Robinhood Chain Goes Live With Tokenized Stock Trading
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- Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum-powered Ethereum layer-2 it calls "AI-native," with integrations from BitGo, Chainlink, Uniswap, and Pleiades for market making and prop trading.
- Robinhood is expanding its Stock Tokens — on-chain representations of shares in companies like Nvidia and Apple — by letting eligible (non-U.S.) users plug them into DeFi lending pools as collateral.
- Robinhood Wallet added in-wallet perps trading via decentralized exchange Lighter and opened Robinhood Earn to eligible U.S. users, who can lend the dollar-backed stablecoin USDG for around 7% APY.
- Robinhood is opening its app to users in Canada and Singapore, with U.K. crypto services expected "in the near future," on top of its nearly 28 million existing customers.
- HOOD shares finished Wednesday up more than 8% at $108.65, though the stock remains more than 29% below its 52-week high of $153.86.
- Robinhood cut about 10% of its staff last month after crypto revenue fell 34% quarter-over-quarter to $134 million from $221 million — a contraction the new chain launch is clearly designed to counter.
Why it matters: Robinhood is racing to bundle brokerage, tokenized equities, and DeFi into one app at a moment when crypto revenue just cratered 34% quarter-over-quarter and 10% of staff were cut — so the 8% HOOD pop reflects a bet that an AI-agent-friendly Layer-2 can revive growth, while U.S. users remain locked out of the headline tokenized-stock feature.
