Robinhood Culls 10% of Staff While Telling Everyone the Business Has Never Been Stronger 🤡

Robinhood said Tuesday it is cutting roughly 10% of its full-time workforce, a reduction affecting about 290 employees as the trading platform restructures to flatten its organization. In an internal memo, CEO Vlad Tenev told staff the company cannot "default to operating as a heavily-layered organization" if it wants to scale its mission, adding that Robinhood must "continuously raise" its performance bar. The company had approximately 2,900 full-time employees as of Dec. 31, 2025, according to its Form 10-K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Robinhood estimated it will incur about $28 million in total restructuring-related charges, including roughly $20 million for employee severance and benefits and about $8 million in share-based compensation costs. The company said in a Form 8-K filed on Tuesday that the reduction in force also includes the closure of a small number of remaining open roles and that it expects to recognize these charges in the second quarter of 2026. A Robinhood spokesperson confirmed the figures to Cointelegraph.

Despite the cuts, Tenev said the company's business "has never been stronger," pointing to June month-to-date average daily trading volumes at record levels across equities, options and prediction markets. Robinhood said it is taking the action "from a position of business strength" and would continue hiring selectively while investing in top-tier talent and "frontier technologies." The announcement did not specifically mention artificial intelligence-driven restructuring.

The move follows first-quarter results that missed analyst expectations, with revenue and earnings coming in below forecasts. Crypto trading was a key drag, with volumes down roughly 50% year-on-year, and revenue from crypto transactions falling 34% sequentially to $134 million from $221 million, the company's smallest quarterly profit in a year. Robinhood's stock price fell 1% to $97 on Tuesday, according to Yahoo Finance, with shares down roughly 12% year-to-date after touching an all-time high of $153 last year when Bitcoin hit an all-time high above $126,000 in October.

The reductions echo explanations offered by other crypto companies this year, including US exchange Coinbase and Jack Dorsey's Block, which have also linked layoffs to reducing management layers and improving efficiency. In March, Crypto.com let go of 280 employees, or 12% of its workforce. Separately on Wednesday, Robinhood launched Agentic Trading and the Agentic Credit Card, two products that allow artificial intelligence agents to trade stocks and execute credit card purchases autonomously on behalf of customers through Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, an expansion of the firm's push into AI-driven finance.