Why Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev Is Betting Big on Crypto, Stablecoins, and Prediction Markets - Ep. 754
Episode publishedPodcast: UnchainedUnchained
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Think the first benefits of adopting crypto technology for more things, including real world assets, are gonna be lowering the costs for the companies and improving the margins. But the the kind of down the road impact will be passing that on to users with even more value and lower cost of investing. So so the ultimate cost borne by users will decrease over time, which is gonna make an impact long term on their portfolio returns and their retirement savings. And I think Robinhood can really help accelerate that. Our approach has always been to not use technology to improve our margins, but but
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. We are now featuring quotes from listeners on the show. Today, we have one from defynpcman on today's episode with Athena Labs' Guy Young. Defynpcman said, interesting Athena podcast from atlorasin, but very disappointed in Guy's answer on s u s d e on l twos. His answer was basically, quote, people only use it for farming a token and there probably isn't any demand for it, unquote. Defy NPC man then commented, how about the billions of USDC and arbitrum, which has a token? Stay tuned fo
to see you, Laura. Thanks for having me. Before
we begin, I want to disclose that Robinhood is an active sponsor of the Tuesday episodes of Unchained. However, this episode with Vlad is not sponsored content, and all of my questions were independently crafted. 2024 was quite the year for crypto in so many ways, and Robinhood was a major beneficiary of the positive turn that the crypto industry has seen. And I was wondering, what are some of the major accomplishments Robinhood saw from its crypto business in 2024?
Yeah. I I think the crypto business has been firing on all cylinders, really. We have a great team, a great GM, Johan, who's been running it, and we've had, some constraints over the past few years. You know, I I wasn't shy about talking about how the current administration and the SEC has really tried to strangle crypto in the US, and we we didn't let that I I think that was disappointing, and we were unhappy with it. But we did we didn't let it keep our business stagnant. So we used that opportunity to launch in the EU where we went live with crypto just, about a year ago. We've been growing
And, you know, as you mentioned, trading in crypto skyrocketed on Robinhood month over month from October to November. And we're sure, you know, most people listening to the show would know that the external factor that drove a lot of that was the victory by Donald Trump, the 1st pro crypto candidate, the 1st pro crypto nominee in a presidential election. And I was curious, like, internally, what you were seeing in terms of, you know, what it was that Robinhood crypto users were most interested in, you know, how that translated to trading volumes, etcetera. Yeah.
It was interesting. I think juxtaposing this election night, which was a very busy night for Robinhood. I mean, we had multiple teams that were monitoring heavy usage across multiple products. We had crypto, which obviously reacted to the news of Trump being more likely to win the election quite early. The equities markets, which we now offer 24 hour trading in over a 1000 US equities, they were responding as well. Then we also had a a product called presidential election market, which allowed, customers to trade event contracts on the election. And that was just having very, very high volume
And, you know, in general, I also wondered about the, you know, earlier wave that we saw this year, kind of the be
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