Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket have poured millions into marketing. Their logos and “trade on everything” message have flooded college campuses, social media, and events like the Super Bowl and the Golden Globes.
Loading audio narration…
At the Next Summit, a gambling industry conference happening this week in New York, some were looking further ahead. While attendees — many young, and many European — schmoozed and visited booths dedicated to web hosting and fortune-cookie advertising, the phrase that kept popping up was “super apps.”
“There’s gonna be this massive convergence of Robinhood, Coinbase, and the gaming companies with super apps,” Roger Ehrenberg, an investor, said from the stage of the conference. “That’s the mega-trend I see.”
Super apps are loosely defined as apps that subsume most of the reasons people look at their phones — messaging, shopping and payments, social media and news. Venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz and tech-industry figures like Elon Musk have been predicting their rise for years. The model is China’s WeChat, which combines social media, mobile payments and messaging.
Some founders have said they want to be a one-stop shop. Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-imprisoned crypto trader, once told investors that his vision for the exchange FTX was a platform “where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy Bitcoin. You can buy a banana.”
Super apps can create cross-selling opportunities. In a 2022 blog post, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz described Doordash and Uber rolling multiple services into the same app — food delivery and consumer goods, rides, and meals — as “headed in the right direction.”
Since then, the video app TikTok has become a massive presence in e-commerce, with its TikTok Shop doing $500 million in business on Black Friday and adding major US brands.
For now, most Americans use a variety of apps to save and spend money: They might check Chase, Bank of America or Wells Fargo to see if their paycheck hit, and use a brokerage app like Fidelity, Wealthfront or Schwab to trade stocks or invest for retirement. Some might gamble using apps from FanDuel, BetMGM, DraftKings, PrizePicks, or any of dozens of other apps.
And the American marketplace is more fractured than China’s, where most people use WeChat. Despite Musk’s desire for X to be an “everything app,” only about a fifth of US adults use his social-media app, the Pew Research Center reported last fall.
But this year might be the year of the super app. When Musk acquired Twitter and rebranded it as X in 2022, he said it would become an “everything app.” In recent weeks, he has teased the rollout of X Money, a way for people to save and send cash using his platform.
Alex Kane, the founder of Sporttrade, a sports betting exchange active in New Jersey with plans to go nationwide, said Robinhood has an edge in the race to build a super app. He said during a panel discussion on Tuesday that he recently moved his main banking relationship to Robinhood and said the company offered an incentive to refinance his mortgage there, too.
Eventually, Kane said, users will “have one big wallet and trade everything.”
Robinhood and Kalshi announced a formal partnership in early 2025, and the investment app has historically been a major source of trades for the prediction market. One analyst estimated last fall that 25% to 35% of the money traded on Kalshi came from Robinhood users. Robinhood and the trading firm Susquehanna bought their own commodities exchange last year and plan to turn it into a new prediction market, to be called Rothera.
Kane said he thinks Robinhood and other finance apps could eventually reduce the fees on sports trading to zero and use it as an on-ramp for young people who will generate income for Robinhood in different ways, like trading stocks.
That could drastically increase competition and require prediction market-only apps to spend much more than they currently do on marketing, new-user incentives and other customer acquisition costs for each new user, Kane said.
Prediction markets appear to have considered this possibility. Tarek Mansour, one of the co-founders of Kalshi, has said his company’s ambition is to “financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”
The rise of the super app isn’t guaranteed. For one thing, no one can seem to agree what a “super app” is. Last week, DraftKings used the term when it announced that it would be merging its sports, predictions, lottery and casino apps. The company isn’t going into banking, instant messaging, or social media.
Prediction markets, gambling, and finance apps also compete on dimensions beyond commissions and fees, like user experience. Online gaming veterans often joke that Betfair, a long-running British sports exchange, could pick up more users if it updated its website.
“I think sports bettors are very provably price-insensitive,” Adhi Rajaprabhakaran, a former Kalshi trader who writes about prediction markets, told Business Insider. “In fact, I think fees are going to increase over time.”
Even if super apps enter the picture in a real way, some industry analysts think prediction markets have a real shot at competing for users’ attention and dollars.
“It’s impossible to ignore the prevalence and rise in prediction markets,” said Joseph Solosky, the managing director for sports betting at NASCAR. “In short, I don’t think it’s a passing fad.”
Have a tip? Know more? Reach Jack Newsham via email (jnewsham@businessinsider.com) or via Signal (+1-314-971-1627). Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
