Robinhood Markets said Tuesday it's cutting nearly a quarter of its workforce, as crashing cryptocurrency prices and a turbulent stock market keep more customers off its trading app. CEO Vlad Tenev said the company, whose easy-to-use app helped bring a new generation of investors to the market, will reduce its head count by about 23%. The reduction of about 780 jobs follows another round of layoffs announced earlier this year, which cut 9% of its workforce and "did not go far enough" in cutting costs, Tenev said in a post on the company's blog, per the AP.
Bitcoin has fallen to roughly $23,000 from its record of nearly $69,000, with prices crashing across the crypto ecosystem. Stocks on Wall Street, meanwhile, dropped more than 20% from their record to put the S&P 500 in what's called a bear market. All that tumult means Robinhood saw its number of monthly average users drop to 14 million monthly active users in June. That's down from 15.9 million three months earlier and from 21.3 million in last year's second quarter. That decrease hurts the company because it does best when its customers are trading a lot.
Altogether, Robinhood reported a net loss of $295 million, or 34 cents per share, for the three months through June. That's a narrower loss than the $502 million, or $2.16 per share, reported for last year's second quarter. Revenue, meanwhile, fell 44% from a year earlier to $318 million, though it was stronger than analysts expected. "In this new environment, we are operating with more staffing than appropriate," Tenev wrote in his post. "As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on me."
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