Robinhood holding bitcoin 'comes up from time to time,' CEO says
Quick Take
- Vlad Tenev, CEO of trading platform Robinhood, said there have been internal discussions about holding bitcoin, but the company doesn’t have plans to maintain a BTC reserve.
- Robinhood’s stock price is “highly correlated with bitcoin,” he said.
Cryptocurrency may be becoming increasingly important to the equities and crypto trading platform Robinhood, but there are no plans to hold bitcoin for investment purposes, CEO Vladimir Tenev said in an interview published on Monday.
Tenev said the idea of holding bitcoin “comes up from time to time” given Robinhood’s growing interest in cryptocurrencies. But other than holding some coins as part of its business of servicing clients' trading needs, the company has no plans to hold onto BTC for investment purposes, he added.
"We wouldn’t rule it out. We haven’t done it thus far,” Tenev said in the interview with Anthony Pompliano. "Not in the business of being an investment manager."
The CEO went on to say that despite Robinhood having not followed in the footsteps of companies like MicroStrategy and Tesla, which hold bitcoin on their balance sheets, his company's share price "is already highly correlated with bitcoin as such without us even holding it on the treasury."
Robinhood's stock (ticker: HOOD) is up 202% this year, compared to bitcoin's 110% year-to-date return.
But Tenev said he believed if Robinhood held bitcoin for investment purposes it might "complicate" investors' view of the company, potentially seeing it as a "quasi, bitcoin-holding play."
Robinhood 'top' trade
In November, Bernstein analysts named Robinhood the top “crypto deregulation trade” of the cycle following Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. They predicted Robinhood's crypto revenues will jump 20% by the end of 2025 to make up 38% of the trading platform's total revenues.
Up until now, Robinhood has been more conservative in terms of what it offers clients who want to buy and sell crypto. The company offers substantially fewer digital asset investment options and has listed fewer tokens than rival trading platforms like Coinbase and Kraken. The expectation is that this could change during Trump's presidency.
Robinhood is also set to close its acquisition of crypto exchange Bitstamp in the first half of 2025.
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