Key Takeaways:
- Coinbase generated $6.9 billion in full-year 2025 revenue, with subscriptions and services now accounting for around 40% of the total, up from roughly 4% in 2020. The company is no longer purely a crypto exchange.
- Robinhood posted a record $4.5 billion in 2025 revenue, growing 52% year over year, the fastest pace among publicly traded U.S. brokerages. Full-year EPS hit a record $2.05.
- Both stocks are down significantly from their 2024 and 2025 highs. The more useful question is not which bounces more in the next crypto rally, but which business has the stronger floor when trading volumes slow down.
Now Live: Discover how much upside your favorite stocks could have using TIKR’s new Valuation Model (It’s free)>>>
These two names have sold off for the same surface-level reason: crypto cooled, trading volumes pulled back, and investors marked down anything with transaction revenue exposure. Coinbase is down roughly 20% year to date, sitting around $171 after hitting nearly $350 in late 2024. Robinhood has been volatile as well, though its stock has nearly doubled over the past 52 weeks even after the recent drawdown.
The instinct to sell both together is understandable, but it is also imprecise. Coinbase (COIN) and Robinhood (HOOD) are doing superficially similar things, but the businesses underneath look quite different, and that changes how you should evaluate each one in a downturn. Before asking which stock bounces harder in the next crypto rally, it is worth asking which company has built a more durable revenue foundation underneath the cycle.
Estimate a company’s fair value instantly (Free with TIKR) >>>
Two Different Revenue Engines
The surface-level descriptions do neither company justice, so it is worth being precise about what each one actually does.
Coinbase started as a place for retail investors to buy and sell crypto, but it has spent the last several years building a second business alongside that exchange. That second business includes staking, which helps users earn yield on assets like Ethereum by participating in blockchain validation; custody services for institutional clients such as hedge funds and asset managers; and stablecoin revenue tied to USDC, the dollar-pegged digital currency that Coinbase manages with Circle.
When users hold USDC on the platform, Coinbase earns a share of the interest generated by investing those dollar reserves. The $2.9 billion acquisition of Deribit, the world’s largest crypto options exchange, further extended Coinbase’s presence in institutional derivatives heading into 2026.
Robinhood started as a zero-commission brokerage for younger retail investors and has been systematically expanding ever since, adding retirement accounts, a credit card, banking features, options trading, crypto staking, and its Robinhood Gold subscription.
The latter, which at $5 a month gives members higher cash yields, margin access, and premium research, reached 4.2 million subscribers by year-end 2025. The Bitstamp acquisition brought a regulated European crypto exchange with institutional relationships.
Both companies remain tied to trading cycles, but the nature of that dependency differs for each, and that matters when considering downside scenarios.
What the Financials Show
For its part, Coinbase’s operating margin swung from 42% in the 2021 bull cycle to negative 86% in 2022 when crypto collapsed, then clawed back to negative 7% in 2023, 32% in 2024, and settled at around 22% in 2025 as volumes softened in the back half of the year. That volatility is the defining characteristic of the business and the primary reason the stock trades at a discount to its peak multiples.
Robinhood’s journey looks even more dramatic as operating margin was negative 90% as recently as 2021, reflecting a business burning cash to acquire users and build product, and has since expanded to nearly 47% by the end of 2025 as revenue scaled and the cost structure held relatively flat. Gross profit more than doubled from $1.7 billion in 2023 to $3.7 billion in 2025, a level of operating leverage that justifies investor attention.
The key diversification question for Coinbase is whether subscription and services revenue can hold the floor when transaction volumes fall, and the 2022 to 2023 period answers it fairly clearly. Subscription revenue continued to grow throughout the crypto winter, reaching around $1.4 billion in 2023 even as transaction revenue collapsed. By 2025, that subscription line had grown to $2.8 billion, making up roughly 40% of total revenue.
Robinhood does not have the same structural floor, but its net interest revenue, tied to customer cash balances rather than trading activity, grew 66% year over year in Q3 2025 to $456 million, providing meaningful ballast.
What Consensus Estimates Are Pricing In
From the TIKR Estimates tab, analysts expect Coinbase revenue to come in around $7 billion in 2026, roughly flat with 2025, with EPS of around $3.30. The recovery in estimates depends heavily on a pickup in crypto transaction volumes, with EBITDA expected to grow around 40% in 2027 if market conditions improve.
Coinbase trades at roughly 62x forward earnings today, reflecting both earnings cyclicality and the premium the market assigns to its institutional infrastructure buildout.
Robinhood’s consensus estimates are more optimistic on growth, with revenue expected to reach around $5.2 billion in 2026, growing around 16%, and EPS of around $2.45. The forward P/E is roughly 36x, lower than Coinbase’s despite faster near-term growth, and reflects a business the market is still learning to value as it expands well beyond its brokerage origins.
EV/Revenue for Robinhood sits at roughly 15x trailing, compared to around 7x for Coinbase, which suggests where growth expectations are concentrated.
See what analysts think about COIN stock right now (Free with TIKR) >>>
Valuation: What Are You Paying For?
The TIKR model targets around $370 for Coinbase, implying roughly 75% upside from current levels and an annualized return of about 13%. The mid-case assumes modest revenue growth of around 4% annually through 2035, with net income margins moving toward 20%.
That conservative growth assumption reflects the reality that 2025’s revenue base was already elevated by a strong first half, and the model is not counting on another bull cycle to reach that level. The subscription floor is the key input holding the downside scenario together.
The TIKR model targets around $205 for Robinhood, implying over 120% upside from current levels and an annualized return of about 19%. That higher return reflects an assumed faster growth rate of around 14% annually, driven by Gold subscriber expansion, net deposit compounding, and new product adoption.
Net income margins approaching 48% at the mid-case assume continued operating leverage as the platform scales. The risk is that Robinhood’s valuation on an EV/Revenue basis, at roughly 15x trailing versus around 7x for Coinbase, already embeds a fair amount of optimism about how that product expansion plays out.
See analysts’ full growth forecasts and estimates for HOOD stock (It’s free) >>>
The Bottom Line for Investors
If you are underwriting a crypto recovery, Coinbase has more operating leverage to that outcome, and the subscription layer now provides a floor that did not exist in prior cycles.
If the more compelling story to you is platform expansion within retail financial services, Robinhood is building something that looks less like a brokerage and more like a full financial app, one that does not require a crypto cycle to keep growing, though it certainly helps.
Neither stock is for investors who need predictability. Both carry high beta and will move sharply on macro or crypto news long before the underlying business thesis has time to play out. The difference is what you own at the bottom: Coinbase has a growing subscription base that generates revenue regardless of trading activity, while Robinhood has a deposit flywheel and subscription ecosystem that keeps compounding even when the market goes quiet.
Build your own Valuation Model to value any stock (It’s free!) >>>
How Much Upside Does COIN Stock Have From Here?
With TIKR’s new Valuation Model tool, you can estimate a stock’s potential share price in under a minute.
All it takes is three simple inputs:
- Revenue Growth
- Operating Margins
- Exit P/E Multiple
If you’re not sure what to enter, TIKR automatically fills in each input using analysts’ consensus estimates, giving you a quick, reliable starting point.
From there, TIKR calculates the potential share price and total returns under Bull, Base, and Bear scenarios so you can quickly see whether a stock looks undervalued or overvalued.
See a stock’s true value in under 60 seconds (Free with TIKR) >>>
Looking for New Opportunities?
- See what stocks billionaire investors are buying so you can follow the smart money.
- Analyze stocks in as little as 5 minutes with TIKR’s all-in-one, easy-to-use platform.
- The more rocks you overturn… the more opportunities you’ll uncover. Search 100K+ global stocks, global top investor holdings, and more with TIKR.
Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
