Robinhood Chain Growth

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Carol Massar** (0:14)
An interesting take from analysts at Bernstein and Piper Sandler this week. They argue that Robinhood's revenue from prediction markets is set to overshadow that from cryptocurrency trading starting as soon as the second quarter.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:24)
Yeah, that's pretty significant. I mean, we're talking so much more about, you think about it, prediction markets. The establishment, financial firms increasingly looked at it. It's something we actually talked about with the CEO of Charles Schwab yesterday, Rick Wurster.

**Carol Massar** (0:38)
Yeah, Johann Kerbrat is here with us now. He's Senior Vice President and General Manager of Crypto over at Robinhood. He also runs the international business as well. He joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio. Welcome, welcome. How are you?

**Johann Kerbrat** (0:51)
Good, good. How have you been?

**Carol Massar** (0:52)
Yeah, we've been good. It's good to have you back here in New York. Welcome back. We've got this decline in crypto trading, I think many people would argue it's related to the price action that we've seen since October. But at the same time, a catalyst in prediction markets with the World Cup.
I'm just wondering how you're thinking about this universe of these two different elements of trading and how that affects your users. Are they doing less on crypto and more with prediction markets?

**Johann Kerbrat** (1:18)
We haven't seen that in our data when we look at our customer engagement on the platform.
We do have contracts on the prediction market platform that are related to crypto index price and crypto actions. But overall, I think it's just one of the cycle where we see a bit the sentiment in crypto a little down and overall we are just focusing on building new tools and new features that people can utilize when the sentiment goes up.

**Carol Massar** (1:43)
So when the sentiment goes up, not if the sentiment goes up, like you're confident it will go up.

**Johann Kerbrat** (1:47)
We've seen all of these different cycles a lot and I think this is not our first time, not our first rodeo and I think the sentiment will come back. We saw it with the launch of our Robinhood Chain on July 1st. We've seen very good metrics, already 105 million transaction on the platform.

**Carol Massar** (2:05)
So explain what the impetus behind that was and why you guys launched that now.

**Johann Kerbrat** (2:11)
Yeah, we really wanted to create an infrastructure and a backbone for creating new products that bring the value of DeFi and blockchain technology to our traditional finance systems. And so one of the first products that we launched with this chain is called Robinhood Earn that gives you approximately 7% on the dollar that you're lending to the protocol. And I think it's really giving you the best of two worlds, the high yield that you can get from DeFi and also the simple UX and UI that you can get from a platform like Robinhood.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:41)
What do you guys really want to be? Prediction markets, crypto, you've got a Platinum card, like there's a lot of stuff. And I think some of our critics might say, wait, you just kind of are chasing what seems to be popular. So what is it that you really want to be?

**Johann Kerbrat** (2:54)
I think for us, the main goal has been to be this all-in-one platform for all your financial needs. And for that, you need to cater to customers at different stages of their life, from the very young people that are starting to think about retirement, opening their first retirement account on Robinhood, like an IRA, to the more advanced customers that want to use agentic trading or AI tools, and also at the same time, banking rails and credit cards are still something that you need on a day-to-day basis.

**Tim Stenovec** (3:23)
But why not go to the establishment? Like to say, like we talked to the folk, Rick Worcester, Rick Charles-Schwa, but why not go to the establishment who are also embracing kind of the new innovation, if you will, in finance?

**Johann Kerbrat** (3:34)
Yeah, we absolutely are as well. If you see our market share and the growth of our business, it shows that we've been able to grab some of these customer from these more established businesses. But I think for us, it's been important to have a wide array of features and functionalities. If you think about our credit card, we launched a gold credit card, we have more than a million customer now with this credit card. It really shows that there are a lot of things that we are used to on the financial side that we can disrupt.