Robinhood (HOOD) customers have been clamoring for the investing app to add Shiba Inu (SHIB-USD), the newest meme coin which hit all time highs on Thursday.
A change.org petition with over 300,000 signatures is asking Robinhood to list the SHIB token, as it’s known. Judging by the meme coin’s popularity, Robinhood knows listing it would likely bring in new accounts. But the company appears to be treading carefully around new meme assets — one of the drivers for its success in the past.
Robinhood shares on Wednesday sank 10% after the company missed revenue estimates for its third quarter results as crypto trading slid 78% compared to the prior three-month period.
During the second quarter, Dogecoin (DOGE-USD), the cryptocurrency which was initially created as a joke, had accounted for 62% of crypto revenue.
One analyst during Tuesday’s earnings call asked Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev just how many new funded accounts had come from the massive uptick in Dogecoin in the second quarter.
“There were millions of new funded accounts that came for cryptocurrencies particularly Dogecoin in Q2. So certainly, it was a meaningful portion of the new accounts in that period,” answered Tenev.
An investor question submitted ahead of the earnings call asked management about plans for new crypto offerings.
“We hear this loud and clear our customers want new coins,” said Tenev during the conference call.
He went on to say, “The regulatory environment in terms of new coins in lending products in crypto is uncertain and evolving, and we’re having to carefully evaluate whether we can add new coins in a way that safe for customers and in line with regulatory requirements.”
Cryptocurrencies have become increasingly important for the company’s top line.
“Crypto is absolutely critical,” Christian Bolu, analyst at Autonomous Research told Yahoo Finance Live.
“To the extent Robinhood can bring out a much more scaled, much more robust crypto offering, we think there’s a lot of incremental monetization opportunity over time,” he added.
Robinhood recently announced a crypto wallet, with more than 1 million customers already on the waiting list.
“On new coins specifically, one thing to mention is that crypto wallets will allow customers to participate and take coins such as Bitcoin (BTC-USD) and Ethereum (ETH-USD) that they’ve purchased on Robinhood to participate in some of the other decentralized applications of platform, which allow access to coins that we don’t offer,” said Tenev.
“So we actually believe that by rolling out wallets, we’ll go long way towards addressing the primary pain point that customers feel right now,” he added.
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Source: finance.yahoo.com