Robinhood adds $25 million worth of bitcoin to balance sheet as it deepens crypto push
Robinhood has added $25 million worth of bitcoin (BTC) to its balance sheet, as the trading platform steps up efforts to demonstrate its bullish stance on the world's largest cryptocurrency.Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood's senior vice president and general manager of crypto and international, told The Block's Gareth Jenkinson and Kelvin Sparks in an exclusive interview on The Starting Block on Wednesday that the purchase was intended to signal the company's commitment to the crypto sector."We care deeply about bitcoin and the ecosystem around it," said Kerbrat. "For us, it's more aligning our company and our vision with the crypto community."Kerbrat noted that the $25 million purchase represents a relatively small investment for Robinhood given the company's size."Robinhood is a massive company at this point, with a market cap in the $100 billion [range]. So the $25 million worth of bitcoin is not going to change a lot of the current trajectory of the company," he added.Robinhood's Nasdaq-listed shares closed down 1.85% at $112 on Tuesday, giving the company a market capitalization of roughly $100 billion.The purchase comes as other publicly traded companies continue to add bitcoin to their balance sheets. Bitcoin treasury company Strategy said Monday that it acquired an additional 334 BTC for roughly $28.7 million at an average price of $85,838.80 per bitcoin between Sept. 28 and Oct. 4, bringing its total holdings to 848,000 BTC.Broader crypto pushRobinhood's bitcoin purchase comes as the company continues to expand its crypto-related offerings.Last week, the company announced plans to enable perps trading in the coming months for eligible U.S. users to take long or short positions on assets including BTC, ether (ETH), Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, ADA, LINK, or HYPE."Robinhood is bringing America its first true perps. No expiry, with P&L settled every 15 minutes," Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said on X last week, calling the new offering a "new chapter for U.S. derivatives."Robinhood is also expanding Robinhood Chain, a Layer 2 built using Arbitrum’s tech stack. The chain went live on public mainnet in July, and its total value locked reached $1.05 billion as of Tuesday, according to The Block's data dashboard.The company has also launched Stock Tokens, enabling eligible users to trade 24/7 directly on Robinhood Chain."We have 28 million funded accounts on the platform: 27 million in the U.S., and 1 million outside of the U.S. We also have our Robinhood wallet, which is the official wallet for Robinhood Chain, available in 120 plus countries," Kerbrat said in the interview. "So this is probably the first time that an L2 is connected to such a large distribution."In a separate interview with The Block last week, Kerbrat said the company's stock-token volume is already high enough to run into caps set out in the Securities and Exchange Commission's innovation exemption for tokenized U.S. equities."We're still trying to understand all the parameters of it," Kerbrat said. "There are limitations on the volume, and what type of assets we can tokenize. If you look at our volume on our stock tokens, it's already pretty high and will hit some of its limits."