Written by: Ada, ShenChao TechFlow

Robinhood is undergoing a peculiar split.

On February 10, after the US stock market closed, this retail trading platform delivered a seemingly flawless report card: annual revenue of $4.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of 52%, setting a record high. The diluted earnings per share was $2.05. The net deposits for 2025 hit a record $68 billion, with $16 billion in the fourth quarter. The number of Robinhood Gold subscription users reached a record 4.2 million.

CEO Vlad Tenev was spirited on the earnings call: “We are building a financial super app.”

However, the stock price fell 7% after hours. Combined with the decline this year, Robinhood's stock price has already halved from its peak last October. A company that just posted its best performance ever has seen its market capitalization evaporate by half in four months.

Where is the problem?

Looking closely at the earnings report, cryptocurrency trading revenue was $221 million, plummeting by 38% year-on-year.

Last year, the same figure was $357 million, and the previous quarter it had been $268 million. By Q4, the trading volume of cryptocurrencies on the Robinhood App was reduced to just $34 billion, halving year-on-year.

Retail investors have stopped trading. Bitcoin dropped from $126,000 to $65,000, FOMO has disappeared, replaced by fear. Opening the app reveals a sea of red instead of green, and turning off the app is the most rational choice.

That is the predicament of Robinhood: its core business is improving, but the market is only focusing on the deteriorating part.

How much does cryptocurrency contribute to $4.5 billion in revenue?

Breaking down Robinhood's revenue structure reveals a transformation in identity that is taking place.

Q4 trading commission revenue was $776 million, a 15% year-on-year increase. Of this, options trading contributed $314 million, up 41%; stock trading was $94 million, up 54%; other trading revenue was $147 million, tripling. The only laggard was cryptocurrency, which plummeted from $358 million to $221 million.

Net interest income was $411 million, a 39% increase, largely due to the growth of interest-earning assets and securities lending activities. Subscription revenue from Gold members was $50 million, up 56%.

For the whole year, cryptocurrency trading revenue's share of total revenue has dropped from around 35% in Q4 2024 to 17% in Q4 2025.

Robinhood is well aware of this trend.

Over the past year, it has aggressively expanded its product categories: launched a prediction market that made 12 billion contracts in its first year, with trading volume more than doubling in the fourth quarter; futures trading covering stock indices, energy, metals, and cryptocurrencies; the number of Gold Card holders is pushing toward 1 million.

As early as the Q3 2025 earnings meeting, the company management said: “We now have 11 business lines with annualized revenue exceeding $100 million.”

This means, don't just focus on cryptocurrency. But Wall Street is precisely focused on cryptocurrency.

A brokerage that has become a shadow of Bitcoin

This reminds me of the earnings report released by Strategy five days ago.

Strategy reported a net loss of $12.4 billion in a single quarter, almost entirely due to unrealized depreciation from Bitcoin's price drop in Q4. Saylor doesn't care; he says Bitcoin's decline is a gift, where every dip is a buying opportunity.

Robinhood's situation is exactly the opposite. It does not hold Bitcoin, does not bear price risk, and does not rely on issuing bonds to buy coins for survival. It is merely a trading platform that earns commission.

But when Bitcoin drops, retail investors stop trading, and the commission disappears.

Strategy survives on Bitcoin's price. Robinhood survives on Bitcoin's volatility. The two companies appear completely different, but fundamentally rely on the same thing: retail investors' sentiment towards cryptocurrency.

Strategy bets on the price direction, while Robinhood bets on the foot traffic of the casino. In other words, when Bitcoin drops, the casino becomes quiet. Both models lose.

Data confirms this judgment. Strategy's MSTR has dropped 76%, which is 1.6 times the leverage of Bitcoin. Robinhood's stock price has fallen about 50% from its peak last October, during the same period Bitcoin dropped 48%. The two curves almost overlap.

One is a leveraged long position on Bitcoin, the other is a delta-neutral call option on Bitcoin. The underlying asset is the same: the temperature of the cryptocurrency market.

The "record" trap

The term "record" appears multiple times in Robinhood's earnings report. Record annual revenue, record adjusted EBITDA, record net deposits, record number of Gold members, record EPS.

All these numbers are true.

Strategy's earnings report also states "record". Record Bitcoin holdings. Record cash reserves. Record BTC Yield. But its stock price has dropped 76%.

"Record" is a badge in a bull market, a tombstone in a bear market. It only indicates your status at the peak and cannot tell you what will happen next.

Robinhood's Q4 revealed a key indicator: monthly active users (MAU) fell from 14.9 million last year to 13 million, a decline of 1.9 million.

Users are leaving.

The assets under management on the platform grew 68% year-on-year, which was due to the market cap expansion from rising stock prices and cryptocurrency prices. The annualized growth rate of net deposits has slowed down from over 30% at the beginning of the year to 19% in Q4. This means the speed of money inflow is decreasing. The number of people is decreasing.

This is structurally the same problem that Strategy faces. In a bull market, all indicators reinforce themselves: prices rise, trading is active, revenue increases, users grow, stock prices rise. In a bear market, every link reverses.

The flywheel can turn in reverse. Robinhood has its own flywheel.

Decentralization: a gamble

Robinhood is clearly aware of this. Over the past 12 months, Robinhood's strategy can be summarized in one sentence: reduce dependence on cryptocurrency while doubling down on the infrastructure of cryptocurrency.

This may sound contradictory, but the logic is clear.

On the revenue side, it strives for diversification. Prediction markets, futures, short selling, Gold Card, banking services, retirement accounts, international expansion, etc.

On the infrastructure side, it aims to go deep. Last year it acquired Bitstamp, the oldest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, and trading volume has already doubled. It launched 2000 tokenized stocks in Europe. It signed acquisition agreements with brokerages and crypto platforms in Indonesia.

Robinhood learned from Coinbase's lessons in 2022.

Coinbase nearly perished in the last bear market due to its overly singular revenue structure. Armstrong took two years to rebuild. Tenev is attempting to diversify before the bear market arrives.

But time is not on his side. Robinhood's adjusted operating expenses and equity incentive budget for 2026 are estimated to be between $2.6 billion and $2.725 billion, an increase of about 18%. This money will be spent on international expansion, new product development, and mergers. If the crypto winter continues, and the growth of traditional brokerage business is not fast enough, the cost expansion combined with revenue slowdown will squeeze profit margins.

With around $4.3 billion in cash and cash equivalents, there is enough to burn for a long time. But like Strategy, "surviving" and "growing" are two different things.

A thermometer in the crypto winter

When you put the financial reports of Strategy and Robinhood together, you can see two ways Bitcoin bear markets can play out.

Strategy is a chronic disease. With Bitcoin not rising, the flywheel stops turning, but it has $2.25 billion in cash on hand that can last for two and a half years. It has time, but time is draining faith.

Robinhood is an acute reaction. Cryptocurrency revenue plummeted 38% in a quarter, 1.9 million monthly active users were lost, but other businesses are still growing. It will not die, but it will hurt.

The commonality between the two companies is: they both cannot control the most critical variable in their destiny.

Strategy cannot control the price of Bitcoin. Robinhood cannot control retail investors' sentiment. And ultimately, retail investors' sentiment is determined by the price of Bitcoin.

Everyone in this industry is pretending to have Alpha, but in reality, everyone only has Beta. Beta is Bitcoin. When Bitcoin rises, everyone is a genius. When Bitcoin falls, everyone is swimming naked.

Robinhood did set records in 2025, but no amount of records seems to mask the pain brought by the decline in its cryptocurrency business.

Tenev is now faced with a question that has no standard answer.

The current Robinhood is like a casino owner who has just started to quit gambling. He knows where the problem lies, and he is taking action, but the dividends gained during the bull market have all turned into debts in the bear market.

For Robinhood, the true test is not the records in the bull market, but the floor in the bear market.

Where the floor is, no one knows yet.