DraftKings CEO Jason Robins has confirmed the operator is ultimately looking to fully shift its prediction markets offering onto its own in-house platform, as he argued there were distinct similarities between the strategy and DraftKings’ online sports betting playbook.
DraftKings Predictions, which launched at the tail end of 2025, recorded annualised trading volume of $11bn in Q2, with more than 600,000 users engaging with the platform since the start of 2026.
DraftKings launched DKeX, its in-house exchange built out of the acquired Railbird asset, in June. At the time of the launch, DraftKings said DKeX would give the brand “greater ownership over content depth, operating economics and the end-to-end customer experience”.
DraftKings still operates some of its prediction markets offering via Crypto.com and CME Group. However, Robins said the eventual plan is to move completely in-house.
Alongside the launch of DKeX, DraftKings has also secured approval as a futures commission merchant (FCM) from the National Futures Association.
Speaking on DraftKings’ Q2 earnings call, Robins said: “We’re certainly planning to shift the volume that we have, in sports at least, to our platform in the coming months.
“For things that are in the non-sports category, we will continue to use third parties. Even that, we ultimately believe we can shift to our exchange.
“As far as the economics go, we’re looking at this in a way that is very similar to how we evolved in sportsbook. We started off with an LTV model that we built in the early days of sportsbook. We were pretty cautious because we didn’t have a lot of data.
“Here we do have comparable data on the sportsbook side, which I think particularly when it comes to customer acquisition, gives us a good sense of what to expect.
“We’ve just got our FCM licence. That changes our unit economics by bringing more to us, and we are assuming some timelines for when we’ll be able to migrate volume over to our exchange, and then we are making some assumptions on how we can grow market making. I believe we can actually do better than what we’re assuming.”
Citizens’ analyst Jordan Bender noted that the shift will allow DraftKings to “capture attractive economics more quickly”, propelling the company to more than $600m in event contracts revenue by the end of next year.
Bender said: “As we look beyond the next several months, with $200m to $300m of prediction market investment weighing on full-year EBITDA, the trajectory into 2027 is becoming increasingly clear and positive.
“The company is internalising the end-to-end technology stack for the prediction market product, allowing it to capture attractive economics more quickly, including the volume it routes through its exchange and market-making capabilities.
“We do not need to make heroic assumptions to outline a path to our $630m of total prediction market revenue next year, consisting of $194m from the DCM (exchange) and $266m from market making.
“These two areas should begin contributing meaningful EBITDA to the bottom line, while the FCM (broker) portion of the business could take longer, providing an attractive lever for EBITDA growth over the coming years.”
Robins made the comparison between the DraftKings Predictions plan and how the operator shifted from Kambi as its third-party platform for sports betting in 2020.
DraftKings originally launched online sports betting by tapping the Stockholm-listed supplier in June 2018, with the pair penning an extension in August 2019, which added eight additional states to the agreement.
DraftKings then pivoted away from the supplier’s product after completing its acquisition of SBTech in 2020 as part of a three-way merger with special purpose acquisition company Diamond Eagle Acquisition Corp.
Robins continued: “In OSB when we started off, we launched a product on Kambi. We were not using our own backend technology or doing any of our own pricing and trading.
“Thus, we were seeing two things. One, a lot of the unit economics were going out the door to others. Two, we didn’t have full control of the product and customer experience.
“Where you see this flywheel develop is across two dimensions, LTV being the centrepiece of it. We can capture more unit economics because we are on out own technology platform. We are doing our own pricing and trading. All that value is accruing to DraftKings.
“That allows us to then invest more back into customer acquisition because we now have higher LTVs. The second thing is that we’re improving our retention and monetisation because we are actually developing product at a faster pace and putting differentiated offerings that we couldn’t do before because we didn’t have full product control.
“Our pace of development and the ability that we’ve had to increase our retention and our monetisation of customers has just been absolutely tremendous the last few years.”
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Jason Robins suggests swapping Kambi for SBTech following the 2020 acquisition of the supplier serves as a blueprint for the operator’s prediction markets ambitions
The post DraftKings CEO: In-house predictions push the “same story” as OSB playbook first appeared on EGR Intel.