Robinhood Adds $25 Million in Bitcoin to Its Balance Sheet

Published October 7, 2026, 08:45 UTC. Based on The Block's exclusive interview with Robinhood SVP Johann Kerbrat on The Starting Block (Oct. 7, 2026) and reporting by The Crypto Times.

Robinhood has put bitcoin on its own balance sheet. The trading platform bought $25 million worth of BTC, a purchase its crypto chief says is about signaling commitment to the sector rather than chasing returns, according to an exclusive interview with The Block published on October 7, 2026.

Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood's senior vice president and general manager of crypto and international, told The Block's Gareth Jenkinson and Kelvin Sparks on The Starting Block on Wednesday that the purchase was intended to align the company with the crypto community.

"We care deeply about bitcoin and the ecosystem around it," Kerbrat said. "For us, it's more aligning our company and our vision with the crypto community."

The $25 million signal

Kerbrat acknowledged the buy is a small one for Robinhood's scale. "Robinhood is a massive company at this point, with a market cap in the $100 billion [range]," he said, adding that the bitcoin "is not going to change a lot of the current trajectory of the company." Robinhood's Nasdaq-listed shares closed down 1.85% at $112 on Tuesday, giving the company a market capitalization of roughly $100 billion, The Block reported.

The decision ends months of public deliberation. Robinhood executives had said as recently as November 2025 that they were only weighing whether to add bitcoin to the balance sheet and had reached no decision, according to CoinCentral's coverage of the company's earnings remarks. Wednesday's interview makes the answer official.

Joining the corporate buyers

The purchase lands as other listed companies keep adding bitcoin. Bitcoin treasury company Strategy said Monday it acquired 334 BTC for roughly $28.7 million at an average price of $85,838.80 per bitcoin between September 28 and October 4, bringing its total holdings to 848,000 BTC, The Block reported. Robinhood's buy is tiny by comparison, but it is the first confirmed balance-sheet bitcoin purchase by the brokerage itself.

Perps, Robinhood Chain and stock tokens

The bitcoin buy is one piece of a wider crypto push. Last week Robinhood announced plans to offer perpetual futures trading in the coming months for eligible U.S. users, covering BTC, ETH, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, ADA, LINK and HYPE. CEO Vlad Tenev wrote on X that the company is bringing "America its first true perps," with no expiry and profit-and-loss settled every 15 minutes, calling the launch "a new chapter for U.S. derivatives."

Robinhood is also expanding Robinhood Chain, a layer-2 network built on Arbitrum's technology stack that went live on public mainnet in July. Total value locked on the chain reached $1.05 billion as of Tuesday, according to The Block's data dashboard. The company has launched Stock Tokens enabling eligible users to trade around the clock directly on Robinhood Chain, and Kerbrat said in a separate interview last week that stock-token volume is already high enough to run into the limits of the SEC's innovation exemption for tokenized U.S. equities.

Kerbrat put the company's distribution footprint at 28 million funded accounts, 27 million in the U.S. and 1 million abroad, with the Robinhood wallet available in more than 120 countries. He said the direct bitcoin purchase is meant to put the company's own money behind that pitch.

This article is news reporting and is not investment advice.

Sources

• The Block, Robinhood adds $25 million worth of bitcoin to balance sheet as it deepens crypto push (Oct. 7, 2026), primary source
• The Crypto Times, Crypto and Stock Trading App Robinhood Adds $25M in Bitcoin to Balance Sheet (Oct. 7, 2026), secondary source
• CoinCentral, Robinhood Weighs Bitcoin Treasury Move as Crypto Revenues Surge 339% (Nov. 2025), secondary source