Deutsche Bank Says Robinhood’s Blockchain Fees Are Already Outrunning Its Own Forecast

Deutsche Bank has raised its price target on Robinhood Markets to $136 from a share price of about $122, an implied upside of roughly 11.5%, and lifted its earnings estimates alongside it. Analyst Brian Bedell’s case rests on a line of the business that barely existed a year ago: the fees Robinhood collects from Robinhood Chain, the blockchain it launched earlier this year to support crypto buying and selling. The upgrade landed in the same week that AMC Entertainment’s chief executive publicly called Robinhood’s stock tokens contemptible, a reminder that the products driving the revenue are not universally admired.

The mechanism is simple enough. Robinhood takes a cut of every trade that runs across its chain, so chain activity converts directly into fee income. Using public DeFiLlama data, Bedell notes that daily chain revenue sat below a roughly $200,000 run rate through the middle of August, then jumped to nearly $500,000 in late August. Over one recent five-day stretch the chain generated close to $11 million, of which roughly $5.4 million would accrue to Robinhood as fees. His previous estimate for the whole of the third quarter was $4.6 million. Five days of late-August activity, in other words, matched what he had pencilled in for three months.

That is the strength of the argument and also its weakness. Bedell himself cautions that visibility into how long the momentum lasts is limited, and a run rate built on a handful of unusually busy days is not the same as a durable revenue line. Crypto trading volumes are famously cyclical, and the enthusiasm that lifted Robinhood shares this week owed a good deal to excitement about prediction markets rather than the chain itself. Positioning is crowded too: of the 29 analysts covering the stock, 24 rate it a Buy or Strong Buy, which leaves little room for a pleasant surprise.

The thing to watch is the third-quarter report, and specifically whether management breaks out chain-related fee revenue clearly enough for outsiders to judge whether August was a step change or a spike. A second point worth following is regulatory. Tokenised equities are drawing attention from exchanges and issuers alike, and this fee stream depends on those products remaining available.