This week’s presidential election introduced a lot of people to prediction markets. 

Kalshi was the number one app in the App Store on Election Day. The CEO of Polymarket claims the Trump campaign first realized they were winning from his startup’s stats, which showed them winning by a landslide hours before news networks called the race. There’s a sense in some tech and finance circles that these betting markets are now a better “wisdom of the crowd” indicator than polls.

Robinhood joined the fray just in the nick of time. A week before the election, the company announced that its first-ever prediction market would be for the presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. It turned out to be a massive hit, with over half a billion bets placed. Now, CEO Vlad Tenev sees a future where Robinhood’s millions of users can bet on all kinds of things, including the performance of the stocks they trade on the platform. He thinks the broader interest in prediction markets reflects a growing “distrust of traditional news” that’s rewiring how people seek information about the world.