Robinhood CEO talks SEC lawsuit dismissal: ‘It’s nice to not have to play as much defense’

In a Tuesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev praised the Trump administration’s attitude towards financial services and cryptocurrency, one day after the company announced the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped an investigation into its crypto business.

“It’s nice to not have to play as much defense. I mean, frankly, in the last administration, we were playing a lot of defense,” he said. “There was an all out assault on not just crypto but individual retail trading in general with market structure proposals, predictive data analytics, which is basically an assault on AI and financial services…We’re fortunate to have, you know, an administration that wants the U.S. to be number one in AI and financial services and crypto.”

Robinhood revealed the SEC told the company it had closed its crypto investigation and had no plans to proceed with enforcement. Last May, the agency warned that Robinhood could face penalties for failing to register some crypto assets as securities. The SEC’s dismissal of the Robinhood investigation comes just days after the agency agreed to drop its enforcement case against Coinbase, displaying President Donald Trump’s more lenient stance on crypto regulations.

Tenev claimed that prediction markets are “the future of trading” as well as “the future of information.” He also said the platform has progressed in its options offerings, rolling out index options which have been one of the fastest growing sectors.

“I think that prediction markets are going to be a bigger and bigger thing across all events,” Tenev said. “Of course there’s lots of market participators – there’s people that speculate, there’s folks that use it to hedge like any market, and I think Robinhood can, can serve all of them.”

Sign up now for the CNBC Investing Club to follow Jim Cramer’s every move in the market.

Disclaimer