Robinhood Founder & CEO, Vlad Tenev: Robinhood’s $85BN Resurgence & Tokenizing SpaceX & OpenAI

Robinhood originally targeted first-time investors, but discovered that a relatively small cohort of high-volume, strategy-driven active traders generated outsized revenue and remained engaged in all market conditions. Explicitly building for them (e.g., Legend, Futures Ladder, low-latency execution) was the key driver of the business turnaround.

Nearly all new engineering code at Robinhood is AI-assisted via agentic tools (e.g., Cursor, Windsurf), to the point where human versus AI contribution is hard to separate. Custom-built AI for customer support, deeply integrated with internal systems and actions, has materially reduced costs and improved responsiveness—outperforming off-the-shelf vendors.

By holding traditional exposure (shares or economic interests) in SPVs and issuing blockchain tokens one-to-one, Robinhood can offer retail investors exposure to companies like SpaceX and OpenAI without the company’s opt-in. This bypasses the historical “adverse selection” where only weak private firms tap retail, and addresses the lack of Stripe-like opportunities for non-institutional investors.

For a platform settling billions in crypto trades, weekends used to require taking counterparty risk, expensive credit lines, or massive pre-funding due to closed banking rails. Stablecoins now allow instant, 24/7 movement of ‘dollars’ between counterparties, improving capital efficiency and providing a concrete, institutional-grade use case beyond speculation.

Tenev argues that over time, crypto rails will underpin many conventional financial functions—interest-bearing ‘savings’ via stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenized equities—so the distinction between ‘crypto products’ and ‘traditional products’ will blur. For Robinhood, that means crypto will power multiple revenue lines rather than sit as an isolated vertical.