Robinhood Markets, Inc. Q3 FY2025 Earnings Call

Thank you to everyone for joining Robinhood's Q3 2025 Earnings Call, whether you're tuning into the live stream at home or here with us in person. With us today are Chairman and CEO, Vlad Tenev; CFO, Jason Warnick; SVP of Finance and Strategy and Treasurer, Shiv Verma; and VP of Corporate Finance and Investor Relations, Chris Koegel. Vlad and Jason will offer opening remarks and then open the call to Q&A. During the Q&A portion of the call, we will answer questions from the audience, which includes institutional research analysts, finance content creators who may hold an ownership position in Robinhood and both institutional and retail shareholders. As a reminder, today's call will contain forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from our current expectations, and we may not provide updates unless legally required. Potential risk factors that could cause differences, including regulatory developments that we continue to monitor are described in the press release we issued today, the earnings presentation and our SEC filings, all of which can be found at investors.robinhood.com. Today's discussion will also include non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the GAAP measures we consider most directly comparable can be found in the earnings presentation. With that, please welcome Vlad and Jason.

Good to see everyone. It's great to be here with all of you today. We have a live audience again this time from Downtown San Francisco. And also great to, I think, for the first time in our earnings call, have institutional and retail shareholders, so buy side joining us. So welcome, and thank you. Also, we have our institutional analysts. So good to see a lot of familiar faces here. Q3 was another quarter of relentless product velocity. So we were excited to see that. It was really across our three focus areas, which, as a reminder, number one in active traders, number one in wallet share for the next generation, number one global financial ecosystem. So I'll briefly go through each of these. Active traders. We want active traders to feel like they are at a disadvantage if they trade anywhere other than Robinhood. And we've rolled out a ton of great new products for active traders. You guys might have seen the second annual HOOD Summit in Vegas just a couple of weeks ago. We announced a bunch of brokerage updates, shorting multiple brokerage accounts, AI-driven custom indicators powered by Robinhood Cortex, a whole new social platform, Robinhood Social. And we've got more. We've got more for you guys. We can't wait to share more next month at our first ever AI event on December 16. Innovation like this really has the active trader engine humming. In Q3, we had record equity and option trading volumes, and October looks even better. For both equities and options in the month of October, we had new single day all-time and new monthly records. So both of those businesses just continuing to perform strongly. Prediction markets are really on fire. It's hard to believe that we launched this just about a year ago with the presidential election markets. We've doubled volume every quarter since then to 2.3 billion contracts in Q3. And the month of October alone was up to 2.5 billion contracts. So October by itself was bigger than all of Q3 combined. Customers really love the product, and we're bringing them even more. We're now at over 1,000 live contracts, and we've expanded categories. So it's not just sports but also economics, politics, culture. We're making the UI much cleaner to experience even better. And I think it's really exciting to see where this can go. I mean, we love being early to this new asset class. And some people are saying this could be one of the largest asset classes because you can price risk in pretty much anything. We have a massive opportunity with assets as well. Turning to wallet share. Our assets are now up to over one-third of $1 trillion as the generational wealth transfer of $120 trillion is fully in motion. So I think it's really great to see our financial super app accelerating. On the long-term money side, retirement, now up over $25 billion, which more than doubled in the past year. And Robinhood Strategies, which we just launched in March, now has over $1 billion in assets and is one of the fastest-growing digital advisers. On the banking front, Robinhood Gold Card, now over 0.5 million cardholders with over $8 billion in annual spend. So the numbers there just keep growing. That's 5x growth in cardholders since the beginning of the year. And we'll get into this a little bit more in Jason's section, but we like what we see there. The customer behavior is good, and that's given us confidence to accelerate the rollout, and we're going to accelerate it even further. And Robinhood Banking started early customer rollout quite recently. So far, we like what we're seeing there, too. Customers are direct depositing. You might have seen some nice screenshots of the user experience and the onboarding flow and people really love that they're getting interest, not just on their savings, but they have an opportunity to earn a good interest on checking. So it's really about simplifying things for customers. And the plan is to just keep scaling this, keep adding more services, more products. And last but not least, we've been really grinding to build out the number one global financial ecosystem. So ten years from now, the aim is to have over half of our revenue be outside the U.S. and also cut another way. Right now, we're majority retail. We think we can get to over half being non-retail institutional. And these are tough goals, but I think the opportunity is there, and we're going after it. Three areas of progress to highlight from Q3: tokenization, which are stock tokens in the EU. We're now up to 400-plus public companies and growing. There's a lot of innovation to be done. We're working hard. Robinhood Ventures in the U.S. So we found a way to give exposure to non-accredited retail to private companies, which we think is super important and a huge opportunity for us. We've already made some initial investments. We're working towards the public offering for Robinhood Ventures in the coming months. Bitstamp around the world, our first scaled institutional business, we're very excited about that. We are continuing to grow. We're adding capabilities. We're adding more institutional customers. Volumes are up 60-plus percent quarter-over-quarter for Bitstamp. And it's great to see that we're accelerating even as we're integrating. And I think that's like not a common thing. It's a big business. I think the team has done a really nice job kind of integrating and making sure that product velocity just continues to increase. And as a result of all this, great business results in Q3, revenues up over 100% year-over-year to a record of nearly $1.3 billion, record net deposits in the quarter, over $20 billion. We've already exceeded last year's record of $50 billion in net deposits, and we still have another entire quarter to go. So we feel really good about the traction there. Gold subscribers up to a record 3.9 million, and that's 14-plus percent adoption when you look at the overall net account base, and it's nearly 40% for customers that joined in quarter, our new customers. International customers, nearly 700,000 international funded, including Bitstamp. So the U.K. and EU are continuing to grow nicely. And we feel great about Q3 product velocity and results. I think it was a strong quarter, and I'll turn it over to Jason to go through financials before we get into Q&A.

Sounds good. Thanks, Vlad. In Q3, we delivered another quarter of strong profitable growth. Revenue doubled while margins expanded and earnings per share more than tripled from last year. Year-to-date through Q3, revenues are up 65%. Earnings per share is up 150%, and we continue to stay disciplined on expenses to deliver 75% incremental adjusted EBITDA margins. And it's exciting that as our business grows, we're continuing to diversify. In Q3, two more businesses, Prediction Markets and Bitstamp, each surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue, bringing us to $11 million in total and underscoring the growing diversification and strength of our business. Prediction Markets reached that milestone in less than a year. It's our fastest in history, and it's already tracking towards a $300 million run rate based on October volumes. So just really going fast. Now let's take a closer look at our Q3 results compared to a year ago. Revenues doubled to an all-time high of nearly $1.3 billion as our customers remained engaged and continue to bring more of their assets to the platform. Trading volumes were up double to triple digits across equities, options, and crypto, and we continue to grow market share across product categories. We're also seeing strong contributions from newer products like prediction markets, index options, and futures. Interest-earning assets were up over 50%, driven by strong margin and cash sweep growth. It's great to see margin continuing to hit new highs as we win larger customers and gain market share. And securities lending also hit an all-time high with a strong market backdrop as IPO activity continued to pick up. And Robinhood Gold grew to 3.9 million subscribers. That's over 75% year-over-year growth as we continue to broaden the value proposition, including Robinhood Banking, which is just beginning to roll out. Turning to expenses. Q3 adjusted OpEx and share-based compensation came in at $613 million; it's about $40 million above the midpoint of our prior outlook range. This was driven by two items that are both related to our strong performance. First, stronger year-to-date results led to higher Q3 employee bonus accrual. That is higher for Q3, but also includes a catch-up for the first half of the year. And second, the significant increase in our stock price this year triggered vesting on the remaining tranche of the 2019 CEO market-based award. This resulted in unplanned payroll tax expense in G&A. We are through that award now, so glad to get back to your $40,000 a year. Looking ahead to the rest of the year, we're tracking toward full year 2025 adjusted OpEx plus SBC of around $2.28 billion, but it could be higher or lower depending on how the rest of the year plays out. This reflects our strong year-to-date business results, which had us tracking to the top end of our prior outlook range as well as some increased investment in new growth areas like Prediction Markets and Robinhood Ventures. I think each of these areas have significant potential for us. And lastly, this also incorporates the cost of Vlad's market-based award, which were not previously included in our outlook. I'll also provide a quick update on the strong results we're seeing so far in Q4, as you may have seen in the release. October was a strong month across the business. We saw continued momentum in net deposits, new records set across equities, options, prediction markets, and margin and a nice step-up in crypto volumes. And before we go to Q&A, I'm sure you saw in the release that I'm going to be retiring next year. I'll transition in Q1 from my operating role into an advisory role and will stay on until September 1. I'm incredibly happy and proud to share that Shiv Verma will be stepping into the role of CFO. I've worked closely with Shiv these past 7 years, and I've got absolutely complete confidence in him. You're going to find that he's seriously world-class.

At this time, I'd like to invite Shiv Verma to join us up here. Okay. First of all, I want to thank Jason for all he's done for Robinhood. He's been an incredible steward of the company, not just for the finance team, but the entire company and is leaving the finance team in a much stronger position than when he joined. Among his many assets, and you guys are obviously familiar with some of them, I would be remiss to not mention that his good looks were a main reason why we wanted to do these earnings on video, which everyone can agree. So I'm sure he'll be missed by this audience as well. I also want to congratulate Shiv. He's been working closely with me for some time now. You guys will increasingly see he's an exceptional operator. He's got a strong track record of not just being lean and disciplined, but also advocating for growth. And I think that balance is critical to so much that we do here. Tomorrow, Shiv celebrates 7 years at Robinhood. So while he's got his hands on nearly everything, he's currently SVP of Finance and Strategy and also our Treasurer. So Shiv, welcome. Maybe he'll say a few words as well.

Yes. Thank you, Vlad. I'm so excited and humbled for the opportunity to serve our customers and shareholders. Much appreciation to you, the Board and the entire leadership team for the trust. To Jason, a heartfelt thank you. We joined 6 weeks apart, and we've been on quite the journey together. Many of you know Jason is a fantastic CFO, but he's also an incredible colleague, mentor and friend. I just want to express my sincere gratitude. For today, I'll keep it short and just want to introduce myself. As Vlad said, I've been here a little over 7 years, and I've seen the company scale from a couple of million customers and a few billion assets to now 27 million customers and over $300 billion in assets globally. I work closely with Vlad, Jason and the entire team. I've gotten to worn a lot of different hats. And as Vlad said today, I lead four teams: finance, strategy, corporate development, and treasury. In terms of what to expect, big picture, more of the same. Our top goal is still to grow and to keep delivering for customers to ship amazing products with high velocity. We also believe in a lean and disciplined culture, and this is personally where I spend a lot of time. We obsess about capital allocation and ROI. We pride ourselves on small teams that can deliver outsized results, and we believe in profitable growth. And lastly, our financial North Star is going to remain the same, grow earnings per share and free cash flow per share and compound long-term shareholder value, plain and simple. So I'm excited to partner with everyone. I'll turn it back to Vlad and Jason and talk about this great quarter.

Thanks, Shiv, and I do look forward to seeing Shiv competing on Jeopardy someday. Chris, why don't we go ahead and take some questions.

All right. Thank you, Jason. For the Q&A session, we'll start by answering shareholder questions from Say Technologies from shareholders who are joining us on video. And after the Say questions, we'll turn to live questions from our audience and then go to dial-in participants. So I'll kick it off with our first question from Say, which comes from Preston.

Well, Vlad and Jason, can you guys see me okay?

I see you now. There you are. Look at that. He's got the Robinhood logo. Did you draw that yourself?

I painted that in class a couple of days ago. But I was wondering how quickly do you expect to roll out Robinhood Banking to users?

Yes. Great question. This will be a relatively fast rollout. When you compare banking to the credit card, there's not the same considerations around making sure the economics between the borrowing and the spending are perfectly calibrated. I think banking is a simpler product in that way. And so the rollout will just be governed by customer feedback. We like what we see thus far, and so we're going to continue to rollout. And we expect that if there's no surprises, it should be pretty quick. We've already got customers trying it, including cash delivery available in some markets and early results are really good. So if you're in the state of New York and have access to banking, you can try it right now.

Thank you, Vlad. The next question is about a recent AWS-related outage. How are you strengthening platform resiliency to address that?

Sure. Yes, that's a great question. So for those of you that don't recall this, even though pretty much the entire Internet was briefly affected, including my kids' elementary school, they couldn't take attendance. AWS had an outage a few weeks back, and that led to degraded app performance for a significant number of our customers. Now the good news is it actually demonstrates how much progress we've made in the resilience of our systems over the past few years. If this had happened to us, like an outage of the infrastructure provider of this magnitude, if it had happened a few years ago, we probably would have been fully down. But we made a lot of investments in that time period. And so even though things were slower and there were higher latencies, a lot of customers could manage their risk and place orders, although we didn't provide them with the type of experience that we would want. That's for sure. And one thing that you can be assured of is every opportunity, every outage like this, even if it's a third-party related, is an opportunity for us to further strengthen our resilience. So we've been hard at work looking at how we could become even better. And that's internally and also in conversations with all of our partners. So this is part and parcel of what we have to do. We want to be our customers', not just primary financial account, but we want to be their secondary financial account as well, which means that we have to continue to be robust.

All right. Thank you, Vlad. And let's take one more question from Say on video and see if we can go two for three here. So the next question is from Griffin.

Really great quarter, first of all, but I wanted to ask around the super-app nature and kind of the evolution of Robinhood. So obviously, it was started to democratize investing for everyone. And now as you evolve into the full financial kind of ecosystem and also the true super-app for the next generation, how do you see this ecosystem maturing? So what products do you think will kind of be the core tie around all of this? And also, how do you see the biggest opportunities for this next generation as everyone's finances get more complex?

Yes, that's a great question. As part of our vision, some aspects are somewhat predictable. We need to examine how money enters our ecosystem. We have various existing mechanisms, but the aim of Robinhood Banking is to become the primary place where our customers deposit their paychecks. This will facilitate the inflow of money. Over time, we anticipate that many assets will be invested. However, we need to focus on minimizing the reasons customers withdraw money and ensuring it’s easy for them to deposit funds. In the future, we expect to introduce new products, including categories like Prediction Markets. Our goal is to leverage our best-in-class user experience and economic strategies to establish ourselves as a significant player in all areas where customers manage their finances, not just in the U.S. but also globally. Therefore, our approach will involve expanding our offerings while also delving deeper into areas where we have a competitive edge.

All right. Thank you, Vlad. That concludes our shareholder questions from Say Technologies. And so now we'll move to Q&A from our live audience. The first question is going to be from Patrick Moley at Piper Sandler.

For my question, I want to say congratulations to both Jason and Shiv. Jason, I really enjoyed working with you. Shiv, looking forward to getting to know you a little better. So I had one on Prediction Markets. You've obviously become one of the leaders in the space, but there's been a lot of new entrants recently. So I was hoping you could talk about just the strategy there and what you think gives you the right to win long term? And then as a second part to that, can you talk through some of the strategic considerations around maintaining your position today as kind of a retail distribution for the venues versus maybe trying to develop something internally, whether that's organic or inorganic?

Yes, yes. So I think one of the advantages we have entering any market, Prediction Markets aren't an exception, is that we have distribution. And we have lots of customers, 26 million-plus funded accounts in the U.S. that are trading and using us for all sorts of things. And from an infrastructure standpoint, we actually have an increasing set of tools that can plug in and are being built to be multi-asset. So not just our mobile app, but increasingly on the web. We have Robinhood Legend. We have all of these things that we announced at HOOD Summit. And it's really an ecosystem of financial services, and you'll see great integration between all of our platforms and all of our assets and account types increasingly so in the future. I think when we think about vertical integration, like should we be a market maker or should we be an exchange in any asset? One thing we look at is, is the vertical integration going to be accretive to us? Is it going to be something that is increasingly commoditized over time? And my feeling for how this is going to evolve in Prediction Markets at least is there's going to be a lot of entrants in the space, a lot of exchanges. And in the same way that across equities and options, customers are well served because there's a wide variety of venues that are competing on cost to offer great execution. I think Prediction Markets will evolve that way, too. And I think in that world, the customer certainly benefits because different DCMs and markets will compete for who offers the lowest cost. And I think the power continues to be in our distribution and offering a wide variety of products and services. I think we're the only ones currently that have this powerful combination for traders, not just being able to trade Prediction Markets, but crypto, options, equities, futures. I think it's a great combination. And there are certain advantages for everything being in one place under a simple, easy-to-use platform. I think we can keep pressing on that advantage. And as you've noticed, I think the product has continued to evolve at a pretty rapid pace. I think you should expect that to continue and to even accelerate.

All right. Next question from Alex Markgraff from KeyBanc.

Jason, Shiv; congrats. Maybe, Jason, one on crypto, the crypto business for a second. Just want to understand better as you've moved through the third quarter and early part of the fourth quarter, the mix of smart exchange routing and how that's sort of factored into the numbers that we're seeing.

The blended take rate is in the high $0.60 range, and we are pleased with the interest in smart exchange routing from our customers. The take rate so far in Q4 is in the same range, and we will need to monitor how the mix develops. However, we are happy with the customer engagement, as those selecting smart exchange routing are directing more of their trading volume to Robinhood, which gives us confidence in our offering.

Yes. And I would just add one thing there. It's a big step towards pricing being a little bit more personalized, right? And what we had before, a lot of people ask us as well, your take rate is so much lower across the board. Can you raise your take rate? But I think the real story is a little bit more complex than that because certainly, if you're an active trader, you're trading huge volumes, you're able to use advanced offerings on exchanges. And in the past, we didn't have tools to offer those customers we might not have been super competitive for lower take rates. And that's what smart exchange routing really unlocks for us for those that are super active and bringing a ton of volume, almost like prosumer traders, which we're seeing more of now that we've got Robinhood Legend. Can we make Robinhood a no-brainer for them? And we've seen more and more of those customers choosing us and coming in here after smart exchange routing, which is very exciting because that's just a customer segment that we felt we were underpenetrated with.

The next question is from Devin Ryan from Citizens.

Vlad, Jason, Shiv, and Shiv welcome to the call. I know you've been a big part of the story already. So kind of welcome to the stage here. And Jason, to you as well, the success to date and the best practices you put in place with the firm on strong footing. So congratulations.

Thanks, Devin.

Question about private markets. The demand and activity we are observing is on the rise. Recently, Morgan Stanley announced they were acquiring EquityZen. There might be some complications due to the requirements for accredited investors. Could you discuss whether there is demand from your customers, especially since companies are remaining private for longer periods? It appears that Robinhood is well-positioned to act as a trading hub and facilitate liquidity in the market, potentially even for primary capital in private markets. The question is whether there is growing interest in private markets and if there are plans to engage more in this area. I understand this also relates to tokenization, and whether mergers and acquisitions would be a feasible approach there.

Yes. Maybe I'll start, but Shiv has also been working on the Robinhood Ventures front. So maybe I'll ask him to say a few words as well. Look, I think private markets are a huge opportunity and just let's focus on the U.S. perhaps first because that's where we have the largest portion of our business, although international with tokenization provides some interesting opportunities as well. In the U.S., I think it's one of the biggest iniquities that we think is part of our mission to help resolve. You mentioned yourself, you have a lot of these companies that are staying private longer. They're avoiding the public markets. They're private in valuations of hundreds of billions now, right? And if you want access to the AI innovation economy or space technologies, you don't have a ton of pure-play public companies to select from. So we think it's a bigger problem, particularly as these technologies have so much potential to upend the lives of retail consumers, giving access to that is a big part of it. A few years ago, we rolled out IPO access. And I would say that at first, people were kind of skeptical about it, right? Like we would have to really work hard to get companies to be interested to give retail IPO allocations. And recently, pretty much every company that's notable that's thinking about going public comes to us, talks to us about their retail engagement strategy. And now they're looking at how to engage retail better: earnings calls, not just shareholder Q&A, but making earnings more compelling so that retail wants to actually watch and participate and learn as well. And we've noticed the allocations to retail going up in public companies, public IPOs, which we've been very happy about. And I think that's a trend that's going to continue. And we want to do that at an earlier stage. And I think that's really the thesis behind Robinhood Ventures. And we found a way to do it, we believe, unaccredited. And maybe Shiv can talk a little bit more about that.

Yes. We've been working on this for a while, and we're super excited. In terms of the demand, when we talk to customers, it's one of the top things they want. They want access to these best-in-class technology companies that they use and love. And when you ask them, there's three big things they want. First is daily liquidity. Second, not to be accredited. 85% of Americans aren't accredited today, so they get left out. And third, more concentrated portfolios. They want to access again the names they love. And so when we designed the product, that was our main use case, how do we do that? And we think we found a great way to do that. We're on a file with the SEC for Robinhood Ventures I. We're in the quiet period, so we can't say too much more there. But we think this vehicle will be great and expect pretty strong customer demand. And then the other thing we're working on is how do you make it great for companies because you need both the customers but also the companies. And so we're trying to think what's the best way to partner and innovate with these customers and companies as well and have some really great traction there. So we're excited to share more about the fund in the coming months. But as Vlad said, this is just Fund I and just to start, our ambitions in the space are pretty large.

The next question is going to be from Jeff John Roberts from Fortune.

My question is about tokenized equities, which seem to be the future, and they seem very cool. But I'm curious, when do you think they're going to scale Vlad? And also what implications they might have for Robinhood's revenue when it comes to payment for order flow or otherwise?

Yes. Great to see you, by the way. I forgot to mention we have some folks from the media joining us today, too. So thanks for the question. So tokenized equities, as you might remember from the event in France, there's three phases to the rollout. And we're still in Phase 1, but we're really ramping up the number of tokens available on the platform. So we're now up over 400 available. And I think that makes us the largest in terms of selection. I think, the largest, maybe one of the largest at the very least. But I think where it really starts to get interesting is Phase 2 and Phase 3, which is them available for secondary trading on Bitstamp and then eventually them being on DeFi where the possibilities really start to multiply. You start thinking about self-custody collateralized lending and borrowing, which we think could be very, very disruptive as well. Currently, the model is just foreign exchange in the EU. Yes, we take a relatively low simple foreign exchange fee for tokens. And actually, we're pretty happy with that. I think that's 10 basis points, if I'm not mistaken, which is actually slightly higher than what we would be foregoing with payment for order flow.

All right. The next question in the front row.

Vlad, this is for you. Anyone who's had the pleasure of being an investor or customer over the last many years, I think has seen an incredibly inspirational change in product execution base. I'm curious to understand from you guys, what have been the contributing factors there? How do you see that maintaining or increasing over the coming years, but really incredible job, and it's so fun to be a customer.

Thank you. We appreciate it. As a company, we have grown, and it's easy to overlook what happened during COVID, thinking we were just too bloated and lost our way. However, much of what we did during that time helped lay the groundwork for our future. We brought in talented individuals and realized we had to ask ourselves critical questions about our desired culture and our goals, including whether we wanted to prioritize speed in shipping. This has laid the foundation for our current product velocity, both in terms of infrastructure and people. We made some difficult decisions to streamline our operations, and while this is often underreported, we were early adopters of AI, integrating it across the organization, especially in customer service and engineering, where we excel in our industry. You'll learn more about our efforts at the upcoming AI event, but it's worth noting that, while we may not be a foundation model company, we are leading in the financial services sector with how we are implementing AI at scale.

Two things that I would add, which I think both relate to speed of decision-making. We made the change to a general manager model. And I think having leaders over their specific business owning goals and driving against their milestones helped us move faster. The second piece was alignment on what our financial tenants were around kind of what the ROI and other financial guardrails are and just getting a complete alignment across the teams that build and the teams that support on what those hurdles are and what those requirements are allowed us to move even faster once there was alignment on that. So those are two aspects that I think help us move faster.

All right. Yes, and also in the front row.

Cryptocurrency-related products and revenue have been an important part of Robinhood's growth story. What are your thoughts on adopting Bitcoin or other digital assets as part of your corporate treasury strategy?

Shiv, what do you think about that one?

So we spend a lot of time thinking about this. We like alignment with the community. We are a big player in crypto. We want to keep doing it. We like that our customers are engaged in it. What we always try to figure out is, is it the right thing for shareholders as well. If you put it on your balance sheet, it has the positives in that you're aligned with the community, but it does take up capital. Our shareholders can also go and buy Bitcoin directly on Robinhood, and so are we making that decision for them? And is it the best use of our capital? There's a lot of different things you're doing from new products for growth, investing in engineering. So we have this debate constantly. And I think the short answer is we're still thinking about it. There's pros and cons to both of it, and it's one that we're going to keep actively looking at.

Before we move to the virtual queue, are there any other questions from those present? Now let's turn to the dial-in participants. The first question is from James Yaro at Goldman Sachs, but it seems we cannot connect with him at the moment. So we'll proceed to the next question. James, please feel free to jump back in if you're able to hear us. The next question comes from Ben Budish at Barclays. While we work on connecting with our virtual audience, Alex Markgraff, do you have another question? Let's get Alex a microphone. Shiv, would you like to share more about yourself while we wait?

I think we're getting Alex on mic. So we're in good shape.

Vlad, you mentioned the wealth transfer in your prepared remarks. And I'd just be curious to get your thoughts as to in that sort of longer arc opportunity where we are today. And then Jason or Shiv, maybe just thinking about the contribution to growth, again, sort of a longer-term question, but when we think about the contribution to growth from the wealth transfer, how should we sort of think about that over a 5-, 10-year arc?

Yes, I’ll start by discussing some of our product strategies. We are focused on making Robinhood more beneficial for users, especially as more family members join. This is evident with our credit card and banking offerings, where we aim to create a family-friendly experience. Customers can easily provide credit cards or bank accounts for their partners and set up accounts for children and other household members. Many users have begun utilizing Robinhood as a family financial center, and we plan to expand this aspect throughout our ecosystem. While we've introduced various account types since our initial offering of just individual brokerage accounts, including retirement accounts and custom brokerage accounts that users enjoy, there's still room for growth. We currently lack trust and custodial accounts, which we view as opportunities, particularly as we target younger users and those with increasing wealth who may be looking to diversify into trusts. Additionally, as financial needs grow more complex, we believe integrating more personalized advice through trade PMR will enhance our digital services. Over the next year, we will be addressing this significant $100 trillion opportunity from multiple fronts. I believe this focus on the whole family is not currently on the radar of many competitors, presenting us with a unique opportunity to stand out.

Stepping back, we've been gaining market share across every category we operate in. As we work towards the vision that Vlad outlined, we're well-positioned to capture a significant portion of the wealth transfer.

All right. The next question I'm going to read on behalf of James Yaro from Goldman Sachs. We are seeing tokenization across Robinhood and other firms and your tokenized equities product and those of peers are not interoperable as they are slightly differently structured and on different blockchains in many cases. Does this result in fragmentation of liquidity across the equity market? How do you expect this market to develop? And how would you make these tokenized stocks interoperable?

Certainly, Robinhood stock tokens currently lack the interoperability we desire because they aren't on DeFi yet. They remain within the Robinhood ecosystem, which has its benefits. Every trade made by a customer is supported by a traditional equities trade in a conventional market. As we enhance liquidity and increase the supply of tokens, this should create a strong initial experience for customers. Over time, I expect to see improved interoperability. In the crypto world, communities often engage in building connections and solutions for assets across various chains. Therefore, I believe that interoperability will evolve. I anticipate that all major tokenized assets will eventually operate across multiple chains; it’s simply a matter of how we achieve that. Regarding liquidity fragmentation, this is not a new issue, particularly on a global scale, where multiple exchanges and market makers coexist. They are adept at managing liquidity and trading across different platforms. Moreover, crypto technology and infrastructure may simplify this challenge, as the integration process from an engineering perspective tends to be less complicated.

All right. The next question is for Jason, and it's from Ben Budish at Barclays. I'll read it on his behalf. You've called out a number of cost items impacting this year, some of which it sounds like won't recur. How should we think about the run rate into 2026?

Yes. We are currently planning for 2026. Our approach is similar to what we've done in recent years, focusing on investing for growth while also achieving profitable growth, which means expanding our margins. We urge our existing businesses to identify efficiencies and we aim to limit their cost growth to low single digits, or even lower in some cases. The savings from this are reinvested into growth areas such as increasing marketing expenditures, which we find to be very efficient in terms of return on investment, as well as investing in new businesses. You can see the results of this strategy in our fast revenue growth alongside relatively modest expense growth, and we are applying the same approach as we prepare for 2026.

All right. Thank you, Jason. We're going to take another shot at going to the live phone queue. All right. So the next question is from Brian Bedell at Deutsche Bank.

Can you hear me okay?

We hear you. The telephone works.

Excellent. All right. The old-fashioned, TradFi telephone. Well, I just want to say, first of all, congrats, Jason, on retirement. It's been great working with you, and welcome, Shiv. Looking forward to working with you as well. Maybe my question will go to Prediction Markets. So maybe if you can just talk about how the customer behavior has been forming just in the last two months. We've seen a big increase in volume, obviously, in September with the NFL and college games added. And how are you seeing that maybe sort of shape in coming into October? Are you seeing that volume increase coming from more new users coming into the Prediction Markets or rather greater usage of existing users? And then if you can talk about maybe just your thoughts around time line of launching new contracts and potentially even weaving in things around maybe single stocks that active traders can start using.

Yes, I can begin. We are actively working on this. Recently, we have significantly expanded the variety of contracts we offer, launching entirely new categories. We've broadened our presence in entertainment and culture markets, and you may have noticed our expansion in technology markets as well. Currently, we are offering over 1,000 live event contracts for trading. Adoption has been strong, which isn't surprising given our large established customer base and the uptake from existing users, especially traders. However, we are also gaining new customers who are joining us specifically for access to our prediction markets. I believe there is still more we can accomplish, not only by increasing contract diversity but also by enhancing the user experience and improving product discoverability. The team is committed to this effort, and you can expect to see ongoing improvements each week.

Much like our active trader offering, a relatively smaller portion of our customers are participating in the market. And I think as we continue to work on the user interface and discoverability of the product, we've got the expectation that we can take that higher.

All right. The next question is from Dan Dolev at Mizuho.

Great job again on an outstanding quarter. I wanted to thank you, Jason. Thank you, Jason. It was a pleasure working with you, and I look forward to working with you, Shiv. And my question for you, Vlad, is Bitstamp very, very strong, I think, over 60% growth quarter-over-quarter. This seems incredibly strategic to Robinhood. Can you maybe elaborate on the long-term strategic importance of this because it seems to be off to a great start.

Yes. We had the Bitstamp team from engineering visiting our offices, and we spent time with them discussing our plans for the upcoming year. We've achieved significant success in growing volumes and enhancing the product since the acquisition, but we are not becoming complacent or slowing down. There is a tremendous opportunity ahead. I believe Bitstamp will play a crucial role in our tokenization plans as we move into Phase 2 of our vision. We aim to provide access to real assets that have genuine utility on the platform. Additionally, this marks our entry into the institutional market. I truly value feedback from institutional customers, who have many options for their business and are candid about areas where we must improve, which is quite a few, to be honest. We are set for a busy year ahead, and as we achieve further successes and develop more offerings, I believe volumes and market share will increase accordingly.

All right.

Johann is very nervous watching me say all this.

All right. The next question is from Brett Knoblauch at Cantor.

Congrats on the quarter. On the Robinhood Social, could you maybe just dive into that a bit deeper and when you expect for that to rollout and how you expect maybe users to begin using that and how should impact maybe financials and when you would expect it to impact financials going forward?

Yes, I think forecasting the impact precisely might be a bit challenging because we view this as a new source of information for our customers. It's intended to provide trading ideas, and we genuinely want the product to excel as a source of information. We aim to be a platform where substantial discussions about business and finance take place and hopefully begin. We've conducted some social feature experiments over the years, and we've observed that when done correctly, along with ensuring high-quality content and verifying traders, we have a significant advantage. We believe it can be an engaging product that makes Robinhood not only useful for trading ideas but also a place where those ideas originate, presenting a considerable opportunity to close the loop. If ideas come from Robinhood and trades are executed on our platform, it enhances our power. This network effect will strengthen as we introduce more assets. We expect to be the only platform offering live verified trades across various markets, including equities, options, crypto, prediction markets, and futures. The content diversity should be quite appealing to those interested in business and finance.

In terms of monetization, we really see this as an opportunity to spin the flywheel, attract more customers to the platform because of the rich social experience and then be able to capture a greater share of trading activity and other financial activities across the platform.

All right. The next question is from Ed Engel at Compass Point.

You talked about aspirations outside the U.S. and you guys talked about over half of, hopefully, one day, your user base will be outside the U.S. How does M&A play into that strategy? And can we expect you to kind of continue launching market by market? Or could they create an opportunity to kind of launch a couple of markets simultaneously given a bigger transaction?

Over time, I think it's probably a mix. I mean we naturally gravitate towards organic growth, and you're seeing examples of that, for example, in the U.K., but we do have an active corp dev team. Actually, Shiv has been leading that for some time now. And when deals make sense for us, great team, great technology, ability to accelerate the roadmap, we don't shy away from those kinds of opportunities as well.

Okay. The next question is from Steven Chubak at Wolfe.

Congrats, Jason and Shiv. I wanted to start with a question just on the international strategy and the growth that you've seen thus far. I was hoping to get some perspective, Vlad, in terms of how that growth is tracking relative to plan? Is there more that you can do in terms of product deployment and innovation to maybe help accelerate that growth? It just hasn't gotten as much airplay as like some of the other opportunities. So I was hoping you can unpack that a little bit further.

It's still early in our international plan, which is why we view this opportunity as a long-term vision spanning 10 years. Unlike the U.S., we don't have an established customer base in these new markets to cross-sell to. However, we are encouraged by what we're seeing and are increasing our investments. Activity in the U.K. and the EU has improved, prompting us to initiate marketing efforts, as we are starting to see real returns on that marketing as revenue increases. Recently, we launched stock tokens in 30 countries during a token event in the EU, which we are excited about, although it has only been a couple of months since then. Looking ahead, we believe that in five to ten years, we might reflect on this period and realize we underestimated the potential growth of this business. We are pleased with the early indicators and are continuing to boost our investments. There's a significant amount of development to be done, especially in tokenization, where we’re still in the initial phase. Over time, it will become evident that our products offer significant advantages compared to others in the market.

All right. Thank you. The next question is from Amit. Amit is investing.

A big thank you, Jason, over the years on your execution and congrats to you, Shiv, on your new role. My question is for you, Vlad. Going back to tokenization, you recently said tokenization will eat the broader financial system. Outside of just tokenized equities, can you give us a more larger look on how big of a size the opportunity is, why right now is the time to go after it? And what Robinhood is really thinking about over the next couple of years in terms of taking advantage of the opportunity? I know there's a lot of different other assets besides equities that could be tokenized. So can you just speak a little bit more on how you guys are thinking of the opportunity?

Yes. I think the opportunity is very exciting. One of the things that I think is both a problem and an opportunity with the traditional crypto is that crypto and the traditional financial system up until fairly recently have kind of been two separate worlds. And I think Robinhood has a unique position as a scaled crypto business, but also a scaled business in traditional finance to bridge the two and actually make room for what we consider traditional assets, but really things like securities, products with real fundamental utility to leverage blockchain technology and actually be tradable on chain where customers can self-custody, they can engage with a variety of protocols, collateralized borrowing and lending and where those assets can be traded 24/7 real time in fractional quantities. You've obviously seen some efforts in private companies in the EU with our OpenAI and SpaceX token giveaways there. So I think we're really interested in continuing to pull on that and making those products available to customers. The other opportunities that I'm personally excited about are real estate, private credit, unique assets and collectibles like art. If you think about what's a part of your portfolio, if you're a high net worth individual, there's a lot of these assets that actual retail can't access currently. And I think that tokenization is a way to enable that at scale and sort of like reduce some of the downsides that would typically be associated with holding those assets, like lack of liquidity being locked into positions, not being able to chunk the assets out and invest in portions of them. So that's why we're continuing to push on it, both in the U.S. and outside. And you should expect this to become bigger and bigger in the coming years, of course, starting with stocks, which is the asset class that we think has the most potential and we're also closest to.

Okay. Thank you, Vlad. The next question is from Roy from Crossroads.

Huge congratulations to Jason and also Shiv, and congrats to everybody on a great quarter, too. And very impressive, there's been a huge increase in predictions market activity. And I'm curious if the volume shown in the platform is a mix of Kalshi and Robinhood? Or is it just pure Robinhood? And also, is Robinhood considering expanding this internationally even alongside or even ahead of its current trading expansion plans?

Yes. I mean, sure. The volumes that we're showing are the volumes that are on Robinhood. I'm sure Kalshi is counting the activity that we send to them, which is quite substantial. And for contracts that we offer, I think a very large chunk of Kalshi's volume is actually coming from Robinhood. In terms of international, Vlad, I'll let you cover that one.

Yes. We're definitely looking into it closely. And you talk about tokenization as some of the previous callers have brought up, Prediction Markets is another asset class that actually has a strong crypto component, particularly outside the U.S. So we're definitely taking a look at what's the most effective way to get that to our customers. And I think it's going to be on a case-by-case basis, maybe slightly different in each jurisdiction, but we have some options as a scaled traditional player, but also on the crypto side, I think we will have our pick of what's best in each jurisdiction, and that's something we're definitely closely looking at.

Okay. The next question is from Matti Daleiden from JPMorgan.

This is Matti on for Ken. On shorting, has Robinhood experienced a noticeable pickup in customers applying for margin accounts in order to participate in the short selling since your 3Q launch? What have early adoption numbers and customer behavior looked like in these first few months?

Yes. So shorting is something that we've announced at the HOOD Summit event in Vegas a couple of weeks ago. Customers are very excited about it. It's somewhat hard to believe that we've been able to get to this point without offering shorting. But we've been rolling it out to employees and doing final testing. It's actually not yet rolled out to external customers. So we think people will love it, but too early to tell. And I guess to answer your question, no. I mean, I don't think the increase in margin usage has been in anticipation of shorting because it's just not yet available.

The next question is from Tannor with Future Investing.

First off, I just wanted to start off with a can you guys hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

Okay. Sorry. With a crypto question around crypto staking on the Robinhood platform so far, if there's any insights there? And then also just maybe a small request, if you guys are open to publishing event contract volume on their monthly metrics updates going forward? That's it.

We ended the quarter with about $1 billion in stake. The market has been quite volatile recently, so it may have decreased slightly, but customers are reacting positively to the staking option.

And what about the event contract volume published and monthly metrics?

Yes, I'll leave that with Shiv as something to consider. I don't want to promise that for him, but we do like, in all seriousness, being as transparent as possible for investors, and we're always looking at ways to provide incremental disclosure to help you understand the business. So that's something we'll look at.

Yes. Thanks for the suggestion.

All right. That is the last question from our virtual queue. Is there anybody else in the audience here who didn't get to ask a question earlier that wants to ask a question?

Perhaps one of the virtual...

All right. Well, I think let's pass it back to you, Vlad.

Okay. I think you guys should know that we are not slowing down. The team remains incredibly excited to continue our mission, and there's so much to do. Roadmap is full. AI event is coming up, which I think will be very, very exciting. So hopefully, some of you will be able to join us there, at least virtually. And to commemorate this occasion, bittersweet, though it might be, I've learned that Jason has a favorite dessert. And so we've actually brought one here, and Jason wanted to share this with everyone in person and virtually vicariously, a Baked Alaska.

You all wonder why I'm retiring.

Unfortunately, they wouldn't let us light it here even though that would have been very cool. So this is...

It looks incredible. It's the first time I've ever had it, actually growing up. My favorite was lemon meringue pie, and this brings back fond memories. I anticipate there's ice cream underneath, which is my favorite.

I wish they gave me the lighter, and I just like tried unsuccessfully to light it. But...

Thank you, and I appreciate all the kind words of encouragement. And I do believe we're leaving the company in an incredible position. And I think you're going to find in short order that Shiv is, if not an upgrade, equally as good at driving the company forward. So thank you.

Thank you. We'll see if he can finish an entire one of these. It looks like there's one for each of us up here.

We'll bring some of the team to help with that.

All right. Thank you.

Thank you, all.