Vlad TenevCo-founder & CEO

Revenue doubled while costs stayed tight, so EPS tripled. We timed big releases—commission-free options, crypto, and 24-Hour Market—and kept improving the core experience. When active traders feel we have the sharpest tools, the business compounds without bloated spend. That mix of product timing and cost discipline is why the stock has outperformed.

Active traders lead us. We watch where they push the frontier, measure share and gaps, and build the missing pieces. Commission-free equities, options, and crypto each became real businesses. If an active trader would feel disadvantaged anywhere else, we know we are shipping the right thing at the right time.

It means adding assets like futures and prediction markets and pushing the experience, like we did with 24-Hour Market. We stitched ATS and exchange sessions so thousands of securities trade around the clock. The goal is for serious traders to feel Robinhood is the most advanced, integrated place to run their workflow.

There is no law banning after-hours trading; ATSs have long run outside the core session. The hard part is stitching them with national exchanges so routing, pricing, and UX stay seamless. We built smart routing across those venues for thousands of tickers so customers experience one continuous market instead of fragmented sessions.

Crypto trades 24/7 and tokenization proves the rails exist. We are already at 24/5 and see demand bleeding into weekends and holidays. Whether traditional infrastructure catches up or crypto rails lead, the capability will exist soon, and once people taste it, time barriers are hard to reimpose.

We view crypto two ways: as a trading product alongside options and equities, and as infrastructure that could replace parts of the financial stack. Protocol-level exchanges and payment processors can lower cost and raise reliability. Tokenization lets us deliver a familiar UX on crypto rails, which is where the deeper opportunity sits.

In the EU customers see a normal Robinhood app, but exposure to hundreds of U.S. equities and crypto runs on crypto infrastructure. Growth accelerated once we launched it, giving us confidence that tokenized rails can power mainstream products without breaking the user experience.

Native on-chain stock issuance sounds neat, but the traditional system moves slowly with many counterparties and paper-era plumbing. Pilot programs end up tiny and most liquidity stays on old rails. A more useful model is like stablecoins: hold real assets in a bucket and mint or burn tokens against them.

We debated every major chain and whether to build our own. We wanted an existing ecosystem plus a path to own the critical pieces we must engineer ourselves. Starting on an Ethereum L2 like Arbitrum gives that mix now and keeps us multi-chain over time as tokenized assets expand.

That 1% figure mixes DeFi, CeFi, global, and institutional. In U.S. retail we are already large. So first we keep adding assets, cutting costs, and improving tools for U.S. customers. Then we expand internationally and grow institutional via Bitstamp, which is already over $100M ARR. Retail excellence plus selective expansion drives share.

Being a super app means we can be your paycheck destination, emergency fund, long-term investing home, and active trading platform in one. Crypto is one tool in that stack. Our customer base now ranges from a few thousand dollars to nine-figure accounts, so the experience has to serve both without losing simplicity.

Prediction markets are CFTC-regulated and brokers answer to the NFA, so we treat them like another regulated market, not a casino. Any market needs some speculation for price discovery. What is new is trading outcomes beyond commodities—sports, politics, AI benchmarks—where real money creates better forecasts. That is why I call them truth machines.

I think markets on shutdowns, policy moves, tech milestones, or earnings can replace polls that only show wishes. You can even imagine quote-based insurance where risk is priced in real time. There are hurdles, but if you let people price outcomes they care about, you get better information than headlines.

Like Cursor for coders, Cortex lives inside the trader workflow. Today it summarizes why a stock is moving with sources, and powers scanners and indicators in Robinhood Legend. Over time it should let people backtest and automate strategies in natural language instead of cobbling together a complex setup.

The models could generate trade ideas, but unchecked hallucinations and regulation make that risky. Self-directed brokers must stay impartial, while automated advice has its own rules. We offer narrow first-trade nudges and a digital advisor, Robinhood Strategies. Anything in between must balance helpful guidance with compliance and reliability.

AI lets us ship more with fewer costs. Engineers use code tools to lift output, and support and operations use AI so simple issues resolve fast and humans focus on complex ones. That leverage helps us grow revenue while keeping a disciplined cost base and forces us to design teams for AI-native workflows, not headcount sprawl.

Stay close to the user problem and rebuild the plumbing if needed. 24-Hour Market, tokenized stocks, prediction markets, and Cortex all started with "what would make this customer's experience better," then we worked backward through regulation and cost. Narratives are easy; shipping behavior-shifting products inside real constraints is the hard part.