Robinhood Needs to Redo Wall Avenue on the Blockchain

Robinhood, the corporate behind some of the widespread 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 depart conventional Wall Avenue 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, 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 while not having a conventional stockbroker, a giant Wall Avenue agency, and even being bodily within the U.S.

Not like shopping for common shares by way 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 important freeway for digital transactions; a Layer 2 like Arbitrum is a sooner, much less congested facet street that makes use of the principle freeway for safety, making transactions faster and cheaper. These tokens could 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 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 may 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 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 objective, 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 could be self-custodied. Self-custody means you, and solely you, immediately management your digital property, moderately than a financial institution or brokerage holding them for you. This new blockchain can even assist staking (extra on that beneath) and seamless buying and selling while not having 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 capabilities of right now’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 Good Routing

Past the inventory tokens, Robinhood additionally introduced crypto perpetual futures for its European prospects. These are superior buying and selling instruments that enable buyers to wager on the long run worth 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 also be launching crypto staking, beginning with widespread cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Solana. Staking is a solution 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 in your digital property.

And there’s extra for patrons in each areas: European customers will achieve entry to good routing for crypto trades (a system that mechanically finds the most effective worth in your commerce by checking a number of exchanges). Each U.S. and EU prospects will see Cortex, an AI-powered investing instrument, 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 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 laptop code on a blockchain moderately than by conventional clearinghouses. The thought is simple however revolutionary: exchange Wall Avenue’s previous infrastructure with the effectivity and transparency of a blockchain.

Robinhood’s technique is evident: make investing less complicated and extra extensively obtainable, utilizing the elemental expertise of cryptocurrency to attain this. Typically, this could 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 latest product launches; it might be a blueprint for a way digital property quietly however basically reshape the worldwide monetary system from inside. The “Trojan Horse” has really entered the town gates, and the world is ready to see what emerges.