Robinhood adds $25 million worth of bitcoin to balance sheet as it deepens crypto push

Robinhood has added $25 million worth of bitcoin to its corporate balance sheet, a move the brokerage framed as a statement of intent toward the crypto sector rather than a material shift in its finances.

Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood's senior vice president and general manager of crypto and international, said in an interview on The Starting Block on Wednesday that the purchase was designed to show the company's alignment with the crypto community. "We care deeply about bitcoin and the ecosystem around it," Kerbrat said. "For us, it's more aligning our company and our vision with the crypto community."

Kerbrat downplayed the size of the allocation relative to Robinhood's overall scale, noting the company's market capitalization sits around $100 billion. The $25 million in bitcoin, he said, will not meaningfully change the company's current trajectory. Robinhood's Nasdaq-listed shares closed down 1.85% at $112 on Tuesday.

Broader crypto build-out

The purchase landed alongside a wider slate of crypto initiatives. Robinhood said last week that it plans to offer perpetual futures trading in the coming months to eligible U.S. users, allowing long and short positions on assets including BTC, ether, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, ADA, LINK and HYPE. CEO Vlad Tenev described the offering on X as "America's first true perps," with no expiry and profit and loss settled every 15 minutes.

The company is also expanding Robinhood Chain, a Layer 2 network built on Arbitrum's technology stack that went live on public mainnet in July. Its total value locked stood at $1.05 billion as of Tuesday, according to The Block's data dashboard. Robinhood has additionally rolled out Stock Tokens, letting eligible users trade around the clock directly on the chain.

Kerbrat pointed to distribution as a differentiator, citing 28 million funded accounts — 27 million in the U.S. and 1 million internationally — plus the Robinhood wallet, the chain's official wallet, available in more than 120 countries. "This is probably the first time that an L2 is connected to such a large distribution," he said.

In a separate interview last week, Kerbrat said stock-token volumes are already high enough to test the caps set by the SEC's innovation exemption for tokenized U.S. equities, adding that Robinhood is still working to understand the parameters, including limits on volume and on which assets can be tokenized.