Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev Talks Blockbuster Quarter - podcast episode cover

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev Talks Blockbuster Quarter

Feb 13, 202512 min
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Episode description

Robinhood is out with strong earnings thanks to a 700% jump in its cryptocurrency revenue. The company also announcing it expects expects double-digit revenue growth this year. CEO Vlad Tenev joined host Sonali Basak to talk about the quarter, his outlook for events contracts and the promise of Stablecoin.

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Transcript

Speaker 1

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

Speaker 2

Now another stock we're watching today Robinhood. The stock is jumping after reporting topping estimates in its fourth quarter report. It's revenue beat powered by a seven hundred percent drump in its cryptocurrency revenue. The company also announcing it expects double digit revenue growth this year, joining US now Robinhood CEO of Lad Tenev billion dollars in revenue for the first time as a public company. So clearly a great quarter.

The stock is responding to it. I do want to talk Vlad about some of the growth initiatives, some of the newer initiatives you launch, derivatives, businesses that have been very much expanding event contracts. What can you tell us about how well they're doing into twenty twenty five that would signal these businesses becoming a bigger part of Robinhood moving forward.

Speaker 3

Thanks Chanali, glad to be here. Yeah, it was a strong quarter. The job's not finished, and one of the things we're most excited by is that there's a full packed roadmap. It's going to be an intense year and we're going to make progress across all three of our strategic priorities. You mentioned the Active Trader front Robinhood Legend, which we unveiled a couple months ago, which is the first desktop platform that we built specifically for active traders

in mind, that's already off to a fast start. That's up to fifty million in annualized revenue after just two months of being live to customers, and we expect that to continue to accelerate as more customers adopt the platform and we keep making improvements. The team's been shipping features on a weekly basis and iterating extremely quickly. The feedback's

been very very good. Index Options we already announced is up to a fifteen million annualized revenue run rate, and that product just went live in the past few months as well. And not to mention our derivatives business with few and a comprehensive prediction markets event contracts offering that are rolling out either now in the case of futures outrights, but in the next few months for the comprehensive event contracts offering.

Speaker 1

Well flat, that's exactly where I want to go the events contracts business. Before we get to the ambitions, I want to actually look backwards and talk about what happened with the Super Bowl because you launched those Super Bowl events contracts. They were live for about a day I think, and then they were pulled at the request of the CFTC. You said that you were in contact with the CFTC beforehand. What actually happened there any light you could shed would certainly be interesting.

Speaker 3

Yeah, of course, And I should say that we're huge believers in prediction markets. We think they're the future of trading and also the future of news and information. So I've been a student and a fan for a long time, and that's one of the reasons we're so excited about bringing a larger, comprehensive event contracts offering to our customers. You probably remember in November of last year, we launched the Presidential Election market, which allowed our customers to trade

the election. That was our first event contracts offering, incredibly successful, over half a billion contracts traded in just about a week. We did follow that up with the Super Bowl last week, and yeah, I mean, the CFTC had issue with that rollout. They asked us to suspend the rollout, which which we complied with, even though I mean it was a little bit perplexing to us that several companies were allowed to

continue offering those to consumers. So we're going to have to continue to work through that, and we believe in these products. They're coming, and robin is going to be a big part of offering those and also driving regulatory clarity to make sure that these products that are so useful and available to institutional consumers make their way to

retail as well. So TBD, you know, but I think you should expect us to be a leader in this innovative space and continue to push for clarity from regulators there.

Speaker 1

Well, just to say my own curiosity, it was live for about a day. Did it actually generate any meaningful business or was it too fresh?

Speaker 3

We pulled it back after it was rolled out to a small percentage of customers. We did get some early signs on whether customers would be interested in it, and particularly how they would feel about it being alongside other tradable assets like futures, options, equities and crypto because now

Robinhood's a comprehensive, diversified platform. So the signals were good. Obviously, customers are interested in these products and that makes us very very optimistic for delivering a comprehensive events offering later this year.

Speaker 4

Well, you know now you have a new CFTC, or at least that CFTC is no longer the one you're going to be dealing with in that and that light, lad, I'm sure that you attempt to be the best business that you can regardless of the environment. But different environments offer different opportunities. So what do you see as your advantages now in you know, Trump's new sort of golden golden era, golden age that he wants to drive.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of a lot of people focus on crypto, and we're certainly going to be in a more innovation friendly environment in crypto. I think that's going to be a tailwind for our business as one of the few scaled players in both crypto and traditional financial assets. But Robino's at the forefront of innovation and financial services in a few key areas. Artificial intelligence is coming and is going to disrupt financial services

in a big way. We talked about event contracts and prediction markets and that's a huge innovative new product and that that's going to be a new industry. We're at the forefront of that, and so it's great to see innovation friendly regime that's coming in that believes that the US needs to be number one, number one in business and innovation, and I think that'll be good not just for Robinhood, but but for every industry we operated.

Speaker 2

Speaking of innovation, this whole move to twenty four hour trading. One way you have told investors now you're facilitating that is partly through using stable coin to power settlements. How far does that go and how else can you be using stable coin to make your business more efficient? Does that just take off once you have greater US rules around this? Yeah.

Speaker 3

So we're part of the US Dollar Global Network USDG with a couple of other great companies, And the idea that we want to introduce is that in order for stable coins to be competitive with other means of holding and transacting in dollars, there needs to be a better way to pass yield directly onto holders. And right now, in a high interest rate environment, you can be getting

four percent yield on your cash in a bank. So if it's not easy to get the same type of experience with stable coins, then they're not going to be as competitive. So that's the real innovation that we're driving. Making it easy to do that now in terms of

use of stable coins for institutional purposes. One of the things that we have to do to operate our crypto platform is facilitate transactions and settlements between cash and crypto twenty four to seven, particularly on weekends when the banks are usually not open and there's no way of transmitting dollars using banking rails on weekends. Stable coins solve that problem because it's a twenty four to seven network that's

running on software. And I think that just shows you just one of the advantages of crypto technology over the tradition financial system, and that translates not just to money movement, but also to trading, to liquidity pools, and to the trading of private assets that that are that are typically considered I liquid.

Speaker 2

Speaking of private assets, a lot of things that are trying to be done in the private assets world is tokenization of private funds. You've been talking about tokenization as well. You told investors just last night that it's something that you're perhaps most excited about. How big of a business could that become for you? And what are the near term plans to make tokenization a serious part of what Robinhood does.

Speaker 3

Yeah, so I think the near term opportunity that everyone's excited about in the US, provided we get some regulatory clarity on this. On this point is being able to put real world assets on blockchains. And I think what resonates with customers in the US is private private cum company stock. So I think it's ludicrous that you know, customers are free, retails free to invest in, you know, a wide collection of mean coins and other alternative assets.

But open ai and SpaceX and other private companies that early backers have seen you know, one hundred x sometimes thousand x or more returns are impermissible and are seen as too risky. So I think that needs to change. And I think over time what you'll see is if we release the power of crypto technology and allow crypto

to be connected to real world assets like securities. I mean the addressable market for that is every private and public listed equity, which which is obviously trillions of dollars in market value. We see crypto as the next stage and the technological advancement. We've gone from you know, filing cabinet to mainframe to on premise to cloud, and I think the next stage of evolution is going to be

the financial infrastructure going from cloud to crypto technology. I think Robinhood's best position to actually lead that transformation.

Speaker 4

Clod we only have about.

Speaker 1

A minute left, but you brought up meme coins, and I'm curious about that because compared to maybe some of your competitors, compared to a coinbase, for example, when it comes to meme coins, it seems like you've submitted fewer requests to regulators to list those coins than Coinbase, for example. Way is that and do you see that strategy changing maybe under this new regulatory regime. Yeah.

Speaker 3

I mean, historically we've been extremely selective about the assets that we list on the platform. I think now we're in a world where, you know, on some of these chains, including Solana, there's hundreds of thousands or more new coins created, and I think that's really interesting. On the one hand, it raises questions for what it looks like to list assets and what the policy should be to make it available to retail freely through these centralized platforms like Robinhood.

I think we need clarity on that. On the other hand, it kind of shows you the power of this technology and what an improvement it is upon the existing IPO process, which is so long and cumbersome. That a lot of the best and biggest private companies are choosing to delay

or forego it entirely. So that's why I think it's so interesting to connect crypto technology with real world productive assets, because all the benefits that you get can accrue to customers that want to trade those revenue generating productive assets.

Speaker 4

Glad great, have you on the program. Really appreciate your time. Robinhood's CEO of vlad Tenev. They're talking to us about driving his business forward.

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