StoneX Financial has recently opened its coverage of Robinhood Markets (NASDAQ:HOOD) with a Buy rating and a $170 price objective. The call came from Mark Palmer, managing director and senior research analyst at the firm. Against Tuesday’s close of $117.34, when the shares fell 3.91 percent, that target implies about 45 percent upside.
Palmer’s initiation argued that Robinhood’s operating trends are speeding up across almost every key measure.
Second-quarter net revenue increased 32 percent year over year to $1.31 billion.
Crypto-related revenue dropped 38 percent and now represents 8 percent of net revenue, compared with 16 percent a year earlier.
Rather than treating that mix shift as a setback, the note framed it as evidence that the company is no longer defined mainly by digital asset trading.
The core of the bull case is Robinhood’s move beyond commission-free retail brokerage into exchange platforms and blockchain infrastructure that can earn software-like margins.
Robinhood Chain, the company’s Ethereum Layer 2, launched on mainnet on July 1.
The research described recent 24-hour gas-fee collections that exceeded those of other Ethereum Layer 2 networks combined.
Daily fees were about $4.59 million by September 3, and annualized revenue was near $39 million as of August 29.
StoneX’s model projects that the chain could generate $980 million in revenue by fiscal 2029 at an 85 percent margin.
Prediction markets are the other growth engine cited in the report. In the second quarter Robinhood handled 13.6 billion event contracts, including more than 5 billion during the World Cup period.
That activity produced roughly $156 million in revenue, up 50 percent from the prior quarter.
On the same Tuesday as the stock’s decline,
Robinhood also disclosed equity stakes and commercial arrangements with Crypto.com and OG.com, including plans to route some event-contract volume to OG.com.
Palmer presented these businesses as the reason the stock should be valued less like a traditional broker and more like a platform building high-margin rails.
The $170 target is among the more aggressive recent Street estimates and assumes the Layer 2 network and event-contract franchise can scale fast enough to support a higher multiple.
The rating is an initiation, not a settled consensus.
Forward estimates can shift with user engagement, regulation, crypto-market conditions, and execution on the new infrastructure. Even so, the StoneX note adds to a growing set of analyst arguments that Robinhood’s next phase of growth may come from software-style economics rather than trading commissions or crypto volume alone.
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