Why the Crypto Number Still Surprised
Crypto trading on Robinhood has been in a rough patch. Bitcoin was trading at roughly $63,559 during the quarter, about 46% below where it stood a year ago. When the price of the biggest crypto drops that much, fewer people rush to buy and sell.
Yet that $100 million beat what Wall Street expected. Analysts had forecast $86.6 million. Analysts had set a low bar as Robinhood prepared to announce its quarterly results.
In the first quarter, crypto revenue had dropped by nearly half to $134 million. Then the Q2 number decreased an additional quarter from that amount. So when the second quarter came in better than feared, the market took notice.
Robinhood's notional crypto trading volume also tells the story. The app saw $18 billion in crypto trading during Q2, down 35% year over year. Bitstamp added $22 billion, bringing the aggregate volume to $40 billion. That is still a lot of activity, just not as much as a year earlier.
Why does it matter? Crypto now supplies under 8% of Robinhood's total net revenues. A couple of years earlier, digital assets had been a major growth driver for the firm.
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Other Parts of the Business Are Booming
While crypto cooled, the rest of Robinhood's engine heated up. Total net revenues reached $1.31 billion, up 32% from a year earlier. Diluted earnings per share came in at $0.62, a 48% climb.
Transaction-based revenues as a whole rose 44% to $776 million. Options revenue increased 29% to reach $342 million. Revenue from equities rose nearly 100% to $129 million.
The real standout was event contracts - those are the prediction-market-style bets tied to things like sports and elections. Event contracts brought in $156 million, over tenfold the amount from the same period last year.
Robinhood also crossed two milestones: 28.4 million funded customers and a record 4.8 million Robinhood Gold subscribers. The company's CFO, Shiv Verma, said in the earnings release: "The business is firing on all cylinders. We delivered record revenues and drove new highs across equity, option, and event contract volumes, as we continue to win market share." The stock itself dropped 3.15% on the day to close at $89.84, then eased further to $87.00 in after-hours trading.
What Comes Next for Robinhood and Your Portfolio
Robinhood is not sitting still. Robinhood announced intentions to introduce a crypto service in the UK. The firm has already deployed the mainnet for Robinhood Chain, a second-layer Ethereum network designed for tokenized real-world items.
The company launched Robinhood Earn, an initial on-chain lending offering, expanded stock tokens to over 120 nations, and finalized the purchase of WonderFi in Canada. During the same period, perpetual futures became available in the EU.
At the same time, management is being careful with costs. The company revised downward its forecast for 2026 adjusted operating expenses and equity-based compensation to between $2.675 billion and $2.775 billion. Earnings per share of $0.62 benefited from $0.14 in gains due to removing Robinhood Ventures Fund I from consolidated reporting.
The stabilization of crypto revenue might be less critical for the stock price compared to the continued growth of event contract volumes.
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