Sure.

So you put these three things together, and the way I describe it is we wanna give you the power of a hedge fund in your pocket, an extremely sophisticated team of financial trading professionals.

Can we give that to everyone? And, uh, yeah, I, I think the way that I think about it, you know, my, my...

The start of my financial career was in algorithmic trading, and in the same way that tools like Claude Code and Codex have made it easy for anyone to be a programmer, uh, Robinhood Agents will make it easy for anyone to be a financial trading quant.

So, uh, you can, you can develop a quant trading strategy, uh, extremely sophisticated trading algo, and we can kind of unlock that for millions of people.

Yeah.

Uh, I think what's likely to happen is you'll, you'll get more depending on what you put in.

So you mentioned the satellite data.

Vlad, anything for our audience on stock tokens, stock token lending, anything that you can share about your kind of broader view plans here?

I mean, I think the first thing is just expanding the selection.

We have about 200 stock tokens now.

So we've got to get that up into the thousands.

I've been talking about private stock tokens for a while.

So we figured out how to do that.

You should expect that at large scale.

them

Explain that.

That's right.

I mean, we are in unprecedented times.

You hear that said a lot, but super intelligence is changing how we create and how we do everything.

And Robinhood, we're focused on the financial aspect of this and what can happen if you plug, if you safely plug in the super intelligence into your Robinhood account.

And we take all of the capabilities that Robinhood offers which we announced 16 new ones last night.

But think of it as the ability to trade any asset 24-7.

Does that loss or potential loss still fall on them or would Robinhood actually bear some of that responsibility?

Should the AI labs live under the same rules? What are your thoughts?

I think that, um, this question rests on how big the blast radius of any potential catastrophe could be, right? And if it's like a small issue where maybe there's a cybersecurity breach that affects a company or, uh, maybe something slightly bigger than that, um- It's, it's probably fine.

I, I think the question becomes, all right, if it's, if it's a bigger blast radius, bigger impact, bigger damage, um, you can imagine it could be larger than a simple, like, legal liability can handle.

I mean, a l- a lot of people compare, uh, the risks of AI technology because it's such a powerful technology with, um, something like atomic energy, right? And I, I think we can disagree about whether, whether that's right or not, but, but let's say for, for example, that it is, and it's, it's on sort of like that tier of risk, then, then I don't think simple, like, legal and civil liability is, is sufficient, and I think you need, you need some safeguards beyond that.

So I think it's, it's, it's a question of like, all right, this hugging face incident and things like that, is that the ceiling of the type of offensive cybersecurity li- uh, uh, capability that we have, or should we plan for something that's maybe 10 times bigger or, or 100 times bigger? And, and do we have time, you know? Is it, is it one of those things where maybe we'll see a canary in the coal mine and there will be, uh, something to react to and respond, and then we can kind of like nip it in the bud, or is the first issue gonna be, gonna be catastrophic? If you, if you think about all regulations in the financial industry, you can kind of trace them back to some kind of crisis, right? The market crash of 1929 led to, uh, you know, the, the Securities Act, uh, of, of the '30s and the Securities and Exchange Act and the establishment of all of that regulation.

And it's, it's, it's typically some problem, uh, raises, raises a concern.

And, and I think my mental model is this will probably be similar in a sense.

the question of, you know, 24/7 trading on a centralized database versus tokens

I wanted to ask you, how much of what you do is literally because people want it, as opposed to necessarily what you guys sit back in a room and offer?

I think that it's, it's a good mix of both.

I think there's a lot of things where, um, you know, obviously we're, we're... customers are asking us for more trading assets, international stocks, and things of that nature, and we, we, we have a endless, uh, roadmap from customers.

But there's also things where we have an opinion and a point of view, and really, nobody's asking us for that specific thing.

But we think that's where the industry's gonna go, that we, we believe we can build bigger, better products.

So for example, when you look at tokenization and prediction markets, that was just...

You know, we, we had a view of, of what we wanted the product to be, and we, we built that.

Right

Mm-hmm

... more things that people are owning.

The first thing is serving our active traders.

Active traders, still very much the core of the business.

A lot of the asset growth is just people bringing in money so that they can trade different things.

So if we make, uh, the, the assets that we offer great, and if, if we have a great options trading experience, great equities trading, we've added futures more recently and prediction markets as well, people will bring in money to trade, and they're... they'll tell their friends about it as well.

So we've seen a lot of growth there, and, you know, you can, you can also look at our market share across all of the core assets, the volumes.

What kind of books do you read? And have you noticed an actual benefit from journaling?

At what point does regulatory uncertainty, whether it's on digital assets or prediction markets, become a hard ceiling on Robinhood's growth?

That's a good question.

I, I don't think we're near that point just because Robinhood is in so many businesses.

You know, we've got, um, you know, our, our tr- our more traditional businesses, which includes Trump accounts, which we're doing, uh, in partnership with, with Treasury and BNY for, uh, spreading ownership of equity markets to American children starting at, at age zero.

And, uh, and I think that's incredibly important, getting children to buy into this economy and this, in this country and, and giving them a stake in, in the benefit, I think is not just great financially, but, but, but for their civic duty and, and for, for their financial literacy.

Um, so we've got a lot of businesses.

We, we've got Robinhood Chain, which is working to spread ownership of high quality US equities worldwide.

Do the rules need to change to that point?

[audience applauding]

Mr.

President, thank you for bringing us together and for your work to ensure the next generation of Americans has a stake in the country's economic success through the Trump accounts and many other things.

Thank you also to Chair Selig, Chair Atkins, your administration, for the work underway to strengthen American capital markets and expand opportunity for all Americans.

If I had to sum up Robinhood in one word, it would be ownership.

Broad ownership is essential to a free, stable, and prosperous society.

That belief has shaped pretty much every product we've built, from commission-free investing to 24-hour trading, and now outside the United States to tokenization, which we're using to expand ownership of American assets to people in more than 120 countries.

[audience applauding]

But when we look at certain growth, I mean, some people are wondering, does the prediction market become sort of one of the bigger parts of this business over time? Or is your goal to try to keep at least some of the main components of those 13 lines relatively in balance?

Yeah, the way we do our business planning is we have general managers that are running relatively autonomous business units.

So you give them a lot of freedom to just do.

Well, their goal is to make their businesses as big as possible and win in market share across each of these.

So our goal is to be number one in all categories that we offer products to customers.

And in fact, there's a flywheel in effect.

And it's actually continuing to expand.

Is this sort of a play towards not just crypto long term, but tokenization? Give me some sense here as to what you actually want this business to be.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, at least temporarily, which I think is, is what ended up happening.

I think it's interesting too, that Ken Griffin, uh, is in the middle of this.

I, you know, a lot, a lot of respect for Ken Griffin.

Just, uh, you know, you, you can tell he has a pure love of the game, loves, uh, what he does, you know, maybe, maybe in the way that a Pavarotti is, uh, uh, you know, the, the art of the opera singer and, you know, Trump, uh, Trump obviously make- makes deals.

Ken Griffin provides liquidity in the most challenging and uncertain of times.

So, uh, yeah, him, him being in, in the middle of this, buying the Constitution.

Mm-hmm.

Talk to us about, you know, the uptake you've seen in terms of interests and downloads, et cetera, heading into the launch and now a few days post.

Yeah, thank you for having me, Katie.

And I mean, the uptake has been tremendous.

The aspiration from the beginning was to make this the best product that the government has ever been associated with.

And we had six million kids sign up pre-launch and express interest.

Millions of accounts have already been invested.

And the app has basically been living at or near the top of the App Store chart.

Is the idea here not so much just, OK, whatever the compounding effect of the thousand, but also an educational component about how to manage money and invest in other ways as a grow and get to adulthood and can do so on their own.

Vlad, from your perspective, what is in it for the average American family with these Trump accounts that didn't exist before?

Well, I think the secret is unlocking ownership.

So right now, 62% of Americans have ownership of U.S. equities.

And the U.S. equity market has been the greatest engine of wealth creation in human history.

Now, the problem is there's still 35 percent of Americans that don't own any equities.

And not only that, but the vast majority of those individuals buy them much too late when they're in their 30s or 40s or even beyond.

So the Trump Accounts Initiative is a brokerage account for every newborn.

Well,

Can this be very pro-Robinhood?

Well, I mean, in the sense that our core mission is to make everyone an owner in great assets, in particular U.S. equities, it's probably the one thing that I can think of that could greatly accelerate our mission.

Of course...

It is also a program that we generate revenue from and we expect to be profitable.

So as part of our relationship acting as a government subcontractor, we do generate revenue from this.

But the value is what happens when... we create so many new owners from birth.

And remember, the vast majority, something like 86% of the contributions thus far have been made by individuals with under $200,000 in annual income.

How do we increase some of those sign-up rates?

For, for the uninitiated, what, what does that mean exactly?

So it, it's a blockchain, uh, a layer two, uh, built on top of Ethereum with Arbitrum technology, and the intent is for this to be the best chain for real-world assets.

And what I mean by that is, uh, for the longest time, and I think it's still very much the case, when people say crypto, they mean Bitcoin and meme coins, and these assets that actually don't represent anything in the physical world.

And Robinhood, uh, for, for over a year now, our crypto strategy has been, can we, can we actually take crypto technology and turn it into useful infrastructure for real-world assets, assets that have fundamental utility, and in doing so, make it easier for people to own those assets worldwide? So, um, along with the Robinhood Chain, uh, we are progressing in our tokenization initiatives.

And last year we did an event in Cannes, in the south of France, where we unveiled our long-term tokenization roadmap.

We said, "Okay, what's the value of tokenization?" The value is in the same way that stablecoin has spread access to US dollars to hundreds of countries worldwide, where it would've been very, very difficult for people to get their hands on dollars otherwise, and now they have a solution with stablecoin.

Uh, tokenization will spread the value of US equities, uh, and make it easier to own US equities for, uh, for, for people in the long tail of countries that don't have even as sophisticated financial systems as we have here in, in the UK.

Sure.

Is that the right lens to view it in?

Well, Karen, perpetual futures are an innovative new product.

Um, unlike a traditional future where there's a expiration date and there's this additional overhead and cost associated to rolling the futures contract, perpetual futures, uh, never expire.

And so for certain types of trades for our active traders, like if, if you wanna make a directional, uh, capital efficient, uh, long or, or short trade, um, it, it's a very simple product.

I mean, it's obviously a complex product, not for everyone, but, uh, it's like purpose-built for, for, for what it does.

And, uh- You know, w- we're at the frontier here.

Through our acquisition of Bitstamp, we own the exchange layer and, and of course, the customer-facing app.

Mm.

Walk us through the revenue implications for, for Robinhood.

Yeah, first off, the Trump accounts, um, if, if you really think about what Robinhood is trying to do and our mission, uh, we wanna make everyone owners, uh, of, of this great American economy, and we think that by doing that, it's not just good for the individuals, but it'll, it'll also create, uh, a stronger economy and a healthier, more stable, more prosperous society.

And Trump accounts allows us to do that from birth, so it actually, uh, gives, gives the power of equity ownership to newborns with, uh, $1,000 kickstart from the Department of Treasury.

So Robinhood serves as the sole initial trustee and broker of the Trump accounts.

That app that you've been showing on the screen, um, our, our engineers and design team have been working on that in close collaboration with BNY, uh, a- along with the national design studio from, uh, the administration and the Department of Treasury.

So the goal really is to build the best product that the government has ever been associated with.

And, you know, you, you, you can tell by the reception that, that I think we're on the right track so far.

I wonder if you think that's an important mission, uh, to diversify away.

Tetragrammaton.

I think that mathematics, hard mathematics, isn't computational at all.

It's almost like art.

It's really about figuring out an insight, a non-obvious insight that unlocks a problem.

Yeah, and, and, and I think the reason that I like it is because it's, it's all about figuring things out, and I think that insight, there's a lot of it that's kinda mechanical.

It's like once you have it, you just turn the crank, and you get the, you get the proof or you get the answer.

Yeah, that special insight can be really, really magical.

Isn't that the case, though, with AI writing code?

Walk me through that three years.

So the first step was once we figured out, hey, this is a really big opportunity, we should go after it, then we had to figure out, okay, how do we reconcile this with having an existing business that's very, very different with enterprise customers that we have to support? How can we do that and also do this new thing? And we basically figured out that we should raise some capital to do this.

So, uh, and at that time, you know, raising capital from VCs, it had kind of a negative connotation to it.

All the people that I knew basically discouraged me from it.

They said, "VCs are gonna take your company, and they're just gonna install professional management, and they're just gonna stab you in the back." So we raised some capital from angel investors, a very small amount.

I think the initial tranche was maybe a few hundred thousand dollars, and that was kind of enough for us to get going and make some initial hires to, to get it all set up.

Building a broker isn't like building a technology startup.

Do you build each of these things yourself? For prediction markets, do you do that independently or do you partner with a prediction market company?

What would you say to those critics?

I mean, I think the reality of it is sports is a big part of the economy.

A lot of money is spent in sports, an increasing amount.

And I think in particular with the potential automation that we see happening from AI, sports is one of those things that is continuing to be human.

You don't really want to watch self-driving cars circling a track.

It's less entertaining.

So I think sports is actually big business and it's a critical part of the economy, much more so than even 20 years ago.

Can you explain how the benefits outweigh the cost of this?

Um, what is your sense of what's gonna happen? I mean, it sounds like this may go to the Supreme Court, and what the intentionality of Congress really was originally, you think, when they put the prediction market world into orbit, if you will.

Yeah.

I mean, fir- first of all, we're building a financial super app, serving our customers across any asset class, any financial transaction, anywhere in the world.

So prediction markets is a new space.

It really entered the, uh, the mainstream with the 2024 election.

And the thing that I love about it is it's not only a tool to help traders specialize.

Now you can specialize in all sorts of, all sorts of things.

So how do you attract those people onto the Robinhood platform if it's gonna be living on another app, at least initially?

Yeah.

So there's gonna be more.

Now, uh, when, when you look at crypto specifically, um, we're still very bullish on crypto assets over the long run, but as you can tell, there, there's cycles in the market.

There's periods where, you know, we're just talking about crypto, then there's periods that are a little bit colder and more winterous.But developers are developing, and we're continuing to build and invest, and we see some very positive things.

Now, our focus on crypto is actually investing in the technology and making it so that traditional assets are tokenized on chain.

So it's a little bit less like, what's the new meme coin that we can list, although we do love our meme coins, and more how can we actually make tokenization a real thing?

Uh, how do you think LLMs are changing, uh, retail investor behavior?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's three different, uh, ways that actually AI advances affect Robinhood, which, which I think is more than most companies, and we're kinda, uh, working hard to lead in all three.

I'd like to know what your view is about what happened here and why it might be wrong, uh, or the wrong direction, so to speak.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, we are making investments to grow this business and to become an increasingly diversified and, uh, global financial platform.

So if you look at some of the leading indicators of this quarter, net deposits continued to be incredibly strong.

We had 18 billion of inflows into the platform, customers trusting us with their hard-earned assets.

And over time, you know, the market can fluctuate, and our revenue tends to track-The assets under custody.

But the component of that that is within our control the most, the net deposits, has continued to be really, really strong.

And we're also seeing continued, uh, market share strength across all of our act- active trader products.

How are you gonna be able to change the perception that your company is deeply linked to crypto and options trading?

What, what should, how should investors think about what it means for Robinhood as it scales and for your business?

Yeah, I mean, obviously for our, our mission from the very beginning was democratizing finance for all and getting more people invested in the engine of wealth creation.

The greatest engine of wealth creation has been the US stock market, so very mission aligned.

In terms of the business, um, you know, th- this puts Robinhood, uh, in, in front of the next generation, and this is literally gonna be the first investment account for millions of people.

So it's, it's really an honor to be able to serve these customers and to work with the government.

You know, this is our first experience really working with the government in, uh, in this way, so we're learning as well.

And, uh, you know, our, our aspiration is to make this the best product the government has ever been associated with.

Do you, do you have a view on that? That's a core customer for you.

Vlad was all in.

I still remember when the instruction manual for how to build iPhone apps was released.I was up all night reading it, learning, trying to understand.

I saw an opportunity for a new level playing field.

Pretty much everything I've done since then was a product both of the economic malaise, but the technological optimism of the time.

But times have changed.

The average twenty-year-old today also has quite a bit of fear, but this time, emerging technology is not the antidote to that fear, it's the source.

And they're asking themselves, "Will that career I'm looking at even be around in ten years?" One reason why it feels different this time is because AI, unlike the iPhone, is the first tool that we've built that's capable of leaving the toolbox, and we don't yet know its limits.

Jobs are lost, sure, but more different jobs take their place.

Yeah.

"You really have no idea how you're gonna make money, are you?" Um, and I think at that time, our thought process was something like, well, you have Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat.

None of these companies really started out making money.

They wanted to get as many customers as possible, and then when you have, you know, a hundred million, two hundred million customers, thenyou're gonna figure it out.

And I think that's generally our thought process.

Like if, if we get a lot of customers spending time on our product, we'll be able to make it work.

And I think it pretty much ended up being correct, right? Like now we have eleven lines of business generating a hundred million or more in annual revenue.

You must be looking and going, "Wow, there's somebody coming to Launch Accelerator or Y Combinator or Techstars or Speedrun with the pitch, 'We're gonna be the AI agentic version of Robinhood.'" How do you, how do you think about it externally in terms of product and internally in terms of running the company?