Editor's note: This article is a standardized version of Decrypt's "Morning Minute" newsletter, written daily by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. The original is available here.

Robinhood Misses Estimates, But Crypto Beats and Robinhood Chain Tokens Rally

Robinhood posted record quarterly revenue of $1.42 billion on Tuesday but missed Wall Street estimates on both revenue and earnings per share. The company's crypto business beat expectations, and the earnings call delivered the bigger story: CEO Vlad Tenev said Robinhood plans to sharply increase investment in Robinhood Chain after the young network outran internal forecasts.

Revenue came in at $1.42 billion, a hair under the $1.43 billion expected. Earnings per share were $0.51 against a $0.55 forecast. Further detail is available in Decrypt's earnings coverage.

Crypto revenue rose to $120 million from $100 million in Q2, up 20% sequentially, though still 55% below last year's $268 million. Total trading volume was $50 billion, with $29 billion of that through Bitstamp.

Event contracts are now the bigger business: revenue of $173 million, up from $156 million, on a record 16.4 billion contracts traded — more than seven times the volume of a year ago. Between prediction markets and crypto, more than a fifth of Robinhood's revenue now comes from products that barely existed two years ago.

Tenev: "It Caught Us by Surprise"

On the earnings call, Tenev said Robinhood Chain has outrun internal forecasts and expectations. "It caught us by surprise," he said. The chain launched on July 1, and by late August it was generating more fees over a rolling 30-day period than Ethereum or Base. Tenev said the company has had to staff up a team to keep pace, and that builders have been telling Robinhood it could be doing more.

His response: "You should expect to see us really ramping the investment, because you just don't see growth of a new ecosystem like this. It's an uncommon thing. A lot of chains have launched over the past few months that have had an incomparably small level of traction compared to this. So we're doubling down."

He also outlined where he sees it going: "Imagine if you take a stock token, make it fully programmable just like software. What can you do? Can you have tokenized options contracts?"

The commentary sent Robinhood Chain leaders up 20-50% across the board, led by Pons (+18%), AI (Long) (+33%) and Orbio (+57%). In the author's view, the message was clear: Robinhood is not treating tokenized equities as a product feature, but as a primitive that other teams build on top of.

That is already happening. Long.xyz pairs meme coins against tokenized NVDA and TSLA (X post), and Orbio funds AI inference credits with fees paid in tokenized Nvidia. Neither was Robinhood's idea, and both only exist because the stock tokens do. Two posts from Robinhood Crypto on Tuesday evidenced the company leaning in, supporting both Long and Priors (X post). While the quarterly numbers were a miss, the author argued the call itself was the bigger win.

Macro, Crypto and Markets

Crypto majors were green, up 2-4% ahead of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting: BTC +2% at $81.2k; ETH +2% at $2,360; SOL +3% at $103; HYPE +5% at $81.40; ZEC +4% at $1,300.

Top altcoin movers included BCH (+6%), ZRO (+6%) and CC (+5%). Oil was even at $101; gold rose 0.2% to $4,050. Stock futures were mixed ahead of the FOMC: Dow -0.23%, Nasdaq +0.4%.

Intel, Oracle, IBM and IonQ joined the issuers objecting to tokenized versions of their shares on the OKX-ICE venue, pushing the count to 26 in twelve days (Decrypt).

Ripple won final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for Ripple National Trust Bank, a federally supervised national trust bank that will hold and act as collateral trustee for the reserves backing its $2.6 billion RLUSD stablecoin (Decrypt).

Google opened a private preview of a crypto custody service for banks that splits a signing key into fragments held across separate environments and runs every transaction past a policy engine before signing, with commercial availability targeted for early 2027. Alphabet is already using it to secure its own assets on Ethereum and Solana (CoinDesk).

Robinhood went live with Ripple's RLUSD on Robinhood Chain and Bitstamp, will run its global cash operations on Ripple Treasury, and will use RLUSD on the XRP Ledger for institutional settlement across Bitstamp (Decrypt).

South Korea's second-largest crypto exchange, Bithumb, confirmed that an outside party accessed its internal staff groupware system and leaked personal information — on the same day two major Korean brokerages disclosed their own intrusions (crypto.news).

Corporate Treasuries and ETFs

Bitcoin ETFs saw $176 million in net inflows on Tuesday, while ETH ETFs saw $60 million in net outflows. STRC traded at $99.53.

Meme Coin Tracker

Meme leaders were green: DOGE +4%, SHIB +4%, PEPE +16%, PENGU +5%, TRUMP +3%, SPX +2%, BONK +4%.

Robinhood Chain leaders were sharply higher after HOOD earnings: Pons +18% to $195 million; Cashcat +1% at $100 million; AI +32% at $69 million; Orbio +60%, Boner +40% and Priors +80% led the top movers.

Solana top movers included Something (+35x), GTA6 (+50%), SI (+60%) and Sapling (+280%); Stonk +20% to $160 million.

Token, Airdrop and Protocol Tracker

Pump.fun led onchain protocols in daily revenue with $1.88 million, followed by Hyperliquid at $1.65 million and Polymarket at $366,000 (DefiLlama).

Circle began piloting USDC settlement inside Colombia's instant-payments network, partnering with ACI Worldwide to plug the stablecoin into Bre-B's real-time account-to-account rails rather than replacing them (Decrypt).

Polymarket has investigated dozens of midterm election bets for insider trading and manipulation, with at least two cases referred to the CFTC (Decrypt).

NFTs

NFT leaders were mixed: Punks +1% at 30.5 ETH, BAYC -2.5% at 6.05 ETH, Pudgy +2% at 2.53 ETH. Deafbeef (+31%) and Identity (+11%) led the top movers.