Morning Minute: Robinhood Misses, But Crypto Beats and Robinhood Chain Soars
Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our daily news show 'FOMO HOUR' covering all of the top stories and market action.
GM!
Today’s top news:
- Crypto majors rebound 2-4% ahead of FOMC; BTC at $81.3k
- BTC ETFs see another $176M in net inflows; STRC at $99.53
- Google previews crypto custody service for banks
- Ripple wins final approval from OCC for National Trust Bank
- Robinhood misses earnings but crypto beats; RH Chain leaders surge
→Robinhood Misses, But Crypto Beats and the Chain Surprises
Robinhood missed on both revenue and EPS on Tuesday, despite crypto beating expectations. But the more interesting things happened on the call.
Revenue came in at a record $1.42 billion, a hair under the $1.43 billion expected. EPS was $0.51 against $0.55 forecast. Crypto revenue rose to $120 million from $100 million in Q2, up 20% sequentially, though still 55% below last year’s $268 million. Trading volume was $50 billion, with $29 billion of that through Bitstamp.
Event contracts are now the bigger business: $173 million, up from $156 million, on a record 16.4 billion contracts traded, more than seven times a year ago. Between prediction markets and crypto, more than a fifth of Robinhood’s revenue now comes from products that barely existed two years ago.
And then came the call and Vlad’s commentary on Robinhood Chain.
“It caught us by surprise.”
Vlad admitted that Robinhood Chain has outrun their internal forecasts and expectations. The chain launched July 1. By late August it was generating more fees over a rolling 30 days than Ethereum or Base. Tenev said they’ve had to staff up a team to keep pace, and that builders have been telling them Robinhood could be doing more.
His response: “You should expect to see us really ramping the investment, because you just don’t see growth of a new ecosystem like this. It’s an uncommon thing. A lot of chains have launched over the past few months that have had an incomparably small level of traction compared to this. So we’re doubling down.”
Then he described where he thinks it goes: “Imagine if you take a stock token, make it fully programmable just like software. What can you do? Can you have tokenized options contracts?”
This was music to the Robinhood Chain bulls’ ears. And it was enough to send the Robinhood Chain leaders up 20-50% across the board, led by Pons +18%, AI (Long) +33% and Orbio +57%.
The message was clear. Robinhood isn’t treating tokenized equities as a product feature, it’s treating them as a primitive other people build on top of. That’s already happening with projects like Long.xyz pairing meme coins against tokenized NVDA and TSLA and Orbio funding AI inference credits with fees paid in tokenized Nvidia. Neither was Robinhood’s idea, and both only exist because the stock tokens do.
Now those teams can expect more support from the Robinhood team. Two tweets from Robinhood Crypto on Tuesday already evidence this leaning in, supporting both Long and Priors. So earnings may have been a miss, but the earnings call was a big win. Now let’s see just what leaning in means…
🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets
- Crypto majors are green up 2-4%; BTC +2% at $81.2k; ETH +2% at $2,360; SOL +3% at $103; HYPE +5% at $81.40; ZEC +4% at $1,300
- Top alt movers include BCH (+6%), ZRO (+6%) and CC (+5%)
- Oil even at $101; Gold +0.2% at $4,050
- Stock futures are mixed ahead of FOMC today; DOW -0.23%, Nasdaq +0.4%
- Intel, Oracle, IBM and IonQ joined the issuers objecting to tokenized versions of their shares on the OKX-ICE venue, pushing the count to 26 in twelve days
- Ripple won final OCC approval for Ripple National Trust Bank, a federally supervised national trust bank that will hold and act as collateral trustee for the reserves backing its $2.6 billion RLUSD stablecoin
- Google opened a private preview of a crypto custody service for banks that splits a signing key into fragments held across separate environments and runs every transaction past a policy engine before signing, with commercial availability targeted for early 2027 and Alphabet already using it to secure its own assets on Ethereum and Solana
- Robinhood went live with Ripple’s RLUSD on Robinhood Chain and Bitstamp and will run its global cash operations on Ripple Treasury, while using RLUSD on the XRP Ledger for institutional settlement across Bitstamp
- South Korea’s second-largest exchange Bithumb confirmed an outside party accessed its internal staff groupware system and leaked personal information, on the same day two major Korean brokerages disclosed their own intrusions
Corporate Treasuries & ETFs
- The Bitcoin ETFs saw $176M in net inflows on Tuesday; the ETH ETFs saw $60M in net outflows
Meme Coin Tracker
- Meme leaders were green; DOGE +4%, SHIB +4%, PEPE +16%, PENGU +5%, TRUMP +3%, SPX +2%, BONK +4%
- Robinhood chain leaders were very green after HOOD earnings; Pons +18% to $195M; Cashcat +1% at $100M; AI +32% at $69M; Orbio +60%, Boner +40% and Priors +80% led top movers
- Solana top movers included Something +35x, GTA6 +50%, SI +60% and Sapling +280%; Stonk +20% to $160M
💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker
- Pump.fun led onchain protocols in revenue on the day with $1.88M, followed by Hyperliquid at $1.65M and Polymarket at $366k
- Circle began piloting USDC settlement inside Colombia’s instant-payments network, partnering with ACI Worldwide to plug the stablecoin into Bre-B’s real-time account-to-account rails rather than replacing them
- Polymarket has investigated dozens of midterm election bets for insider trading and manipulation, with at least two cases referred to the CFTC
🚚 What is happening in NFTs?
- NFT leaders were mixed; Punks +1% at 30.5 ETH, BAYC -2.5% at 6.05 ETH, Pudgy +2% at 2.53 ETH
- Deafbeef (+31%) and Identity (+11%) led top movers
Related stories
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Ripple expects $900 million annualized product revenue run rate as institutional business expands
