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Robinhood IPO Filing Shows Dogecoin Trading Drove Big Gains

Some 34% of the trading app's cryptocurrency revenue in the first quarter was attributable to DOGE.

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 1:20 p.m. Published Jul 1, 2021, 6:15 p.m.

Robinhood recently filed with the SEC to go public.

Robinhood, the popular trading app for stock, options, gold and cryptocurrencies, filed for a public offering that could be worth up to $100 million, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) document submitted on Thursday.

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Along with the company's financials, the SEC document shows the reach of Robinhood as a popular destination for crypto trading.

"For the three months ended March 31, 2021, 17% of our total revenue was derived from transaction-based revenues earned from cryptocurrency transactions, compared to 4% for the three months year ended December 31, 2020," the firm wrote.

A big chunk of that growth – 34% of the firm's crypto transaction revenue in the first quarter – was from DOGE, the memecoin that has surged in popularity this year.

"If demand for transactions in dogecoin declines and is not replaced by new demand for other cryptocurrencies available for trading on our platform, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected," Robinhood said.

The app currently has seven cryptocurrencies available for trading.

Robinhood has been criticized by regulators who have said the app encourages the game-like nature of trading, particularly among inexperienced retail traders. On Wednesday, the firm was fined approximately $70 million by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), which said Robinhood had provided false or misleading information to users and failed to report many customer complaints about its services.

The underwriters for the IPO include Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citigroup.

Robinhood's IPO differs from Coinbase, the crypto exchange that opted to issue shares via a direct public offering, which eliminates intermediaries and only sells shares that already exist. Coinbase's valuation based on its first-day trading price of April 14 was about $99 billion using a fully diluted share count of 261.3 million.

UPDATE (July 1, 15:43 UTC): Adds information on Robinhood's IPO underwriters and comparisons to the Coinbase direct listing.

Dogecoin Robinhood IPOs Trading Apps DOGE

Zack Seward

Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

James Rubin

James Rubin was CoinDesk's Co-Managing Editor, Markets team based on the West Coast. He has written and edited for the Milken Institute, TheStreet.com and the Economist Intelligence Unit, among other organizations. He is also the co-author of the Urban Cyclist's Survival Guide. He owns a small amount of bitcoin.