Finance platforms racing so as to add prediction markets are doing so at the price of accelerated “casino-like” consumer churn, says enterprise capital agency Inversion Capital founder and CEO, Santiago Roel Santos.
Santos argued in a weblog submit on Saturday that whereas he’s a “believer within the underlying thought” of prediction markets, he thinks providing them in mainstream finance apps like Robinhood threatens future worth seize by growing the chance of consumer account liquidation.
“The issue with casino-like merchandise isn’t that customers lose cash. It’s that casinos speed up churn,” he mentioned.
“The longer you exist inside a on line casino, the upper the likelihood of liquidation. And liquidation means you’re out of the sport fully. A churned consumer is value zero.”
Robinhood has been ramping up its give attention to prediction markets over 2025, and crypto corporations Coinbase and Gemini are additionally quickly set to supply comparable merchandise that enable customers to guess on occasions like sports activities and politics.
Santos mentioned such choices put an excessive amount of give attention to an space that can in the end influence the app’s principal use case; providing straightforward to make use of monetary providers to retail shoppers.
“Merchandise like Robinhood succeed initially as a result of they’re easier, extra accessible, and extra digitally native than incumbents,” he mentioned.
“However customers age. Over time, the actual alternative is to develop with them and seize extra of their monetary lives, to not maximize extraction in the intervening time of peak hypothesis,” he added. “If sturdiness issues, you optimize for endurance.”
Blockchain-based prediction markets surged in adoption amid the US elections in 2024, with Robinhood initially leaping on the bandwagon again in March by way of a partnership with Kalshi.
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Crypto alternate Coinbase introduced on Wednesday that it was including prediction markets as a part of its “every little thing app” push in partnership with Kalshi, whereas an affiliate of Gemini gained a US license to supply occasion contracts.
Santos in the end thinks that whereas prediction markets will look good on the stability sheet within the short-term, they’ll later look way more fragile for monetary apps as they’ll introduce a big quantity of threat that might destabilize customers.
“Monetary superapps that deal with churn as a first-class threat will find yourself with stronger moats and higher long-term outcomes,” he argued, including:
“If I had been within the seat, I’d prioritize merchandise customers naturally need as they mature financially: bank cards, insurance coverage, financial savings automobiles. These are boring. The info means that’s exactly why they work. They’re adjoining to the core relationship of managing family liquidity.”
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