Robinhood’s EPS came up four cents short, but crypto and Robinhood Chain stole the show

Robinhood missed Wall Street expectations for third-quarter revenue and EPS on Tuesday, reporting record revenue of $1.42 billion against roughly $1.43 billion expected and EPS of $0.51 per share against the $0.55 projected. EPS was down from $0.61 a year earlier. Crypto revenue beat expectations at $120 million, rising from $100 million in Q2, up 20% sequentially but still 55% below last year’s $268 million. More than 28 million people keep money on the trading app to buy stocks and crypto and now bet on sports and elections.

Crypto trading volume reached $50 billion, including $29 billion through Bitstamp. Event contracts generated $173 million, up from $156 million, on a record 16.4 billion contracts traded, more than seven times a year ago, making the business larger than crypto revenue. More than a fifth of Robinhood’s revenue now comes from prediction markets and crypto products that barely existed two years ago.

Robinhood Chain has outrun the company’s internal forecasts and expectations since launching July 1, and by late August it was generating more fees over a rolling 30 days than Ethereum or Base. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said the company had to staff a team to keep pace and that builders had told Robinhood it could be doing more. He said: “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.”

Tenev then described how tokenized equities could be used as programmable building blocks, asking