Cathie Wood’s investment firm ARK Invest was quick off the mark to purchase 1,297,615 shares of Robinhood as the company went public on Thursday.
With Robinhood's stock closing its inaugural trading session on the Nasdaq at $34.82, this makes the purchase worth more than $45.1 million.
According to data disclosed by ARK Invest, this was also the company’s largest purchase of the day across all six actively managed exchange-traded funds (ETFs), with the shares going to the ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK).
What is Robinhood?
Robinhood is a popular trading app which allows retail investors to trade commission-free stocks, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Dogecoin (DOGE), Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin SV (BSV), and Ethereum Classic (ETC).
Seen as a potential competitor to Coinbase, which went public in April this year, Robinhood also played a pivotal role in Dogecoin’s meteoric rise earlier this year, as the meme coin was responsible for 6% of the company’s revenue in Q1.
In the same period, as much as 17% of Robinhood’s revenue came from crypto, earning the attention of the company’s C-suite.
In May this year, Robinhood Crypto's COO, Christine Brown, told Decrypt that the company is working on enabling crypto transfers to external wallets—the feature currently not available to the app’s users. The company is also exploring ways in which users can stake and lend their cryptocurrencies.
The Robinhood purchase is only the latest in Cathie Wood’s focus on crypto and crypto-adjacent companies.
In the past months, ARK Invest has been regularly purchasing Coinbase stock, Grayscale’s Bitcoin product (GBTC), as well as shares in Jack Dorsey’s Twitter and Square.