Robinhood just took a big leap toward putting traditional finance onchain.
At its “The World Is Flat” event in London’s Old Royal Naval College, the retail brokerage unveiled Robinhood Chain — a public, permissionless Ethereum Layer-2 built on Arbitrum tech — and a new generation of tokenized stock products that can move freely across decentralized apps. The company also announced lending products, perpetual futures, AI-powered trading accounts and other crypto features. The news sent Robinhood shares up more than 8%, trading near $108 at the time of the event.
What Robinhood Chain is and why it matters
- Robinhood Chain has moved from a February public testnet to mainnet and is designed to host tokenized real-world assets, DeFi apps, lending protocols and perpetual futures exchanges.
- The network launches with an ecosystem of partners: Uniswap will deploy a dedicated automated market maker as a main liquidity venue, Pleiades will operate a proprietary trading platform, and services will integrate with Alchemy, BitGo and Chainlink.
A new era of Stock Tokens — but with legal limits
- Robinhood introduced a new generation of Stock Tokens that eligible users in 120+ countries can hold in Robinhood Wallet, trade 24/7, and use across DeFi — for example as lending collateral.
- Important legal detail: these tokens are issued by Robinhood Assets Jersey Limited as debt securities that track the economic performance of underlying equities. Token holders do not get legal ownership, voting rights or traditional shareholder privileges.
- Robinhood’s original tokenized equity products will be rebranded as Classic Stock Tokens and continue to offer exposure to over 2,000 stocks and ETPs through its European app, though those older tokens can’t currently be moved to external wallets.
Yield, perpetuals and AI agents
- Robinhood Earn lets eligible U.S. users lend the USDG stablecoin from a self-custody wallet. The platform advertises an estimated annual yield around 7%, with lending infrastructure provided by Morpho and support from Steakhouse, Ethena, Spark and Maple. Robinhood stresses yields are variable, not guaranteed.
- Robinhood Wallet users will get access to perpetual futures via the Ethereum-based DEX Lighter. Robinhood and Lighter are putting up $11 million in LIT tokens to fuel a trading rewards program tied to eligible activity.
- International rollouts will expand perpetuals to commodity, ETF, FX and index products across Europe over time, subject to regional rules.
- The company also launched Agentic Accounts for crypto — eligible U.S. users can connect external AI models to dedicated trading accounts and set caps on how much capital those automated agents may manage.
Global expansion and corporate context
- Robinhood completed its WonderFi acquisition in June and has formally entered Canada; crypto trading is slated to launch in the U.K.
- The announcements arrive as Wall Street grows more upbeat: Cantor Fitzgerald raised its price target from $110 to $130 (Buy), Goldman Sachs nudged its target to $108, and Truist Securities reaffirmed a Buy with a $100 target.
- At the same time, Robinhood is navigating headwinds — it recently cut roughly 10% of its workforce (about $28 million in expected charges), and Q1 crypto transaction revenue fell 47% year-over-year to $134 million even as overall revenue rose 15% to $1.07 billion.
Bottom line
Robinhood’s new chain and tokenized stock push mark a significant step in bridging equities and DeFi infrastructure. The technical integrations and product suite could broaden onchain access to traditional assets — but the legal structure of the Stock Tokens and macro business pressures mean investors and users should weigh both the opportunities and the limits as the rollout proceeds.
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