Happy Friday. As many of you are already en route to see loved ones or blissfully unplugged from the Internet for a few days, we’ll keep this last newsletter of the year a short one. I’d like to use it to point to my colleague Ben Weiss’s new profile of Robinhood, which I’ve been reporting on since it was a buzzy startup and is now a decade old, including more than two years as a public company (writing this makes me feel old!).
Robinhood has had more than a few ups and downs during this time, including on the crypto front. This is underscored by a striking chart in Ben’s profile that shows how the company’s proportion of revenue from digital assets has ping-ponged from 4% in 2020 all the way to 43% during the mad days of 2021 and then back down to 5% in Q3 of this year.
In many ways, Robinhood is a symbol for the wild financial era we’ve experienced in the last five years as young investors, fueled by stimulus checks, blew off every principle of traditional investing to pile into meme stocks and tokens like Dogecoin. This predictably led to a hangover for everyone involved—including Robinhood—as investors shook off the worst of their follies and got back to basics.
Fortunately for Robinhood, CEO Vlad Tenev appears to have grown up as well, as he guides the company to a crypto expansion in Europe and as the company’s inducements to lure wealthier clients from other brokerages begin to bear fruit. As his comments to Fortune make clear, Tenev has shed the Stanford bro affect from his earlier years and come to sound like just another media-trained banker. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for the company and its shareholders.
Robinhood’s evolution from a Doge and meme stock-fueled casino into something resembling a mainstream brokerage also underscores another trend we can expect to see in 2024: the increasing convergence of crypto and fintech with Wall Street and big banks. I will have a lot more to say about this in the coming months as I adopt a new role at Fortune leading both the finance and crypto teams. In the meantime, I hope you all find time to relax, and have a safe and happy holiday season. We’ll be back in your inboxes Jan. 2.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
DECENTRALIZED NEWS
Stablecoin firm Paxos received a first-of-its-kind permission from New York's financial regulator to distribute a stablecoin on Solana's blockchain. (Fortune)
Prometheum, the only special-purpose crypto broker dealer licensed by the SEC, received permission to clear and trade digital assets—a threat to the industry's claim the current regulatory regime is unviable. (CoinDesk)
An anticipated spike in Bitcoin prices expected when ETFs launch next year may not materialize if the Wall Street adage of "buy the rumor, sell the news" proves true. (WSJ)
SOL surged to nearly $100 on Friday as the value locked on Solana applications rose to about $1.3 billion. (CoinDesk)
A bathhouse for scenesters in Brooklyn is generating heat for its pools by mining Bitcoin, effectively creating a rebate on its $20,000-a-month electricity bill. (Fortune)
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