Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest has jumped on the recent dips and added exposure to key crypto stocks – Coinbase and Robinhood.
On 03 March, the firm scooped 22,452 shares of Coinbase Global (Nasdaq: COIN) via its ETFs, ARKK, ARKW, and ARKF.
Based on the stock’s closing price of $182.36 on Tuesday, the bid was worth $4.09 million.
Additionally, the firm bought 158,587 shares of Robinhood (Nasdaq: HOOD), worth over $12 million based on the closing price of $76.07 on Tuesday.
Coinbase’s share price has dropped by 58% from its 2025 high of $444.65, while HOOD was down about 52% from last year’s peak of $153. Put differently, the stocks were trading at a discount and at an attractive level for long-term investors.
However, Ark Invest’s move also coincided with key updates linked to these crypto firms.
The Robinhood bid coincided with the firm scaling into wealth management after unveiling its Robinhood Advisor Network. According to the firm, the shift would help make Robinhood a “financial superapp” to further drive financial access.
Robinhood believes we may be at a great wealth transfer window and is positioning accordingly for this potential shift. Now, does that mean Ark Invest believes in Robinhood’s vision? Well, the latest exposure to HOOD can be viewed as Ark Invest’s vote on the firm.
Coinbase is also pursuing an “everything exchange” vision, from custody to prediction markets. It also runs Base, one of the largest Ethereum Layer-2s. More importantly, the exchange has doubled down on AI agents and is betting on them becoming mainstream.
In fact, Ark Invest projects that AI agents may make current human-focused DeFi apps obsolete and turn blockchains mainly into settlement layers.
“SaaS had an AI reckoning.
DeFi hasn’t.
If AI agents become the dominant economic actors, they may not need most of today’s DeFi apps.
That shifts everything back to protocols.”
In other words, the asset manager foresees an opportunity via Coinbase’s COIN to capture the incoming disruptions. Worth pointing out though that Ark Invest has expansive interest in crypto, especially infrastructure providers.
