Robinhood posted its best-ever earnings—but its stock price plunged nearly 50%
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Robinhood posted its best-ever earnings—but its stock price plunged nearly 50%
For Robinhood, the true test is not its record during bull markets, but its floor during bear markets.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Ada, TechFlow
Robinhood is undergoing a peculiar split.
After U.S. market hours on February 10, the retail trading platform delivered what appeared to be an impeccable earnings report: $4.5 billion in annual revenue—a 52% year-on-year increase and a new all-time high. Diluted earnings per share stood at $2.05. Net deposits for 2025 hit a record $68 billion, including $16 billion in Q4 alone. Robinhood Gold subscribers reached a record 4.2 million.
CEO Vlad Tenev sounded bullish on the earnings call: “We’re building a financial super app.”
Yet the stock fell 7% after hours. Combined with its year-to-date decline, Robinhood’s share price has halved since its October 2024 peak. A company just posting its strongest performance ever has seen its market capitalization evaporate by half in just four months.
So what’s wrong?
A closer look at the earnings reveals the issue: crypto trading revenue—$221 million—plummeted 38% year-on-year.
The figure was $357 million a year earlier—and $268 million last quarter. In Q4, crypto trading volume on the Robinhood app dropped to just $34 billion, down 50% year-on-year.
Retail investors have stopped trading. Bitcoin fell from $126,000 to $65,000; FOMO vanished, replaced by fear. Opening the app shows a sea of red; closing it is the most rational choice.
This is Robinhood’s dilemma: its core business is improving—but the market is fixated solely on the part that’s deteriorating.
How much did crypto contribute to that $4.5 billion in revenue?
Breaking down Robinhood’s revenue structure reveals an ongoing identity shift.
In Q4, commission revenue totaled $776 million—up 15% year-on-year. Options trading contributed $314 million (+41%), equities trading $94 million (+54%), and other trading revenue $147 million—tripling from a year ago. The sole drag was crypto, which collapsed from $358 million to $221 million.
Net interest income reached $411 million, up 39%, driven primarily by growth in interest-bearing assets and securities lending activity. Gold subscription revenue hit $50 million, up 56%.
For the full year, crypto trading revenue’s share of total revenue declined from roughly 35% in Q4 2024 to just 17% in Q4 2025.
Robinhood is fully aware of this trend.
Over the past year, it aggressively expanded its product suite: its prediction markets launched one year ago and already processed $12 billion in notional contract volume—more than doubling in Q4 alone; futures now cover indices, energy, metals, and crypto; Gold Card membership is nearing 1 million.
As early as its Q3 2025 earnings call, management stated: “We now have 11 business lines each generating over $100 million in annualized revenue.”
In other words: don’t focus only on crypto. Yet Wall Street insists on doing exactly that.
A brokerage that lives in Bitcoin’s shadow
This brings to mind Strategy’s earnings report released five days earlier.
Strategy posted a quarterly net loss of $12.4 billion—nearly all attributable to unrealized impairments tied to Bitcoin’s Q4 price drop. Michael Saylor wasn’t fazed: he called Bitcoin’s decline a “gift,” asserting every correction presents a buying opportunity.
Robinhood’s situation is precisely the inverse. It holds no Bitcoin, bears no price risk, and doesn’t rely on debt-fueled BTC purchases to stay afloat. It’s purely a trading platform—earning fees.
But when Bitcoin falls, retail traders stop trading—and fees vanish.
Strategy lives off Bitcoin’s price. Robinhood lives off Bitcoin’s volatility. Though superficially distinct, both companies depend on the same underlying variable: retail sentiment toward crypto.
Strategy bets on price direction; Robinhood bets on foot traffic through the casino. Put simply: when Bitcoin falls, the casino empties. Both models lose.
Data confirms this view. Strategy’s MSTR stock fell 76%—1.6x Bitcoin’s leverage. Robinhood’s share price dropped ~50% from its October 2024 peak, nearly matching Bitcoin’s 48% decline over the same period. The two curves are virtually identical.
One is a leveraged Bitcoin long; the other is a Bitcoin at-the-money call option. The underlying asset for both? The temperature of the crypto market.
The “record-breaking” trap
The word “record” appears repeatedly in Robinhood’s earnings report: record annual revenue, record adjusted EBITDA, record net deposits, record Gold subscriber count, record EPS.
All these figures are real.
Strategy’s report also boasts “records”: record Bitcoin holdings, record cash reserves, record BTC Yield. Yet its stock plunged 76%.
“Record” is a medal in a bull market—and an epitaph in a bear market. It merely reflects your state at the peak; it says nothing about what comes next.
Robinhood’s Q4 revealed a critical metric: monthly active users (MAUs) fell from 14.9 million a year ago to 13 million—a loss of 1.9 million.
Users are leaving.
Assets under custody grew 68% year-on-year—but that’s due to rising equity and crypto prices inflating market value. Annualized net deposit growth has slowed from over 30% at the start of the year to just 19% in Q4. Money inflows are decelerating. People are departing.
This mirrors Strategy’s structural challenge. In bull markets, every indicator reinforces itself: prices rise → trading surges → revenue climbs → users grow → stock rallies. In bear markets, every link reverses.
The flywheel spins backward. Robinhood has its own flywheel too.
De-crypto-fication: A high-stakes gamble
Robinhood clearly recognizes this. Over the past 12 months, its strategy can be summarized in one sentence: reduce dependence on crypto while simultaneously doubling down on crypto infrastructure.
It sounds contradictory—but the logic is sound.
On the revenue side: aggressive diversification—prediction markets, futures, short selling, Gold Card, banking services, retirement accounts, international expansion.
On the infrastructure side: deepening capabilities—acquiring Bitstamp, the world’s oldest crypto exchange, whose trading volume has already doubled; launching 2,000 tokenized stocks in Europe; signing acquisition agreements for broker-dealer and crypto platforms in Indonesia.
Robinhood learned from Coinbase’s 2022 lesson.
Coinbase nearly collapsed during the last bear market due to excessive revenue concentration. Brian Armstrong spent two years rebuilding. Tenev aims to complete diversification before the bear market arrives.
But time isn’t on his side. Robinhood’s 2026 adjusted operating expenses and equity compensation budget stands at $2.6–2.725 billion—a projected ~18% year-on-year increase. This money will fund international expansion, new product development, and acquisition integration. If the crypto winter persists—and traditional brokerage growth fails to accelerate—cost expansion coupled with slowing revenue will squeeze margins.
Its $4.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents provides runway. But like Strategy, “surviving” and “growing” are two different things.
A thermometer for the crypto winter
Reading Strategy’s and Robinhood’s earnings reports side-by-side reveals two distinct ways Bitcoin bear markets unfold.
Strategy suffers a chronic condition. Bitcoin stagnates, the flywheel stops—but its $2.25 billion cash reserve buys 2.5 years of breathing room. It has time—but time erodes faith.
Robinhood faces an acute reaction. Crypto revenue plunged 38% in one quarter; MAUs dropped by 1.9 million—yet other businesses continue growing. It won’t die, but it will hurt.
Both companies share one critical trait: they cannot control the single most pivotal variable shaping their fate.
Strategy cannot control Bitcoin’s price. Robinhood cannot control retail sentiment. And ultimately, retail sentiment is dictated by Bitcoin’s price.
In this industry, everyone pretends to possess alpha—yet all anyone truly holds is beta. Beta is Bitcoin. When Bitcoin rises, everyone looks like a genius. When Bitcoin falls, everyone swims naked.
Robinhood did set records in 2025—but no number of records can mask the pain inflicted by its crypto business’s decline.
Tenev now confronts a question with no textbook answer.
Today’s Robinhood resembles a casino owner just beginning to quit gambling. He knows where the problem lies—and he’s acting. But the tailwinds he captured during the bull market have become liabilities in the bear.
For Robinhood, the true test isn’t setting records in bull markets—it’s surviving the floor in bear markets.
Where that floor lies remains unknown.
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