Robinhood buys $25M of Bitcoin for its own balance sheet

Robinhood has placed $25 million worth of Bitcoin onto its own books, the company’s crypto chief Johann Kerbrat said on Oct. 7, marking the first time the Nasdaq-listed brokerage has held the asset with company capital rather than on behalf of users. Kerbrat, who serves as senior vice president and general manager of crypto and international, told crypto media that the allocation is about positioning rather than size, according to Crypto.news.

Speaking at the Digital Asset Summit Asia, Kerbrat said the firm cares deeply about Bitcoin and the ecosystem around it, and framed the purchase as a way to align the company and its vision with the crypto community. He also set expectations on scale, noting that Robinhood is a massive company whose market capitalization sits near $100 billion and that a $25 million Bitcoin position will not meaningfully change its trajectory.

Robinhood has not disclosed a coin count. Crypto.news reported only the dollar figure, while Bitcoin Magazine estimated the holding at roughly 294 BTC using an average price near $84,960, with other estimates based on prices around $84,000 placing it nearer 300 BTC. Bitcoin Magazine reported that the exact number is expected in the company’s next public filing. Neither outlet supplied a filing date.

A small allocation against a large crypto business

The purchase sits awkwardly between two scales. At $25 million it is a rounding error against a balance sheet attached to a roughly $100 billion valuation—Kerbrat said as much himself. Yet the same company reported $17.5 billion in crypto notional trading volume in August alone, with funded customers at 28.6 million and total platform assets near $384 billion at the end of that month. Robinhood is not experimenting with a peripheral product line; it is putting principal behind an asset that already drives a substantial share of its trading revenue.

The distinction between custody and ownership is central here. Bitcoin Magazine reported that Robinhood already holds roughly 185,000 BTC, worth about $15.5 billion, for customers—around $25 billion across multiple chains when other assets are counted, based on on-chain analysis. Those coins belong to users. The new $25 million belongs to the company, which is why Bitcoin Magazine treated the decision itself as the story rather than the dollar amount. Kerbrat’s comments left room for either interpretation: a one-off statement of intent, or the first line of a treasury strategy. He did not say which.

Derivatives, tokenized stocks and a Layer 2

The balance sheet move lands in the middle of a broad crypto expansion. Robinhood is preparing to offer perpetual futures to eligible U.S. users, covering Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, Cardano, Chainlink and Hyperliquid. Crypto.news reported that Bitcoin and Ether contracts are expected to carry leverage up to 10x, while the other six assets would offer up to 3x. The products are expected to run through Robinhood Derivatives on Bitstamp infrastructure, with trading fees set at 0.01% through the end of 2026. CEO Vlad Tenev described the planned offering as the first true perps for U.S. customers, with no expiry and profit and loss settled every 15 minutes.

The company’s stock token business is also pressing against limits. Robinhood said its tokenized equity trading volume was already approaching caps imposed under the SEC’s five-year innovation exemption. Kerbrat said the company plans to add voting rights and in-kind redemptions to its stock tokens while working toward support for more U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds.

Underneath both sits Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 built with Arbitrum technology. The public mainnet launched on July 1 alongside tokenized stocks and decentralized perpetual futures, giving eligible users in more than 120 countries access to tokenized equities through Robinhood Wallet on supported decentralized exchanges. Crypto.news reported $570 million in first-week trading volume against $21.68 million in liquidity, much of it memecoin activity, then 7.6 million transactions in a single day on July 11—against 9.2 million on Coinbase’s Base over the same period, based on on-chain data from MSBIntel verified by Token Terminal. By late July the network had processed over $12 billion in decentralized exchange volume and more than 150 million transactions, according to Bernstein. Kerbrat said Robinhood has around 27 million funded accounts in the U.S. and another 1 million abroad, and described the chain as probably the first Layer 2 connected to distribution at that scale.

Why it matters

Corporate Bitcoin buying has become a familiar pattern, but the identity of the buyer matters as much as the size. Strategy, the largest corporate holder, added 334 BTC for about $28.7 million in early October—nearly the same dollars as Robinhood’s entire position, except Strategy’s 848,000 BTC makes the purchase an increment rather than a debut. Robinhood’s move is closer to an opening statement from a company whose core business is retail brokerage, not treasury management. If the allocation grows, it would put a second publicly traded consumer finance platform into direct Bitcoin ownership alongside its role as a custodian, a combination that changes how the company’s incentives line up with the asset its customers trade. Other public companies are also heading the opposite direction: Sequans Communications sold its remaining 314 BTC in September and ended its treasury strategy after using earlier sales to cut convertible debt.

What to watch

The coin count will be confirmed in Robinhood’s next public filing, per Bitcoin Magazine. Nearer term, the company’s perpetual futures rollout will test whether U.S. users adopt products Tenev has billed as the first true perps available domestically, with fees running at 0.01% only through the end of 2026. And the stock token business faces a defined constraint: the SEC exemption caps that volume, so any expansion into more equities depends on how that framework evolves.

Originally published on BitcoinWorld.

Sources: crypto.news, Bitcoin Magazine