Bitcoin, gold and oil price contracts are now among Robinhood's fastest-growing prediction market products, overtaking sports as the engine of the business, according to Robinhood VP JB Mackenzie at the NEXTPredict conference Thursday. The Fed's September rate decision was the platform's largest single event contract in that month — not a sports bet. Crypto contracts have also moved toward 15-minute settlement windows. Mackenzie compared the speed to zero-day options and said prediction market users are quickly expanding into stocks, crypto and retirement accounts, making it potentially Robinhood's fastest-growing segment among its 11 $100M+ revenue businesses.
Tokenized equities are coming whether issuers participate or not — third parties are already creating synthetic versions offshore. CoinDesk Research maps the three models (issuer-sponsored, custodial, and synthetic), explains why only the first makes the token the share itself with full rights, and traces how BLSH became the first NYSE-listed company to place its entire cap table on-chain via the Equiniti × Bullish platform. The key insight: the transfer agent — not the blockchain — is the anchor of issuer-sponsored tokenization, and for companies already using Equiniti, it's an extension of an existing relationship rather than a new infrastructure project.
Bitcoin Core merged a policy change Thursday that ends months-long embargoes on bugs an AI could rediscover with a single prompt — shipping fixes and advisories immediately instead. The change follows a summer in which AI tools found hundreds of bitcoin vulnerabilities before human researchers did, including 4,962 findings across 390 bitcoin projects in a single day by a 16-person volunteer group. "A secret any model can regenerate in one prompt was never going to protect users for long," the article concludes. The tradeoff: fixes will get less testing time before reaching nodes.
