By Alicia Maher
Following an announcement by Robinhood that the rising popularity of the cryptocurrency industry resulted in a lesser revenue for the company, its stock price declined sharply. A couple of months ago, Robinhood went public with 56 million of its shares sold at $38 per share on listing day.
Crypto Accounts For A Greater Portion Of Robinhood’s Revenue
Also, its first-quarter report indicated that it had made almost $560M in revenue, with virtual assets accounting for almost 70% of this revenue figure. Similarly, the majority of the company’s second-quarter earnings were made from cryptocurrencies. Robinhood’s earnings from virtual assets were far greater than what was earned from a combination of traditional stocks and trading options.
Dogecoin alone accounted for 63% of this revenue. While these revenues from crypto-related services seemed impressive, Robinhood still sent a notice to its investors through its Q2 earnings call. It stated, “we are expecting lesser earnings and lower number of newly funded accounts because of the season, which will result in a lesser number of trades.”
Almost immediately after the notice went out, the firm’s shares nosedived to about $45.20 in the extended trade session. A sharp contrast to the sharp rise of 124% in its share value after the completion of its initial public offer (IPO) launch.
The Robinhood Team Keeps Working
Part of the call session involved a q and a session with analysts and investors. However, most of the questions centered around crypto wallets. As the IPO drew closer, Robinhood announced plans to delve into the crypto wallets space with the company’s CEO stating that the team is already working on bringing that initiative to life.
He also said, “we are putting everything in place to ensure a proper scaling of crypto transactions.” But Vlad Tenev (Robinhood CEO) reiterated that dogecoin holders have increasingly demanded a crypto wallet.
Other proposed add-ons include crypto-related services, gifting of stocks, and in-app social media functionalities. The company revealed that the number of funded accounts on its platform rose by more than 150% from 9.9m to 23m within 12 months.
With the increasing expansion of the virtual asset category, leading brokerage firms such as Robinhood might need to overhaul their service offerings to include more crypto-related offerings to avoid losing a larger user base willing to invest in that space.
DeFi Analytics Firm Opposes Community-Enabled Analytics
A decentralized finance (DeFi) analytics firm has opposed the Uniswap proposal for an “ecosystem analytics,” which would give flipside crypto (dune’s main rival) an edge in having almost $26m in UNI tokens assets under management. Dune argued that the Uniswap ecosystem doesn’t have an input on the matter, and it isn’t appropriate for any analytics firm to receive tokens when members of the ecosystem deserve it more.
However, Flipside claimed that over 55% of the grant it’s expected to receive would be used for enhancing the Uniswap community, especially parts of its technical functionalities. Uniswap has been in the news lately for the wrong reasons. First, there are rumors that it’s about to become a centralized system, and last month, it was heavily criticized for its DeFi education fund program.