Webull's second quarter was, by most measures, the best in the online brokerage's history. Revenue hit a record $198.8 million, up 51% from a year earlier and ahead of estimates, and the company swung to a $24.4 million net profit from a $28.3 million loss. The detail that stands out is what did not drive it: cryptocurrency trading brought in about $2.25 million, roughly 1% of revenue, a year after Webull relaunched crypto for US customers.
What actually made the money
The quarter belonged to derivatives and stocks. Trading-related revenue jumped 66% to $147.7 million, on 213 million options contracts (up 68%) and $279 billion in equity notional volume (up 73%), with order-flow rebates from equities and options contributing about $113 million, interest income $42.8 million and handling charges $34.8 million. The customer base grew to 28.2 million registered users, 5.13 million funded accounts, and $28.5 billion in assets, up 79%. The company also credited record volumes partly to June's elimination of the pattern day trader rule, which had restricted rapid-fire trading in small accounts.
Against those numbers, crypto's $2.25 million is a rounding error, and management is candid that the segment is early. "For the first time, probably in the last nine months, I am starting to see the clouds start to part in the crypto business," president Anthony Denier said, noting the platform is still gradually rolling out crypto deposits and withdrawals, plumbing that rivals have had for years.
An industry-wide pattern
Webull's experience would be easy to dismiss as a latecomer problem if the incumbent looked different. It does not: Robinhood's crypto transaction revenue fell 38% year over year to about $100 million in its own record quarter, even as bitcoin traded near two-month highs. Retail brokerage customers are not abandoning markets, they are trading options at record volume, but spot crypto trading through brokerage apps is shrinking as a share of the wallet.
There are structural reasons. Long-time crypto traders concentrate on dedicated exchanges and increasingly on ETFs, which moved crypto exposure into ordinary brokerage accounts without per-trade crypto fees. And this week's bitcoin rally was driven visibly by derivatives, a $1.7 billion short squeeze, not by a wave of new retail buying through apps.
Why it matters
For investors in the brokerage sector, the lesson of Webull's quarter is that crypto trading is a feature, not a business, for mainstream platforms: worth offering for completeness, unlikely to move the P&L. The revenue engines that matter are options volume, net interest, and whatever regulation does next to order-flow rebates, a concentration worth remembering when the next crypto bull run tempts the sector to re-market itself around digital assets.
