Robinhood Desires 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 latest 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 known as derivatives, solely onto the blockchain.

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

A New Sort 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, a giant 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 essential freeway for digital transactions; a Layer 2 like Arbitrum is a quicker, much less congested aspect street that makes use of the principle freeway for safety, making transactions faster and cheaper. These tokens may be purchased and offered 24 hours a day, 5 days every week. Robinhood claims they arrive with no fee charges or additional fees 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 current 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 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 doubtlessly 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 (known as seamless bridging), and may be self-custodied. Self-custody means you, and solely you, straight management your digital property, slightly than a financial institution or brokerage holding them for you. This new blockchain may also assist staking (extra on that under) 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 exchange many core capabilities 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 alter fingers.

Futures, Staking, and Good 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 guess on the long run value of cryptocurrencies, with the choice to make use of leverage (buying and selling with borrowed cash to amplify potential beneficial properties 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 in style cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Solana. Staking is a option to earn passive earnings 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 to your digital property.

And there’s extra for patrons in each areas: European customers will acquire entry to good routing for crypto trades (a system that robotically finds the most effective value to 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 synthetic intelligence assistant designed to assist prospects rapidly 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, 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 slightly than by conventional clearinghouses. The thought is easy however revolutionary: exchange Wall Road’s outdated infrastructure with the effectivity and transparency of a blockchain.

Robinhood’s technique is obvious: make investing less complicated and extra extensively obtainable, utilizing the basic know-how of cryptocurrency to realize this. Usually, this may occur with out the person needing to be a “crypto native” (somebody deeply immersed on the earth of cryptocurrencies and blockchain know-how).

If profitable, this isn’t only a collection of latest product launches; it could possibly be a blueprint for the 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.