Invest2 publishers3 min readPublished
Robinhood needs another 61% month to match last August's crypto volume
Robinhood's crypto notional rose to $17.5 billion in August, still 38% under the same month a year earlier, and 58% of it now clears through Bitstamp. Event contract counts fell 23% in the same month.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Robinhood's notional crypto trading volume rose 61% from July to $17.5 billion in August, according to the operating data the brokerage published on Thursday.
- That total still sits 38% below the $28.1 billion the platform processed in the same month a year earlier, when July's figure was $10.9 billion.
- HOOD slipped 0.83% on the day of the release, even as analysts at Mizuho and StoneX raised their price targets that week.
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Why it matters
- contradiction The annual window says fifteenfold growth in event contracts and the monthly window says a 23% fall, so the two support opposite reads of Robinhood's newest business.
- exposure The line that overtook crypto in transaction revenue sits in front of a Congress that has filed more than 10 prediction-market bills since January, one of them aimed at officials' political trades.
- constraint With the app 46% below its year-earlier volume against Bitstamp's 30%, a recovery in the crypto line depends on the acquired exchange more than on Robinhood's own retail product.
Getting back to where the business was a year ago takes one more month exactly like the one just reported. Rising from $17.5 billion to $28.1 billion is a further 61% [1], and 61% is what August delivered [1].
The mix moved more than the total did. Bitstamp's $10.1 billion is 58% of August's notional [5][2], against 55% in the second quarter, when the exchange did $22 billion of a $40 billion total [15][3]. A year ago it was the smaller half: working back from the two annual declines, August 2025 was roughly $13.7 billion on the app and $14.4 billion on Bitstamp [4]. The app has since fallen 46% and Bitstamp 30% [4][6].
Notional is not revenue. Crypto transaction revenue was $100 million in the second quarter, down 38% from about $160 million a year earlier [13], and event contracts brought in $156 million, more than ten times their year-earlier figure [12]. That put event contracts past crypto as a source of transaction income [12]. Cointelegraph reported that growth in event contracts, options and equities more than offset the crypto decline, and that the quarter set records for revenue and earnings [14].
The August count argues the other way. Event contracts traded 4.7 billion times, down 23% from July's roughly 6.1 billion, though still about fifteen times the 300 million of August 2025 [11][5]. Crypto volume rose 61% in the month the faster-growing line shrank.
More than 10 bills targeting prediction markets have been introduced since January, including the PREDICT Act, which would bar members of Congress, the president and other senior officials from trading contracts tied to political events [17]. Robinhood books the trades through Kalshi and ForecastEx and through Rothera, its own joint venture [16]. Rothera had processed more than 3.5 billion contracts since its June launch, as of the July results [16].
The reported crypto figures leave out Robinhood Chain, which the company said was not included [19]. The Ethereum layer 2 logged $1.6 billion of daily decentralised exchange volume as of September 1, up 61% over four days [18].
Crypto is still a small part of the whole. Total platform assets reached $384 billion, up 26% year on year, funded customers 28.6 million, and margin loans $21.5 billion, up 72% from a year earlier [8][9][10]. A month of crypto notional is 4.6% of platform assets [8].
The composition change is the part I would weigh: most of the notional now clears on an exchange Robinhood bought in June 2025 [22][2], and the app it built is 46% below its year-earlier volume [4]. The counter-case is in the same table, since the app rose 72% month over month against Bitstamp's 53%, so the app is the more responsive of the two to a retail recovery [4][5]. September decides between them. If the app keeps outpacing Bitstamp and event contract counts stop falling, August was the start of a retail return; if the app stalls near $7 billion while Bitstamp grinds higher, what Robinhood owns in crypto is chiefly what it bought.
What to watch
- September's operating report, for whether event contract counts fall a second month and whether crypto notional clears $25 billion.
- Movement on the PREDICT Act or any of the other prediction-market bills filed since January.
- The November 4 earnings report, for whether the $156 million event contract line held while contract counts fell.