Robinhood's Plan to Bring Global Finance Onchain | Johann Kerbrat

Robinhood launched Bitcoin and Ethereum trading in 2018 and has since expanded its crypto wallet to over 120 countries. It acquired Bitstamp last year to add institutional services including staking and lending, and acquired a Canadian company called Wonderfly to launch Robinhood Canada on July 1st with no trading fees for the first 90 days. The company now has 11 business lines each generating over 100 million dollars per year, and Johann Kerbrat said the goal is to reduce dependence on trading volatility by diversifying crypto revenue across lending, perpetuals, and other products.

Robinhood launched its own blockchain on July 1st, built as an Ethereum L2 using the Arbitrum stack. Kerbrat said the team chose to build from scratch rather than acquire an existing chain to avoid legacy baggage and retain control over block time and gas fees. Ethereum was chosen as the anchor for its liquidity, decentralization, and security. Robinhood reduced gas fees dynamically at launch in response to high demand, which Kerbrat said was only possible because they control the chain. Three weeks after launch the chain had approximately 750 million dollars in market cap, one billion dollars in TVL, and had passed 105 million transactions. At the time of recording, 24-hour DEX volume exceeded 560 million dollars and the chain had nearly 2 million total addresses. Kerbrat noted that most DeFi users active on the chain in the prior 24 hours were users from other chains that Robinhood had not previously reached.

Robinhood treats the chain primarily as backend infrastructure rather than a direct revenue vehicle. The chain is permissionless and Robinhood does not direct individual projects on token strategy. Robinhood currently has no plans to launch its own token and uses Ethereum as the gas currency. Kerbrat said a Robinhood-specific token could be considered in the future only if there were a genuine reason that benefits customers. Robinhood evaluates the chain primarily on daily active users and total value locked, and Kerbrat acknowledged that AI agents and bots can distort transaction and wallet counts, complicating interpretation of those secondary metrics.

Robinhood launched lending, perpetuals, and spot products simultaneously with the chain to ensure an ecosystem was ready at launch. It partnered with Morpho for lending, Blider for perpetuals, and Arcus on the spot side. Robinhood invested in Blider last year as part of a deeper integration strategy. The lending product launched at approximately 7 percent and was designed to hold that rate stable rather than fluctuate within hours. Kerbrat said Robinhood Earn offers roughly 7 percent yield while the real lending rate is approximately 3 to 4 percent, and described this as not a subsidy. Robinhood has no revenue share arrangement with Morpho, while the revenue share with Blider is public and on-chain. Robinhood partnered with Lloyds of London to create insurance coverage for smart contract risk, which Kerbrat described as probably one of the largest insurance programs created for crypto, and said Morpho's detailed documentation was necessary to secure that arrangement.

Robinhood offers a crypto-as-a-service white label platform used by institutions including European banks such as BBVA, with some institutions using it to move funds between entities via stablecoin on-ramps and off-ramps. In the EU, Robinhood offers perpetuals through its centralized platform using Bitstamp as the exchange. Kerbrat noted there are significant open regulatory questions around perpetuals in the US market. Robinhood discussed working with Hyperliquid but chose to build a platform unique to Robinhood instead. Robinhood also created a perpetuals trading experience within its wallet that allows users to use stock tokens as collateral.

Kerbrat said tokenized equities are underhyped and that regulation rather than technology is the primary reason tokenized assets are not more widely adopted. Robinhood has a tokenized stock product available on the wallet, with the RWA project Stocktoken holding about 19 million dollars in TVL on the chain. Kerbrat said the on-chain and off-chain worlds will converge, with tokenized stocks eventually enabling portfolios to be used as collateral more easily across more countries, though moving all of Robinhood on-chain is likely further out than a five-year horizon. He views Coinbase pushing similar on-chain products as a net positive rather than a competitive threat, arguing tokenized assets only gain legitimacy if more participants adopt and trust them.

Global access is a central motivation for the strategy. Kerbrat pointed to European platforms still charging at least one euro per trade and described the complexity of buying a stock on an Indonesian exchange as a problem Robinhood aims to solve. Robinhood has 27 million funded accounts, which Kerbrat described as a unique distribution lever. He sees tokens as a meaningful alternative to traditional capital formation, predicts companies will increasingly choose token issuance over conventional exchange listings, and expects tokens and equities to converge over time. Kerbrat said the primary tension between himself and co-founder Vlad Tenev is over pace, with Vlad pushing to move faster and Kerbrat requiring more time to build soundly as an engineer.