The Information's TITV
00:05:05 · Shiv Verma, Akash Pasricha
[00:05:05] S1: Yeah. Great question. So first, actually, crypto trading was up quarter over quarter. It was down year over year, but sequentially, it was actually up. Yeah. But one of the really interesting things that that we mentioned is that we are seeing people use event contracts to place views on crypto, And that's one of the categories that's growing in addition to, as I mentioned, economics or sports or culture. This is just a different way to express a view. Why do customers like it? You can go directly in there. You can see what the probability is. They can have shorter duration. And so if you think about ways you can express views in crypto, you can do it spot on the actual asset, you can do futures, you can do derivatives, now you can do an event contract. What we typically see is as you add any new asset classes, they all become additive. You don't normally see people rotating or cannibalization, it makes the overall pie bigger, and event contracts are just another way to do that. And so, yeah, we were seeing a lot of interest in the crypto markets, and so we're continuing to build some more contracts in that space on the event contracts platform. [00:06:04] S0: Do you think events contracts becomes a bigger business than crypto inevitably? I don't think it's as big yet. Still... I think it was over 100,000,000, I know you said, so it's a fourteenth business over 100,000,000, but I think crypto is a couple 100,000,000 still, right? [00:06:23] S1: So actually, right now, the run rate for event contracts is larger than crypto. Oh, larger. Okay. Well, there
00:06:23 · Shiv Verma, Umesh Padval, Akash Pasricha
[00:06:23] S1: So actually, right now, the run rate for event contracts is larger than crypto. Oh, larger. Okay. Well, there [00:06:28] S2: you go. [00:06:28] S1: It's crossed the $500,000,000 run rate. Couple things I'll tell you about. On crypto, we are still long term bullish, and what we're focusing our cycles on is the infrastructure layer. And so we announced the Robinhood chain in July, and one thing I shared yesterday is in its first full quarter of operation, did about 50,000,000 of gross revenue. Tremendous, and actually much better than we expected. So the infrastructure layer continues to go really well. On event contracts, we think we're at the beginning of a super cycle. I actually think this could be bigger than The US equities market. And so if you look at a typical event contracts month or quarter, you know, you might do 6 to 10,000,000,000 of event contracts volume. We do 10,000,000,000 of equities volume a day. And so while event contracts is growing, relative to equities, it's much, much smaller. So if we were to come back in five to ten years, I actually think the events contracts has a ton of room to run-in terms of the total size. [00:07:18] S0: So tell me, other than the advantage that you can trade all these assets in one spot, what is the advantage that you are pitching to customers in terms of why they should trade events contracts on Robinhood compared to Polymarket and and Kalshi?
00:07:18 · Akash Pasricha, Shiv Verma
[00:07:18] S0: So tell me, other than the advantage that you can trade all these assets in one spot, what is the advantage that you are pitching to customers in terms of why they should trade events contracts on Robinhood compared to Polymarket and and Kalshi? [00:07:37] S1: Yeah. Great. Great question. So a couple different things. One, you mentioned, you can do all your asset classes together. That is a really powerful point for active traders in particular. Two, with our new dynamic pricing, we believe we have the best pricing out there. And so that's really great for customers. The third thing we're bullish on, it relates to the first one, is we are now building event contracts for the equities types market. So for example, we announced KPI options at our Hood Summit a few weeks ago. You can now go in and place an event contract in the very near term on say Apple for example. But you can say the number of iPhones it's gonna ship, how many Duos it's gonna ship, what are revenue, what are EPS. That is something our competitors can't do because it will be a brokerage product. And if you're an active trader and you wanna be able to go between equities or options or crypto or event contracts, Robinhood is gonna be the destination to do it. And so the way we see it is it's making the entire platform better, whether your equities options crypto, and it's a unique advantage that we have relative to many of our peers.
00:07:37 · Shiv Verma, Akash Pasricha
[00:07:37] S1: Yeah. Great. Great question. So a couple different things. One, you mentioned, you can do all your asset classes together. That is a really powerful point for active traders in particular. Two, with our new dynamic pricing, we believe we have the best pricing out there. And so that's really great for customers. The third thing we're bullish on, it relates to the first one, is we are now building event contracts for the equities types market. So for example, we announced KPI options at our Hood Summit a few weeks ago. You can now go in and place an event contract in the very near term on say Apple for example. But you can say the number of iPhones it's gonna ship, how many Duos it's gonna ship, what are revenue, what are EPS. That is something our competitors can't do because it will be a brokerage product. And if you're an active trader and you wanna be able to go between equities or options or crypto or event contracts, Robinhood is gonna be the destination to do it. And so the way we see it is it's making the entire platform better, whether your equities options crypto, and it's a unique advantage that we have relative to many of our peers. [00:08:33] S0: Right. So, okay, we talked about crypto, we talked about prediction markets, so now we have to talk about AI just to complete the trifecta. So remind us now, what agents can you use to trade on Robinhood? What can't you do? What is the suite of what's available?
00:08:52 · Shiv Verma
[00:08:52] S1: Yeah, great question. So we now have Robinhood Agents. We announced this at the Hood Summit. That is where you can natively go into the app and you can ask an agent to trade on your behalf. Earlier in the year, we announced an MCP. So you can connect it to your favorite MCP, whether it's Codex or Claude Code or Grok. And so customers love that. We had about 200,000 customers that are already using it, but what we heard is they wanted to make it more natively in the app. So that's what we announced and now we're rolling it out to customers. Really good adoption. We announced it's already over $250,000,000 of assets on the platform and it's only been around for a few months. What we're seeing is customers right now are primarily using it for research. They're going in and they're saying, Hey, have a view that I'd like to express. I think AI stocks or tech stocks are gonna do well. Can you help me do scanners or screeners? And this is what I'm looking for. We are seeing customers using it to trade as well, but the early adoption has been more research and and focus there. And now what we're building is we're just taking customer feedback, we're iterating it, we're making the in app experience even better and better. We also put a ton of guardrails in place. So first, it's a separate account in the app. So right now, for example, if I open my app, I have a ton of different accounts. Have my investing account, my retirement account, my custodial account for my daughter. I now have an authentic account. That is the only account that your agent can access.
00:10:05 · Akash Pasricha, Shiv Verma, Umesh Padval
[00:10:05] S0: Do do you think... Will will you open it up to, like, you know, external agent, Muse, Instinct, all these other apps? Is that coming? [00:10:14] S1: Oh, yeah. That already exists. If [00:10:15] S0: you Muse. Okay. [00:10:16] S1: If you go to the Grockbox store, you can actually find a Robinhood connector. We are working with Muse to have other connector up in the very, very near term, but absolutely. For us, we believe you should just give customers a choice. We should be available on every single platform, every type of connector. You should also be able to do it in app. It's similar to the Amazon model, selection wins. And so for us, if we give customers a great choice and let them trade, we think it's great for everybody. [00:10:39] S0: So let me ask you about the business model for you then, because we've written about this topic at The Information. I mean, agentic trading is interesting because in a world where you are making at least some money off the spread between the prices that people are buying and selling at, I imagine that agents... And we've seen it with algorithmic trading as well, agents might be better at that. So the spread, the opportunity to make money off that for you guys might be less. How do you see that affecting your financial results then? [00:11:16] S1: Yeah, it's a great question. The way we think about it is if volume goes up and spreads tighten, that's fine. We want to win market share. [00:11:24] S0: Price type of quantity, [00:11:25] S2: got you.