Vlad Tenev on Robinhood's 11 revenue lines, the gold card hitting $15B in annual transaction volume, and crypto tokenization roadmap

Robinhood's Vlad Tenev on 11 revenue lines, the Gold Card, and the tokenization roadmap

Vlad Tenev's core argument is that the market still reads Robinhood as a crypto-correlated trading app, and the actual business no longer fits that description.

Revenue diversification

Robinhood now has 11 lines of business each generating $100M or more in annualized revenue. Crypto sits below 20% of total revenue. Tenev names retirement assets, the Gold Card, Robinhood Strategies (its passive digital advisor), active trading, and Robinhood Legend as the other cylinders firing. He signals the count will keep climbing.

Robinhood's retirement product has crossed $30B in assets. The digital advisor, Robinhood Strategies, charges 0.25% but caps fees at $250 annually, which Tenev says is the first cap of its kind in the category — stopping the model where most robo-advisors charge proportionally more as balances grow.

“Right now, we've got 800,000 gold card holders currently, and they're generating something around 15,000,000,000 in annual transaction volume... Robinhood Cortex, which is our AI family of products, has now been used by nearly 1,000,000 customers and that's growing very, very quickly. Starting next month, I think we're going to roll out some of these agentic capabilities.”

Gold Card

The Gold Card has 800,000 holders generating roughly $15B in annual transaction volume. Tenev says crossing 1 million cardholders and $100M in ARR will happen well before year-end.

The pitch is straightforward: 3% cash back across all categories, no points optimization required. Tenev frames deliberate rollout pacing as credit-quality discipline — companies that moved faster, he argues, ran into trouble.

A Platinum Card at a $695 annual fee launched recently, offering 5% back on dining. Despite stronger-than-expected waitlist demand, Tenev says the team is revising the benefits structure before rollout after feedback that it felt too complex and coupon-driven. A black card is under consideration but follows Gold and Platinum in the queue.

Crypto and tokenization

Tenev is less focused on token listings than on making tokenization a real infrastructure play. The roadmap runs in three phases: starting with tokenized stocks in Europe in a format resembling traditional markets, progressing toward fully on-chain, DeFi-enabled stock tokens that are composable.

Robinhood Chain launched on testnet and processed north of $100M in transactions, which Tenev reads as strong developer intent to integrate and access Robinhood's customer base. A London event in early July is set to unveil the next chapter, with tokenization as the headline.

AI

Tenev breaks AI impact into three buckets: internal tooling (engineering acceleration, customer support automation, with Robinhood building its own because third-party tools haven't caught up); Robinhood Cortex, the AI product suite now used by nearly 1 million customers; and a newly launched Cortex Assistant that has full context into a user's account and financial data.

Agentic capabilities are next. Tenev says Robinhood plans to roll out agentic financial and trading features starting next month, and argues no one in financial services has credibly cracked this yet.

Robinhood Ventures invested in OpenAI, though Tenev offers no terms.

Trump accounts and lifecycle expansion

Robinhood is the sole initial trustee and broker powering Trump accounts, custodial investment accounts that extend Robinhood's addressable market from 18-and-over to zero-and-over, putting the product in front of an estimated 60 million children. Tenev frames this alongside the $100 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer as the long-duration thesis behind current investment levels.

The through-line across all of it: Robinhood is building for a customer's entire financial life, and the business metrics are starting to reflect that breadth.