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By Ishika Dangayach, 2:30 PM ET
Robinhood Markets Inc, the trading platform which got a lot oflight amid the GameStop saga, shares plummeted more than 10% after opening flat onthe Nasdaq on Thursday, valuing the online brokerage at over $28 billion.
Shares of the company opened at $38 and fell to a lowof $33.35. The company has regained some of its losses and is currentlytrading at $36, down roughly 5% from its offer price around 2:16 PM ET.
The firm, arguably the breakthrough financial technologystartup of its time priced its IPO on Wednesday and garnered $2.1 billion.
Its long-awaited debut comes months after it got caught upin a battle between retail investors and Wall Street hedge funds.
The popular online brokerage took an unprecedented step ofenabling users of its trading app to purchase up to one-third of its IPO shares before they trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol HOOD on Thursday. Generally, institutional investors and business insiders may often purchase shares in acompany before it goes public.
In 2020, Robinhood's revenue increased by 245 percent to$959 million. It subsequently more than quadrupled from the previous year'slevel to $522 million in the first three months of 2021.
The firm was compelled to raise $3.4 billion in emergency financing after its finances were stretched by the enormous increase in retailtrading.
Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, roommates at StanfordUniversity launched the business in 2013. The two will have a majority of the voting power, with Bhatt owning around 39 percent of the outstanding stock andTenev approximately 26.2 percent.
According to the documents, the business has around $12billion in cryptocurrency assets as of March 31, 2021. This is 23 times morethan the value of its crypto assets in 2020. During the same time period, morethan 9.5 million users exchanged about $88 billion in bitcoin on Robinhood'splatform, Money Control reported.
The company intended to reserve 20% and 35% of its offeringfor users of its trading platform, which allowed users to make unlimitedcommission-free transactions in stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrencies.
Moreover, the Trading service provider is planning to introducea new feature that would let traders invest spare change and help protect usersfrom crypto price volatility.
The upcoming feature will be called “round-up investments,”which was found as a hidden code inside a version of its iPhone app distributedto beta testers earlier this month and was discovered by iOS developer SteveMoser.
With inputs from Reuters