GM. This is Milk Road AI, the only newsletter that knows the difference between a seasonal trend and a structural shift in your portfolio.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ This app wants your entire paycheck.
- 🎙️ The Milk Road AI Show: The Deflationary Singularity: Why Everything is Going to ZERO w/ Salim Ismail.
- 🍪 OpenAI doubles down on AI agents.
Summ (formerly Crypto Tax Calculator) is a tax software built specifically for crypto. Get started with Summ with a 20% discount.
Prices as of 10:00 a.m. ET.
THE FINANCIAL SUPERAPP THAT COULD REPLACE YOUR BANK?
Back in 1853, Paris was a disaster.
It was a dark, medieval slum that smelled like a gym bag left in a hot car for a week.
It was so chaotic that people were literally building barricades out of furniture and trying to overthrow the government every few years.
So Emperor Napoleon III took matters into his own hands and decided he wanted a total teardown.
He hired Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a man who became the "Artist of Demolition".
Over the next two decades, Haussmann bulldozed 20,000 buildings to carve out the massive, tree-lined boulevards that define Paris today.
Critics called him out, but he was too busy clearing a path for the future.
Vlad Tenev and Robinhood are having their own "Haussmann moment".
For years, the app was a messy collection of rooms.
You had one room for Dogecoin millionaires (who are still waiting for Elon to tweet so they can finally afford the "To The Moon" bumper sticker they bought in 2021).
Another for frantic GME traders, and a third for confused students trying to figure out why their free stock was just a $4 share of GoPro, a stock currently down 98% from its all-time high.
But those walls are coming down.
Vlad and team are clearing out the meme-stock dust to build a Financial SuperApp.
They want to own the wide boulevards of your life, capturing every dollar you earn until you retire.
The V6 to V12 evolution
During the IPO days, the business was basically a V6 engine.
It was powered almost entirely by three things: options, crypto, and equities.
It was a fair-weather business that thrived when interest rates were low, and everyone was bored at home.
But when the world changed, and interest rates spiked, that V6 started to sputter.
Robinhood responded to this by adding more cylinders.
Management recently revealed that they have 11 different business lines generating over $100M in annual revenue each.
They aren't just betting on the next pump. They are building a diversified fortress.
Total revenue for 2025 hit $4.5B. That’s a 52% jump year-over-year.
Adjusted EBITDA (core operating profit before interest, taxes, and non-cash costs) reached $2.5B at a staggering 56% margin.
They are printing money like they found the infinite cash cheat code in a video game.
But here’s the thing: that pile of cash isn’t just sitting in a vault for show.
It is the fuel for the demolition crews.
It’s a massive war chest that allows them to stop being a simple trading app and start being the financial landlord of the next generation.
They are taking that profit and pouring it directly into a blueprint designed to own every single financial heartbeat of your life.
Under the hood
The Financial SuperApp strategy encompasses 15+ distinct product lines.
The end goal is simple: to build a world where you never have a reason to move a single cent outside of the platform.
It starts with the trading engine, which remains the high-performance core of the machine.
Equities volume hit a staggering $710B in the last quarter alone.
Options trading reached a record 659M contracts.
They even added short selling and 24/7 trading for nearly 1,000 different symbols.
The Bitstamp (crypto exchange) acquisition also turned them into a global institutional powerhouse.
Total crypto volume hit $82B, with the “grown-up" institutional side now doing more heavy lifting than the retail app.
But the real magic happens in the Robinhood Gold ecosystem.
Gold has reached 4.2M subscribers, which is a massive 58% jump from last year.
Think about this: about 40% of brand-new customers are choosing Gold the minute they sign up.
For just $5 a month, users get a 3% IRA match and professional-grade research tools.
That subscription revenue alone is now a nine-figure annualized business.
It is the membership club that makes every other part of the app more addictive.
Then you have the disruptors like the Gold Card and the new Banking product.
The Gold Card offers an uncapped 3% cash back on every single purchase you make.
They plan to double the number of people holding that card to over 1M by the end of 2026.
The banking side is already seeing over 20,000 funded customers with $400M in balances.
Crucially, over half of these users have already switched their direct deposit over to Robinhood.
The retirement segment is another massive magnet for capital.
It is a breakout success with $26.5B in assets and 1.8M funded accounts.
They’ve already distributed over $500M in matches to their users.
That industry-leading 3% IRA match is successfully luring billions away from legacy banks.
No major competitor currently matches this level of aggressive incentive.
Then, if that’s not enough, if you don't want to pick your own stocks, they have Robinhood Strategies.
This robo-advisor has grown to over 200,000 customers and $1.3B in assets.
It uses Monte Carlo simulations to forecast your potential returns.
The 0.25% fee is capped at $250 a year for Gold members, which makes it a nightmare for older firms.
But the fastest-growing business in the entire company is Prediction Markets.
Over 12B event contracts were traded in just the first full year.
Through the Rothera joint venture, they now own 90% of the MIAX Derivatives Exchange.
This means they own the pipes and the clearinghouse.
Most brokers, like Robinhood, are just tenants, they pay rent (fees) to use someone else’s exchange.
By owning the exchange, Robinhood stops paying rent and starts collecting it.
They now control the pipes (how trades move) and the vault (the clearinghouse that guarantees the trades).
This lets them keep more profit, launch new contracts whenever they want, and eventually charge competitors to trade on their turf.
Finally, you have the intelligence layer known as Cortex AI.
Cortex is a super-intelligent assistant with full context of your entire financial life.
You can scan the entire market for specific setups just by talking to your phone.
It explains exactly why any stock is moving in real-time, so you don't have to read boring filings.
It is even being integrated into the Legend desktop platform for the pro traders.
It is the brain that ties all 15+ product lines into a single, cohesive empire.
Now that you know what they are like, let’s look at what’s going wrong.
THE SOLUTION TO CRYPTO TAXES
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THE FINANCIAL SUPERAPP THAT COULD REPLACE YOUR BANK? (P2)
Robinhood was the undisputed darling of 2025: revenue doubled, net income exploded, and the stock was fast-tracked into the S&P 500.
The narrative felt bulletproof as the price rode a massive wave from under $30 in mid-2024 all the way to a peak of $152 by October 2025.
But then, gravity showed up.
The crypto turbocharger, the very thing that was juicing the top line for over a year, essentially exploded in the driveway.
Bitcoin plummeted from its $126,000 peak in October down to roughly $69,000 by February.
Since crypto trades carry much higher profit margins for Robinhood than traditional stocks, it became a structural disaster for their bottom line.
Crypto transaction revenue fell to $221M in Q3 2025, down from a record high of $360M in Q4 2024.
That means $139M in high-margin revenue simply evaporated into thin air, and once that momentum died, the rest of the growth story started hitting major speed traps.
The market finally decided to check the math, and it didn’t like the answer.
Total revenue for the quarter hit $1.28B, but Wall Street had already penciled in $1.34B.
In the high-stakes world of growth stocks, a revenue miss is the ultimate party pooper.
The stock tumbled over 8% overnight because investors realized the growth is decelerating.
The funnel is also starting to leak at the top.
While they are successfully moving upmarket with Gold members, the casual crowd is leaving the party.
Monthly active users (MAUs) fell to 13M, a 12.8% drop that represents a loss of nearly 2M users.
Now, platform assets surged 68% to $324B, and average revenue per user climbed to $191.
They’re clearly succeeding at moving upmarket, converting casual scrollers into paying power users.
They are squeezing more money out of fewer people, which is great for short-term margins but worrying for long-term growth.
But that shift carries a risk.
The brand was built on being the app for the first-time investor, the person with $50 to put into a fractional share.
If those casual users are leaving because crypto is boring now and meme stocks have cooled off, you're losing the top of the funnel.
The premium users are great, but they don't multiply the way new users do.
And the casual crowd might not come back when things heat up again if they've already moved to a competitor.
Finally, the construction bill is becoming massive.
The company is doubling down on expansion, projecting that 2026 adjusted operating expenses plus SBC (Share-Based Compensation, paying employees in stock instead of just cash) will climb roughly 18% to a range of $2.6B to $2.73B.
They are currently building 15 massive skyscrapers at the same time:
Bitstamp, Prediction Markets, the Robinhood Chain, and expansion into Southeast Asia.
This heavy spending was already visible in Q4 alone, where adjusted operating costs and SBC hit $597M.
When revenue growth slows down but spending stays at full blast, you’ve got a major problem on your hands.
The market is now essentially saying:
"We believe some of these projects will work, but definitely not all of them on the aggressive timeline you promised."
Construction projects rarely go exactly according to plan.
Your AI PRO verdict
So after all of that, here is the honest question: Is the construction site worth walking through?
Is Robinhood a buy at these prices?
Upgrade to PRO to access:
- My full verdict on the SuperApp strategy.
- The overlooked risks that could make or break it.
- Why the long-term story matters more than the next earnings cycle.
- What this could mean for the company’s future.
- Actionable insights you can actually use.
THE ECONOMIC SINGULARITY, COSTS TO ZERO 🤯
In today’s episode, we sat down with Salim Ismail to unpack the “economic singularity”, a shift toward abundance where exponential tech drives the marginal cost of many goods and services toward zero. We dig into what that means for energy, AI, education, healthcare, markets, and the systems built on scarcity.
Here’s what you’ll hear:
- Why cheap, abundant energy is the choke point that unlocks massive compute, which accelerates AI and drives costs down across domains.
- How AI could reshape education and healthcare fast, from personalized tutors to AI-first diagnostics and free medical apps.
- What deflationary pressure does to incumbents, SaaS, jobs, and reskilling, plus why “immune systems” slow change but do not stop it.
- How agents and microtransactions connect to blockchain, and why decentralized authentication could undercut roles like banking and credentialing.
Hit play and see for yourself 👇️
YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
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BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Anthropic raised $30B in a Series G round, pushing its valuation to $380B. The funding underscores intense demand for its Claude AI as it competes with OpenAI.
Siri’s AI revamp is delayed again, with some features pushed to May or even iOS 27. Testing issues are slowing its shift into a chatbot-like assistant.
OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger has joined OpenAI to work on next-gen personal AI agents. OpenClaw will remain open source and supported going forward.
MILKY MEMES 🤣
ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛
