About three hundred of them are Robinhood's own

Robinhood has bought bitcoin for itself. Johann Kerbrat, the senior vice-president who runs its crypto and international businesses, said on Wednesday that the company had added $25m of bitcoin to its corporate balance sheet. He disclosed the purchase on The Starting Block at the Digital Asset Summit Asia in Singapore, Crypto Briefing reported, and told The Block that it was meant to show the company's commitment to the sector.

"We care deeply about bitcoin and the ecosystem around it," Kerbrat said, according to Unchained. "For us, it's more aligning our company and our vision with the crypto community." He was also candid about the scale. Pointing to a market value of around $100bn, he said "the $25 million worth of bitcoin is not going to change a lot of the current trajectory of the company."

He is right about the arithmetic. On our calculation, $25m is 0.025 per cent of a $100bn company. At bitcoin's price on Wednesday, about $84,000, it is roughly 300 coins, the figure The Crypto Times also gave. Bitcoin fell below $84,000 on Wednesday as about $555.6m of leveraged positions were liquidated in 24 hours, according to The Block, as cited by Quartz; the reports did not say when Robinhood bought or at what price, so the actual coin count may differ. For comparison, Strategy, the largest corporate holder, said on Monday that it bought 334 bitcoin for about $28.7m between 1 and 4 October, taking its holdings to 848,000.

The more interesting comparison is with the bitcoin Robinhood already holds for other people. On-chain analysis has linked about 1.7m addresses across 12 blockchains to Robinhood, with combined balances near $25bn as of early October, The Crypto Times reported. Bitcoin is the largest share, at roughly 185,000 BTC. Those are customer custody holdings, not corporate property, and under the accounting rules they sit on the balance sheet with matching liabilities, so they add nothing to shareholders' equity. On our calculation, the company's own position is about 0.16 per cent of the bitcoin attributed to its customers' wallets. Those attribution figures are third-party estimates, not Robinhood disclosures.

The distinction matters because the two are easily confused. When a broker with an estimated $25bn of customer crypto announces a $25m purchase, the larger number tends to travel with the smaller one. What has actually changed is that Robinhood's own capital now has a small direct exposure to bitcoin's price. The Crypto Times notes that a treasury holding is marked to market under fair-value accounting, so a fall would produce unrealised losses and a rise gains, while neither changes the cash generated by customer trading. At $25m, either effect is small.

The decision has been a long time coming. Shiv Verma, Robinhood's chief financial officer, said on the company's third-quarter 2025 earnings call that executives were weighing whether to hold bitcoin on the corporate balance sheet, alongside competing priorities such as new products, growth and engineering, according to Crypto Briefing. The Crypto Times noted that the company's filings do not yet reflect the position, so for now it rests on Kerbrat's statement until the next periodic report.

The purchase comes as Robinhood pushes harder into crypto products. On 29 September it said it planned to offer perpetual futures to eligible US customers in the coming months through Bitstamp, with up to 10 times leverage on bitcoin and ether and 3 times on other assets, Unchained reported. It launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain in July. Kerbrat told The Block that Robinhood has 28 million funded accounts, 27 million of them in the US. Measured against that business, the $25m is what Kerbrat said it was: a statement about alignment that will not change the company's trajectory. The question for shareholders is whether it stays at that size.