Morning Minute: Robinhood Misses, But Crypto Beats and Robinhood Chain Soars

Robinhood missed on both revenue and EPS on Tuesday, despite crypto beating expectations. But the more interesting things happened on the call.

Revenue came in at a record $1.42 billion, a hair under the $1.43 billion expected. EPS was $0.51 against $0.55 forecast. Crypto revenue rose to $120 million from $100 million in Q2, up 20% sequentially, though still 55% below last year’s $268 million. Trading volume was $50 billion, with $29 billion of that through Bitstamp.

Event contracts are now the bigger business: $173 million, up from $156 million, on a record 16.4 billion contracts traded, more than seven times a year ago. Between prediction markets and crypto, more than a fifth of Robinhood’s revenue now comes from products that barely existed two years ago.

And then came the call and Vlad’s commentary on Robinhood Chain.

“It caught us by surprise.”

Vlad admitted that Robinhood Chain has outrun their internal forecasts and expectations. The chain launched July 1. By late August it was generating more fees over a rolling 30 days than Ethereum or Base. Tenev said they’ve had to staff up a team to keep pace, and that builders have been telling them Robinhood could be doing more.

His response: “You should expect to see us really ramping the investment, because you just don’t see growth of a new ecosystem like this. It’s an uncommon thing. A lot of chains have launched over the past few months that have had an incomparably small level of traction compared to this. So we’re doubling down.”

Then he described where he thinks it goes: “Imagine if you take a stock token, make it fully programmable just like software. What can you do? Can you have tokenized options contracts?”

This was music to the Robinhood Chain bulls’ ears. And it was enough to send the Robinhood Chain leaders up 20-50% across the board, led by Pons +18%, AI (Long) +33% and Orbio +57%.

The message was clear. Robinhood isn’t treating tokenized equities as a product feature, it’s treating them as a primitive other people build on top of. That’s already happening with projects like Long.xyz pairing meme coins against tokenized NVDA and TSLA and Orbio funding AI inference credits with fees paid in tokenized Nvidia. Neither was Robinhood’s idea, and both only exist because the stock tokens do.

Now those teams can expect more support from the Robinhood team. Two tweets from Robinhood Crypto on Tuesday already evidence this leaning in, supporting both Long and Priors. So earnings may have been a miss, but the earnings call was a big win. Now let’s see just what leaning in means…