NEW YORK, April 28, 2026, 18:04 EDT
Robinhood Markets took a hit after hours Tuesday, slipping around 6% when the online broker fell short of Wall Street’s Q1 profit forecasts. A sharp drop in crypto-trading revenue weighed heavily, outweighing gains seen in options, equities, and prediction markets activity. Shares of the Menlo Park, California firm dropped following the report.
The miss comes at a tricky moment for Robinhood. Shares were down over 27% this year, pressure mounting as digital-asset trading slowed—one of the engines behind its latest growth.
The real test for Robinhood is pulling investors away from the swings of crypto and toward fresher revenue streams—think event contracts, subscriptions, interest income. Event contracts, those bets tied to whether a particular outcome happens in markets or sports, saw heavy action. The company reported a record 8.8 billion event contracts traded last quarter.
Robinhood’s net revenue hit $1.07 billion for the first quarter, marking a 15% gain over last year. Net income reached $346 million, up 3%. Diluted EPS landed at 38 cents, also a 3% rise, according to the company.
Transaction-based revenue increased 7% to $623 million, undershooting the $728.2 million analysts had forecast, LSEG data cited by Reuters showed. Revenue from crypto transactions dropped sharply, down 47% to $134 million. Options brought in $260 million, up 8%. Equities revenue surged 46% to $82 million.
Robinhood’s other transaction revenue—driven mostly by event contracts—jumped 320% to $147 million. That boost offset some of the crypto weakness, though it still fell short of what was needed to clear the earnings bar.
In Robinhood’s release, Chief Financial Officer Shiv Verma said customers “remained engaged and rapidly adopted new products.” He highlighted double-digit gains in equities and options, with prediction markets, futures, and index options hitting record volumes. Verma added that April was shaping up to be even better: equity and option trading volumes are pacing for their highest monthly tally this year. Robinhood Markets, Inc.
Robinhood’s premium Gold service notched another milestone, with subscribers climbing 36% year over year, hitting an all-time high of 4.3 million. Revenue from Gold subscriptions moved up 32% to $50 million, the company reported.
Interest income provided another boost. Net interest revenue climbed 24% to $359 million, with growth in interest-earning assets doing most of the work. Still, the company pointed out that lower short-term rates and less securities lending took some of the edge off the increase.
Regulatory complications are ramping up. Robinhood finds itself tangled in legal disputes alongside Kalshi, Polymarket, Crypto.com and Coinbase, after the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed suit against Wisconsin this Tuesday—an answer to the state’s own legal actions targeting those same firms.
There’s a risk here: Robinhood’s newer businesses might not ramp up quickly enough to cushion against another crypto slump, or regulatory headwinds could stall prediction-market expansion just as the company bets bigger on it. Operating expenses jumped 18% to $656 million for the quarter. The company also bumped its 2026 adjusted operating expense and share-based compensation forecast to a range of $2.7 billion to $2.825 billion, tacking on an extra $100 million for initiatives related to Trump Accounts.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev emphasized that the platform is playing a bigger role in users’ finances. Still, the near-term mismatch between the pace of growth and what investors wanted stuck out. The issue isn’t a lack of growth—just that it showed up where the market wasn’t hoping, as crypto revenue remains under the microscope.
