Robinhood has gone live with its own Ethereum layer-2 public mainnet, launching what it calls Robinhood Chain on Wednesday. Built on Arbitrum technology, the network is pitched as a bridge between traditional finance and decentralized finance—bringing familiar brokerage features on-chain while aiming to reduce friction and cost by leveraging Ethereum scaling.
Key elements of the launch
- Infrastructure and partnerships: Robinhood Chain launches with integrations from BitGo (custody), Chainlink (oracles), and AMM partnerships with Uniswap for public liquidity and Pleiades for proprietary trading flows.
- “AI-native” design: Robinhood describes the chain as AI-native and says it will support trading by AI agents, enabling programmatic market activity and other automated strategies.
- Stock Tokens: The network will host tokenized, on-chain “Stock Tokens” that represent shares in major companies such as Nvidia and Apple. In eligible jurisdictions (not including the U.S.), those tokens can be placed into lending pools and used as collateral within DeFi.
- Wallet and product expansions: Robinhood is adding perpetuals trading directly inside its Robinhood Wallet via decentralized perpetuals exchange Lighter. Eligible U.S. users can also access Robinhood Earn to lend the dollar-backed stablecoin USDG for roughly 7% APY.
Robinhood framed the launch as an effort to remove barriers to DeFi. “Decentralized finance unlocks possibilities beyond what traditional finance can offer, but historically, it has required technical expertise to navigate,” said Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood SVP and GM of Crypto and International. “We’re bringing the best of traditional finance and DeFi together, and in doing so, expanding financial ownership to every corner of the globe.”
Geographic push and user base
Robinhood said it’s expanding the network to users in Canada and will add Singapore soon, complementing its nearly 28 million customers. The firm also expects to roll out crypto services in the U.K. in the near future.
Market and company context
Robinhood’s stock (HOOD) climbed more than 8% on Wednesday—about a 20% gain over the last month—trading at $108.65, though still roughly 29% below its 52-week high of $153.86. The rollout comes after a rough quarter for the company’s crypto business: Robinhood last month cut about 10% of its staff following a 34% quarter-over-quarter decline in crypto revenue, which fell to $134 million from $221 million.
Why it matters
By launching an Arbitrum-based L2 with custody, oracle, AMM and wallet integrations, Robinhood is betting that simplifying access to tokenized equities, DeFi primitives and AI-enabled trading will attract mainstream users who historically stayed in regulated, centralized venues. Whether tokenized stock markets, in-wallet perpetuals, and AI trading agents will scale as Robinhood hopes will be watched closely by regulators, investors and the broader crypto market.
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