Robinhood Just Cut About 290 Jobs, Or 10% Of Its Staff

Robinhood is making money. It is cutting one in ten jobs anyway.

The trading app posted $350 million in profit last quarter. Then on Tuesday it told staff that about 290 of them are out.

Cutting from strength, not weakness

The news came in a Form 8-K. That is the filing a company uses to report big events to investors.

Robinhood filed it with regulators on Tuesday, June 16. In it, the company said it would let go of about 10% of its team, or near 290 full-time workers, and pull some open job listings.

The cuts will cost about $20 million in severance, plus $8 million in stock-based pay. Both costs land in the second quarter.

The company has not said which teams will take the hit.

Even so, its revenue still rose 15% from a year earlier to $1.07 billion. So this is not about shrinking sales.

CEO Vlad Tenev framed the cut as a tidy-up, not a retreat. He told staff the company cannot grow as a "heavily-layered organization."

In plain terms, the goal is fewer managers and quicker calls.

The stock stayed near $95 after the news, though it is still down about 13% this year.

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A whole industry is trimming

Robinhood is not alone. Crypto and fintech firms have been shedding staff all year as trading cooled from its 2024 frenzy.

Crypto was Robinhood's hot engine back then. It has cooled hard since, with Bitcoin sliding and trades drying up.

Coinbase, the largest U.S. crypto exchange, cut about 14% of its team last month. Algorand went further in March, with a cut of around 25%.

Block, Polygon, and Gemini trimmed their teams too. They all point back to the same problem.

When fewer people buy and sell coins, the firms that live off those trades feel it fast. Robinhood earns a cut on each trade, so quiet markets hurt fast.

What To Watch

Robinhood has been busy replacing that lost crypto income. It is leaning on options trading, interest, credit cards, and bets on events like the World Cup.

Prediction markets let people bet on real-world events, like who wins a match or a vote. Those bets pulled in active traders, and the paid Gold tier keeps adding members.

Together, the newer lines pushed total customer money on the platform to about $307 billion. Each one earns money even when crypto trading is slow.

That revenue mix is how Robinhood stayed profitable right through the slump.

The newer bets now matter as much as the old crypto boom once did.

Watch whether the leaner team now moves faster on those products. That is the whole point of the cut.

A profitable company shedding 10% of its staff is not trying to survive. It is trying to get quicker.

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