How Apps Turned Investing, Sports, Politics, and Uncertainty Into an Endless Stream of Bets
A single NFL game today can generate hundreds of separate live wagering markets: next play, next first down, whether the next field goal clears the crossbar by more than five yards. None of these existed as betting products a decade ago. A pregame bet used to be one decision. In-play micro-betting turns a three-hour broadcast into a continuous sequence of decision points, each with its own odds and its own countdown clock.
STAT News profiled a college student, given the pseudonym Danny, who described checking betting lines between classes and during meals, and said that a winning bet left him feeling on top of the world while a loss left him unable to concentrate on school or his friends. Mental health professionals now have a clinical term for what he described: hazardous gambling, a pattern that appreciably raises the risk of harm without yet qualifying as a diagnosable addiction. People in that category outnumber those with a full-blown gambling disorder by a wide margin, and most of them, like Danny, are not the extreme case a headline would pick. They are ordinary users of an ordinary app.
Gambling’s mechanics migrated into investing, into how people follow the news, and into the basic experience of owning a smartphone.
The Casino in Your Pocket
The Supreme Court’s 2018 decision striking down the federal ban on sports betting opened the door, but the more consequential change happened inside the apps themselves. Today roughly 90 percent of sports bets are placed on phones rather than at a physical sportsbook, according to STAT News’ reporting on the industry, and Americans now wager more than $150 billion a year on sports. States that legalized mobile betting have documented sharp increases in calls to problem-gambling helplines in the years that followed, and a 2026 Common Sense Media study found that 36 percent of boys aged 11 to 17 said they had gambled in some form in the past year, despite the legal age being 21 almost everywhere.
Public opinion has shifted alongside the growth. A Pew Research Center survey of nearly 10,000 U.S. adults conducted in July and August 2025 found that 43 percent now say legal sports betting is bad for society, up from 34 percent in 2022. The steepest change came from the group betting the most: among men under 30, the share who see it as harmful more than doubled, from 22 percent to 47 percent, even as that same group remained among the most likely to have placed a bet in the past year. A rising share of the industry’s own core customers now describe the product as bad for society while continuing to use it, which is a more useful measure of harm than any single dollar figure.
From Investing to Gambling
The same design instincts moved into brokerage apps, and the clearest documented case is Robinhood’s. In 2024, Massachusetts securities regulators fined the company $7.5 million to settle a years-long enforcement action alleging its app was built to treat trading like a game specifically to draw in inexperienced customers. The consent order detailed confetti that filled the screen after a customer’s first trade, a scratch-off animation customers had to perform with a finger to reveal a free stock reward, and push notifications built around lists of trending tickers. Robinhood discontinued the confetti animation in 2021 under regulatory pressure, and a company spokesperson has disputed that the current app is gamified, but the individual tactics named in the order were never disputed as facts, only their legal significance.
Options trading shows the same shift in raw volume. Same-day expiration contracts, known as 0DTE options, made up roughly 5 percent of S&P 500 index options volume in 2016, according to Cboe Global Markets. By 2025, that figure had climbed past 57 percent. A 0DTE contract compresses a full win-or-lose cycle into a single trading day instead of weeks, and retail brokers now account for about 45 to 50 percent of total U.S. options volume, up from an estimated 10 percent before 2020.
The financial incentive behind this growth is specific and traceable. Payment for order flow, the practice of routing customer trades to market makers in exchange for compensation, has historically supplied around 70 to 75 percent of Robinhood’s revenue, and industry-wide payments for order flow reached about $953 million in the second quarter of 2025 alone. A brokerage funded this way earns money on the volume of trades a customer places, not on whether any individual trade builds that customer’s wealth. That incentive exists in the business model before any designer opens a notification tool.
Betting on Reality
Prediction markets applied the same mechanics to nearly everything else, which turns out to be most of what people already follow closely. Kalshi and Polymarket, the two dominant platforms, saw their combined monthly trading volume rise from less than $5 billion in September 2025 to about $24 billion by April 2026, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of exchange data, a figure that had already surpassed the $14 billion a month Americans wagered on average through legal sportsbooks in 2025. By June 2026, combined monthly volume had nearly doubled again, to $44.8 billion, according to data from The Block, with a World Cup betting surge accelerating growth that was already steep. Since mid-2024, sports, politics, and cryptocurrency have made up roughly nine-tenths of all trading volume on both platforms.
Supporters argue these markets aggregate dispersed information more accurately than polls, since real money forces participants to weigh their actual confidence rather than perform an opinion. Critics counter that prices in thin, whale-dominated markets reflect the conviction of whoever holds the largest position rather than any broader consensus. Both claims can be true of different markets at different moments. What has changed is that regulators, not just traders, are now the ones drawing the line between a forecasting tool and a wager on the news cycle. Kalshi operates as a CFTC-registered exchange. Polymarket only reentered the U.S. market at the end of 2025, after three years operating offshore, by acquiring a CFTC-licensed exchange for $112 million.
Why We Keep Playing
None of this works without a psychological hook, and the hook itself is old. Slot machine design has spent a century refining variable-ratio rewards, where a payout arrives on an unpredictable schedule rather than a fixed one, because unpredictable rewards produce more persistent behavior than reliable ones. Betting apps use the same principle through live odds boosts and free-bet offers that appear at moments of high engagement. A February 2026 NPR report on youth betting addiction captured a DraftKings commercial offering new customers three hundred dollars in bonus bets for a five-dollar wager on the playoffs, a structure built to get a new user placing repeat bets on the platform’s terms rather than their own.
The near miss compounds the effect. A bet or a contract that resolves the wrong way by a single point reads to the brain as almost a win, and it tends to prompt another attempt rather than a pause. One-click deposits and instant crypto funding remove the last physical friction of handing over cash, so the experience of losing money increasingly resembles losing points in a game rather than spending capital that has to be earned back.
The Generation Looking for an Escape
It would be easy to treat all of this as a design problem correctable with better interface rules. A nationally representative Urban Institute survey of 3,194 adults, fielded in January 2026, complicates that story. Among respondents ages 18 to 29, 52 percent said their generation has to take more risks to reach its financial goals, compared with 35 percent of adults 30 and older, and 45 percent said they are more focused on meeting today’s needs than on saving for the future. Economists Seung Hyeong Lee of Northwestern University and Younggeun Yoo of the University of Chicago, studying the relationship between housing costs and financial behavior, found that when home prices rise far enough beyond what a renter’s savings could realistically catch up to, households cross a threshold where they stop adjusting their spending toward that goal and instead increase consumption and risk-taking. Lee and Yoo describe this as households giving up on the goal entirely rather than gradually scaling it back.
Northwestern Mutual’s 2026 Planning and Progress study points to the same behavior from a different angle: among Americans who put money into high-risk or speculative assets, 73 percent said they did so because they feel financially behind and see traditional investing as too slow to help them catch up. Among Gen Z respondents specifically, that figure rose to 80 percent, the highest of any generation surveyed. This is where the idea of “financial nihilism,” as the World Economic Forum’s analysis of the trend frames it, becomes useful less as a verdict on an entire generation’s character than as a description of a rational response to a system that no longer delivers on its old promise. If steady saving toward a down payment no longer plausibly leads to homeownership on the old timeline, a small asymmetric bet on a memecoin or a prediction contract stops looking irrational by comparison, and starts looking like one of the few remaining paths to a different outcome. The same World Economic Forum analysis cites estimates that prediction market trading volume has quadrupled in recent years, with nearly a third of Gen Z investors already participating or actively considering it, and notes that almost one in five investors under 30 surveyed in 2022 held nothing in their portfolio but cryptocurrency.
Who Really Wins
Sportsbooks profit from the built-in margin on every line regardless of outcome. Brokerages funded by payment for order flow profit from how often a customer trades, not from whether the trade makes the customer money. Prediction markets collect a fee on both sides of every contract, win or lose. Kalshi alone generated an estimated $263 million in fee revenue in 2025, with annualized revenue since surpassing $1.5 billion, built on people taking opposite positions about the future.
The three models differ in regulation and mechanics, but converge on one point: each one earns money from the volume of activity on the platform, largely independent of whether the individual user comes out ahead. Whether a specific customer wins or loses on any given trade or bet has little bearing on whether the platform turns a profit that day.
When Everything Has Odds
The pattern connecting sports betting, options trading, crypto speculation, and prediction markets has less to do with individual recklessness than with infrastructure. Four domains that used to be distinct, entertainment, investing, civic life, and news consumption, now run through the same handful of interfaces, use the same psychological triggers, and are increasingly funded by the same transaction-based business model. Checking election odds, a football score, and a portfolio balance within the same few minutes used to be three separate activities. For a large and growing share of adults, it is now one habit that happens to use three different apps.
Some version of regulatory response is already underway, state by state and platform by platform. The harder question is what happens to a generation’s relationship with patience and delayed reward after spending its formative financial years inside interfaces built on the same design principles that once belonged only to the slot machine, now carried in a pocket and checked hundreds of times a day.
