Robinhood Needs to Redo Wall Avenue on the Blockchain

Robinhood, the corporate behind one of the crucial common buying and selling apps for on a regular basis traders, simply revealed a sweeping new imaginative and prescient for the way forward for finance. And its daring plan appears to depart conventional Wall Avenue establishments behind.

The corporate announced a daring set of recent merchandise this week from Cannes, France. These choices are designed to maneuver conventional monetary property, like firm shares, funding funds (ETFs), and even complicated buying and selling instruments referred to as derivatives, fully onto the blockchain.

The clear message? Crypto isn’t only for digital cash anymore. It’s for every part.

A New Sort of Inventory Market

Probably the most attention-grabbing announcement was inventory tokens. Consider these as digital variations of U.S. firm shares and ETFs. Now, for the primary time, European clients can get entry to those main American investments with no need a conventional stockbroker, a giant Wall Avenue agency, and even being bodily within the U.S.

Not like shopping for common shares by a brokerage, these inventory tokens exist on Arbitrum, which is a Layer 2 blockchain constructed on high of Ethereum. Think about Ethereum as a busy principal freeway for digital transactions; a Layer 2 like Arbitrum is a quicker, much less congested aspect street that makes use of the primary freeway for safety, making transactions faster and cheaper. These tokens may be purchased and offered 24 hours a day, 5 days per week. Robinhood claims they arrive with no fee charges or further costs from them, and even pay out dividends (parts of an organization’s revenue distributed to shareholders, now paid on to token holders). Over 200 totally different shares and ETFs can be found.

In easy phrases: your funding portfolio now lives on a digital, decentralized ledger.

At our latest crypto occasion, we introduced a restricted Inventory Token giveaway on OpenAI and SpaceX to eligible European clients. Whereas it’s true that they aren’t technically “fairness” (you possibly can see the exact dynamics in our Phrases for these ), the tokens successfully give…

— Vlad Tenev (@vladtenev) July 2, 2025

Constructing Its Personal Digital Spine

However Robinhood isn’t simply utilizing present blockchain know-how. It’s actively constructing its personal customized Layer 2 blockchain. This new digital community is particularly designed to energy the tokenization of real-world property. This implies taking issues that exist within the bodily world, like firm shares, funding funds, and probably even actual property sooner or later, and turning them into digital tokens that may be simply traded and managed on the blockchain.

Robinhood’s final objective, they are saying, is to create a monetary system the place property commerce across the clock, are simply moved between totally different digital wallets (referred to as seamless bridging), and may be self-custodied. Self-custody means you, and solely you, immediately management your digital property, quite than a financial institution or brokerage holding them for you. This new blockchain can even help staking (extra on that beneath) and seamless buying and selling with no need conventional banks or clearinghouses, that are monetary middlemen that guarantee trades between patrons and sellers are accomplished easily and securely.

It’s a imaginative and prescient that, if it succeeds, might exchange many core features of right this moment’s monetary infrastructure: from the stockbrokers who execute trades to the custodians who maintain property and the exchanges the place they modify palms.

Futures, Staking, and Sensible Routing

Past the inventory tokens, Robinhood additionally introduced crypto perpetual futures for its European clients. These are superior buying and selling instruments that enable traders to guess on the long run worth of cryptocurrencies, with the choice to make use of leverage (buying and selling with borrowed cash to amplify potential good points or losses). Not like conventional futures contracts, these “perpetuals” by no means expire, providing steady publicity to crypto asset costs.

For eligible U.S. clients, Robinhood can also be launching crypto staking, beginning with common cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Solana. Staking is a option to earn passive revenue by “locking up” your crypto to help the operations and safety of a blockchain community. Consider it like incomes curiosity in a financial savings account, however to your digital property.

And there’s extra for purchasers in each areas: European customers will achieve entry to sensible routing for crypto trades (a system that routinely finds the perfect worth to your commerce by checking a number of exchanges). Each U.S. and EU clients will see Cortex, an AI-powered investing software, and U.S. clients will quickly get a crypto rewards bank card. Cortex is a man-made intelligence assistant designed to assist clients shortly perceive worth actions and market shifts in actual time.

Our Take

Whereas the U.S. monetary market stays closely regulated, Robinhood is strategically utilizing its established presence in Europe to experiment with a groundbreaking monetary future. On this imaginative and prescient, property are transformed into digital tokens, they’re accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, and their motion is managed by laptop code on a blockchain quite than by conventional clearinghouses. The thought is easy however revolutionary: exchange Wall Avenue’s outdated infrastructure with the effectivity and transparency of a blockchain.

Robinhood’s technique is obvious: make investing easier and extra extensively accessible, utilizing the elemental know-how of cryptocurrency to realize this. Usually, this could occur with out the consumer needing to be a “crypto native” (somebody deeply immersed on the planet of cryptocurrencies and blockchain know-how).

If profitable, this isn’t only a sequence of recent product launches; it may very well be a blueprint for a way digital property quietly however essentially reshape the worldwide monetary system from inside. The “Trojan Horse” has actually entered town gates, and the world is ready to see what emerges.