Robinhood Needs to Redo Wall Road on the Blockchain

Robinhood, the corporate behind one of the vital in style buying and selling apps for on a regular basis buyers, 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 property, like firm shares, funding funds (ETFs), and even advanced buying and selling instruments referred to as derivatives, solely onto the blockchain.

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

A New Type 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 prospects can get entry to those main American investments while not having a standard stockbroker, a giant Wall Road agency, and even being bodily within the U.S.

In contrast to shopping for common shares by means of 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 predominant freeway for digital transactions; a Layer 2 like Arbitrum is a sooner, much less congested facet street that makes use of the primary freeway for safety, making transactions faster and cheaper. These tokens may be purchased and bought 24 hours a day, 5 days every week. Robinhood claims they arrive with no fee charges or additional prices 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 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 expertise. 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 aim, they are saying, is to create a monetary system the place property commerce across the clock, are simply moved between completely different digital wallets (referred to as seamless bridging), and may be self-custodied. Self-custody means you, and solely you, straight management your digital property, reasonably than a financial institution or brokerage holding them for you. This new blockchain will even assist staking (extra on that under) and seamless buying and selling while not having 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, might substitute many core capabilities of in the present day’s monetary infrastructure: from the stockbrokers who execute trades to the custodians who maintain property and the exchanges the place they modify fingers.

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 buyers to wager on the longer term worth of cryptocurrencies, with the choice to make use of leverage (buying and selling with borrowed cash to amplify potential positive aspects or losses). In contrast to conventional futures contracts, these “perpetuals” by no means expire, providing steady publicity to crypto asset costs.

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

And there’s extra for purchasers in each areas: European customers will acquire entry to sensible routing for crypto trades (a system that robotically finds the perfect worth on 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 rapidly 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 every week, and their motion is managed by pc code on a blockchain reasonably than by conventional clearinghouses. The concept is simple however revolutionary: substitute Wall Road’s previous infrastructure with the effectivity and transparency of a blockchain.

Robinhood’s technique is evident: make investing easier and extra broadly out there, utilizing the basic expertise of cryptocurrency to attain this. Usually, this may occur with out the consumer needing to be a “crypto native” (somebody deeply immersed on the earth of cryptocurrencies and blockchain expertise).

If profitable, this isn’t only a collection 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 the town gates, and the world is ready to see what emerges.