Robinhood (HOOD) officially launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain at a London event on Wednesday, marking its deepest push yet into onchain financial infrastructure. The chain is a Layer-2 blockchain built on Arbitrum (ARB), designed for tokenized real-world assets and decentralized finance applications. The launch comes about four months after Robinhood began testing the network on testnet.
With the mainnet live, Robinhood's tokenized stock products — Stock Tokens — are now fully operational. Available through Robinhood Wallet in over 120 countries (subject to jurisdictional restrictions), the tokens aim to enable 24/7 trading of equities and their use across DeFi applications as collateral or in lending protocols.
Robinhood also introduced Robinhood Earn, a decentralized lending product. Users can lend USDG, the company's dollar-backed stablecoin, through a self-custody wallet to earn an estimated annual percentage yield of 7%.
Beyond the Robinhood Chain ecosystem, the company announced several other expansions. In Europe, Robinhood is broadening perpetual futures trading to include commodities, ETFs and foreign exchange markets alongside crypto. It plans to launch crypto trading in the UK, and following its acquisition of WonderFi, its services are now available in Canada.
The company also unveiled Agentic Accounts for crypto, an AI-powered trading tool. Eligible US users can connect AI models to Robinhood's trading infrastructure while keeping control over capital allocation and trading parameters.
Executive Commentary and Market Context
Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood's senior vice president of crypto, said: "Decentralized finance unlocks possibilities beyond what traditional finance can offer, but historically, it has required technical expertise to navigate." The product push shows how lines between crypto and traditional finance continue to blur. Robinhood has steadily expanded beyond stocks and spot crypto into tokenized equities, derivatives and event contracts (prediction markets). That strategy fits the race for the "everything exchange" to host all kinds of trading and financial activity under one roof, increasingly on blockchain rails.
Separately, Robinhood last month announced it would lay off 10% of its workforce (about 290 employees) to streamline its organization. On the day, Robinhood (HOOD) shares rose 5%, but remain about 30% below their October record.