Draftkings Drops Crypto.com, Launches Own Prediction Market Exchange

From renting rails to owning the exchange

Draftkings launched DKeX on June 26, a proprietary prediction-markets exchange built on technology and a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) license it gained by buying Railbird Technologies in October 2025 – roughly eight months earlier. The exchange is folded into the unified Draftkings: Sports & Casino app, and it ends the company’s reliance on outside infrastructure: until now, Draftkings Predictions had routed its contracts through CME Group and the crypto exchange Crypto.com.

The logic is mostly economic. When trades cleared on CME or Crypto.com, customers paid both an exchange fee and a Draftkings fee, and the third-party venue kept its cut. By matching orders on its own book, Draftkings now collects those trading fees directly. As Wall Street broker Bernstein put it in a June 29 note on the sector’s consolidation in a Coindesk report, the revenue share that used to leave the building now stays inside it.

Draftkings is not alone. Bernstein noted that over roughly eight months, every major consumer-facing prediction platform has moved to own both its customer base and its exchange: Robinhood built Rothera with Susquehanna, Coinbase bought The Clearing Company, and Flutter (Fanduel’s parent) set up a dual-broker structure. That, the analysts argued, leaves leaders Kalshi and Polymarket – which own exchange technology but lack a built-in consumer audience – looking like plausible acquisition targets.

Draftkings said its Predictions platform generated roughly $3.4 billion in annualized consumer volume and about $11.3 billion in annualized total trading volume for the week ended June 21, a stretch supercharged by the FIFA World Cup. “DKeX provides a vertically integrated foundation for Draftkings Predictions … enabling us to move faster as we continue enhancing our unified app,” CEO Jason Robins said in the announcement.

Those annualized headline figures flatter a still-small operation, though. As Ingame noted, the week’s numbers work out to only about $216 million in actual total volume – roughly $31 million a day – against market leader Kalshi, which routinely clears more than $1 billion a day.

DKeX also leans on a regulatory edge that has drawn fire. Because its sports event contracts sit under CFTC oversight rather than state gambling law, Draftkings can offer them in 18 states – generally ones where sportsbooks are not legal. That federal-versus-state question is being fought nationwide: the CFTC has sued one state after another to keep prediction markets beyond the reach of local gambling regulators, even as some lawmakers press for tighter limits.