Prediction markets
I traced how Robinhood turned investing into a game, then mapped who pays when the same design moves into prediction markets.
- Role
- Research, writing and the map
- Timeline
- Fall 2026 (DESIGN 101)
The question
Robinhood made trading free and fun, with confetti after your first trade, and the same design that brought millions of new people into the market also brought regulators after it in 2020 and 2021. In 2025 it started selling prediction contracts through Kalshi, so I wanted to know who ends up paying for that.
What I did
I wrote a case study of Robinhood from 2013 to 2021, then built a consequence map of more than 50 stakeholders around a single bet, from the exchanges and the leagues to state regulators, college campuses and the people downstream who never place a bet at all.
