ap photo This 2020 photo shows the logo for the Robinhood app on a smartphone in New York. The company revealed on Thursday a revenue surge in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as it prepares to sell its own stock on the Nasdaq for the first time.

NEW YORK — Robinhood saw its revenue more than quadruple early this year as the new generation of investors it’s helped empower shook up Wall Street with their newfound trading power.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday, Robinhood also said that it wants to sell a big chunk of its stock to those customers and that cryptocurrencies are becoming a much bigger part of their portfolios. It’s preparing to sell its own stock on the Nasdaq for the first time under the symbol HOOD, in what’s likely to be one of the year’s biggest offerings.

Robinhood’s IPO will give investors a chance to own part of a fast-growing company that has rocked the traditionally staid brokerage business. Since its launch in 2014, Robinhood’s popularity has forced rivals to get rid of commissions and to offer apps that make trading easy and maybe even fun.

But as it’s drawn in 18 million funded accounts, with more than half its customers first-time investors, the company has also faced a mountain of criticism from regulators and users alike. Robinhood has agreed to pay more than $130 million in recent years to settle accusations by regulators, with the most recent fine announced just a day earlier.

Among the accusations: It improperly allowed some users to make riskier trades than they were perhaps ready for; it failed to make clear to customers that it makes most of its money by routing their trades to Wall Street firms taking the other side; and its supervision of its technology was weak and helped lead to outages of its service.

And the regulatory scrutiny isn’t finished. The California attorney general’s office in April issued an investigative subpoena to Robinhood’s crypto trading subsidiary, asking about its trading platform and other matters.

For all the controversy surrounding it, though, Robinhood offers something that’s always in great demand on Wall Street: explosive growth.

Robinhood’s revenue rocketed to $522.2 million in the first three months of the year, up from $127.6 million a year earlier. It lost $1.4 billion during the quarter. But that was almost entirely due to a $1.5 billion charge related to cash it raised early this year following a frenzy of trading activity that forced the sudden posting of much more in collateral to the clearinghouses that process trades. It’s coming off a profitable year, where it earned $7.4 million after losing $106.6 million in 2019.

Robinhood had 17.7 million monthly active users in the first three months of 2021, more than doubling in a year. They’re holding stocks and options and — increasingly — cryptocurrencies. Crypto accounted for 14% of all of Robinhood’s assets under custody in the first three months of 2021.