Robinhood Desires to Redo Wall Road on the Blockchain

Robinhood, the corporate behind probably the most standard 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 go away conventional Wall Road establishments behind.

The corporate announced a daring set of recent merchandise this week from Cannes, France. These choices are designed to maneuver conventional monetary belongings, 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 Type of Inventory Market

Essentially 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 prospects can get entry to those main American investments with no need a conventional stockbroker, an enormous Wall Road agency, and even being bodily within the U.S.

Not like shopping for common shares by means of a brokerage, these inventory tokens exist on Arbitrum, which is a Layer 2 blockchain constructed on prime of Ethereum. Think about Ethereum as a busy primary freeway for digital transactions; a Layer 2 like Arbitrum is a quicker, much less congested facet highway that makes use of the primary freeway for safety, making transactions faster and cheaper. These tokens might be purchased and bought 24 hours a day, 5 days every week. Robinhood claims they arrive with no fee charges or additional 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 completely 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 prospects. Whereas it’s true that they aren’t technically “fairness” (you’ll be able to 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 current 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 belongings. 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 belongings commerce across the clock, are simply moved between completely different digital wallets (referred to as seamless bridging), and might be self-custodied. Self-custody means you, and solely you, instantly management your digital belongings, fairly than a financial institution or brokerage holding them for you. This new blockchain will 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 consumers and sellers are accomplished easily and securely.

It’s a imaginative and prescient that, if it succeeds, may change many core capabilities of in the present day’s monetary infrastructure: from the stockbrokers who execute trades to the custodians who maintain belongings and the exchanges the place they modify arms.

Futures, Staking, and Sensible Routing

Past the inventory tokens, Robinhood additionally introduced crypto perpetual futures for its European prospects. These are superior buying and selling instruments that permit traders to wager on the longer term value of cryptocurrencies, with the choice to make use of leverage (buying and selling with borrowed cash to amplify potential positive factors or losses). Not like conventional futures contracts, these “perpetuals” by no means expire, providing steady publicity to crypto asset costs.

For eligible U.S. prospects, Robinhood can be launching crypto staking, beginning with standard 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 in your digital belongings.

And there’s extra for purchasers in each areas: European customers will achieve entry to good routing for crypto trades (a system that routinely finds the perfect value in your commerce by checking a number of exchanges). Each U.S. and EU prospects will see Cortex, an AI-powered investing software, and U.S. prospects will quickly get a crypto rewards bank card. Cortex is a man-made intelligence assistant designed to assist prospects shortly perceive value 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, belongings are transformed into digital tokens, they’re accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days every week, and their motion is managed by pc code on a blockchain fairly than by conventional clearinghouses. The thought is simple however revolutionary: change Wall Road’s previous infrastructure with the effectivity and transparency of a blockchain.

Robinhood’s technique is evident: make investing easier and extra extensively out there, utilizing the basic know-how of cryptocurrency to attain this. Typically, 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 the way digital belongings quietly however essentially reshape the worldwide monetary system from inside. The “Trojan Horse” has actually entered the town gates, and the world is ready to see what emerges.