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Thread Guy · · 36 min

Johann Kerbrat - Robinhood's Crypto Comeback, Onboarding Retail & Tokenization

Johann KerbratThread Guy

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TL;DR
  • Robinhood Chain is being managed as a ten-year infrastructure bet, not a crypto-cycle trade. Since its July 1 launch, it has processed roughly 360 million transactions and attracted unexpectedly strong developer activity. Johann Kerbrat nevertheless calls current usage “the very beginning,” with the team still working “like it was day one.”
  • The 2023 retrenchment reflected regulatory ambiguity, not a reversal on crypto. Against the host’s backdrop of Robinhood’s 2023 delistings, Kerbrat points to Wells notices, including Robinhood’s, and an effort to protect a globally licensed business. Robinhood had launched crypto during the winter of 2018, “when everyone was saying that Bitcoin was dead”; tokenization has remained a multiyear project, with down markets used to build for the next recovery.
  • Robinhood’s moat is distribution without token-price baggage. The chain has no native token to defend, while Robinhood brings 27 million funded U.S. accounts, 28 million globally, and existing market-maker relationships. Its Morpho-powered Earn product puts approximately 7% stablecoin yield inside the main app, automatically creates a smart wallet, and had disclosed around $275 million of TVL—already among Morpho’s top vaults.
  • Tokenized stocks remain early—about 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs—but their strongest case is market structure rather than novelty. Instant settlement could have changed the capital lock-up problem discussed around GME; 24/7 trading lets investors react to Friday-night news; and on-chain fractionalization preserves Robinhood’s ability to start users at $1. Kerbrat’s objective is to deliver those benefits without forcing customers to ask whether a trade is on-chain.
  • Robinhood is initially aiming stock tokens at people outside the United States who lack inexpensive brokerage access. Kerbrat sees the opportunity widening as private assets, real estate, and other markets become tokenized. He also treats stock tokens as a composable primitive—usable as collateral, for microloans, or in unexpected meme-coin pairs that create premiums, arbitrage, and liquidity.
  • Robinhood intends to own the interface, not every protocol underneath it. Rather than build every DEX or perpetuals engine, it paired its wallet UX with Lighter’s backend and assembled custody and oracle infrastructure from BitGo, Privy, Fireblocks, Chainlink, and others, alongside multiple DEXs. Developers are being offered access to Robinhood’s main app and planned expansion across 120-plus countries, not merely another standalone chain.
  • Retail onboarding means hiding crypto’s machinery while leaving an exit for advanced users. Kerbrat says crypto was “made by engineers for engineers”; Earn therefore abstracts wallets, Arbitrum, L2s, and transaction approvals, while still allowing private-key export to MetaMask. The product test is customer pain—cost, speed, and usability—not whether Robinhood captures every layer of economics.
Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. Robinhood’s crypto strategy outlasted the cycle

  • Kerbrat rejects the host’s framing of Robinhood’s renewed push as a response to sentiment: the company launched crypto in the winter of 2018, “when everyone was saying that Bitcoin was dead.” The host connected the 2023 period to Robinhood’s asset delistings; Kerbrat instead points to regulatory uncertainty and Wells notices—including Robinhood’s—as the context for defensive decisions intended to protect a globally licensed business.

  • Tokenization had been underway for years, including Vlad’s Washington Post op-ed more than a year earlier. Robinhood’s pattern is to build during down markets so customers have new features when activity returns; stock tokens are already seeing “millions of trades happening on weekends,” something not possible through the traditional system.

  • The chain’s July 1 launch had produced about 360 million transactions, while developer engagement made it one of the most active L2s on that front. Kerbrat’s target is ten years out, when blockchain is expected to replace much of the traditional system; today’s traction is only “the very beginning.”

2. Distribution turns DeFi into a main-app product

  • One structural advantage is what Robinhood did not launch: a chain token. Kerbrat calls token-price management a “distraction that we don’t have”; instead, the chain is infrastructure supported by 27 million funded U.S. accounts, 28 million globally, and longstanding market-maker relationships. Those relationships also help support and legitimize DeFi stock-token products.

  • Earn shows how that distribution works. The Morpho-powered product offers approximately 7% on stablecoins inside Robinhood’s main app; when a customer participates, Robinhood creates a smart wallet and lends the tokens directly into its on-chain vault, without requiring the user to manage a private key.

  • Robinhood had published roughly $275 million of TVL, with the vault already among Morpho’s top vaults and continuing to grow. Kerbrat expects customers to test it before allocating more, while the balance updates every few seconds so accumulation is visible immediately. The host’s reaction: “The Morpho thing is crazy.”

3. Tokenization earns its case through market structure

  • The host’s pushback—worth keeping—is that tokenization rhetoric has outrun the metrics. Kerbrat agrees it is early: relatively few people hold on-chain wallets, and Robinhood offers exposure to about 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs, still a small subset of NASDAQ and NYSE listings.

  • Instant settlement is the clearest counterfactual. Kerbrat says the GME problem at Robinhood would not have occurred in the same way if the company had not needed to lock up massive capital while trades settled; on-chain settlement in minutes or seconds would have made it “a very different world.”

  • The second unlock is 24/7 access: “The world moves during the weekend.” News can break after Friday’s close, leaving investors unable to hedge until Sunday evening or Monday morning; Robinhood already sees a lot of stock-token volume on weekends. Fractionalization also arrives by default, preserving the $1 entry point that powered Robinhood’s early growth.

  • Between existing U.S. customers seeking extended hours and people lacking U.S.-market access, Robinhood is initially focused on the latter. Kerbrat points to European brokers still charging commissions or imposing minimums, while phones and internet are broadly available; adding private assets, real estate, and securities from more countries could gradually pull people toward tokenized RWAs.

4. Composability matters more than vertical ownership

  • Kerbrat views stock tokens as “a new primitive,” analogous to perpetuals—created roughly a decade ago in crypto and increasingly influencing traditional systems. Once available on-chain, stock exposure can become collateral, support microloans, or serve as raw material for products Robinhood did not anticipate.

  • Meme-coin pairs against stock tokens were one such surprise: they revealed premiums, arbitrage opportunities, and new liquidity. Robinhood does not treat RWAs and memes as separate universes; low latency, fast block times, and cheap gas serve both. Kerbrat cautiously adds, “I think the market cap has passed a billion on the chain already.”

  • Asked why Robinhood integrates Lighter instead of building its own perpetuals exchange, Kerbrat says the company could have built its own DEX and perps engine, but prioritization matters. Robinhood concentrates on an easy wallet UI and order experience while Lighter powers the backend; the host sees mobile perps as a large, underexplored market.

  • The launch stack included custody from BitGo, Privy, Fireblocks and others, Chainlink integration across stock-token products, and multiple DEXs. The developer pitch is that the chain is “not just a side project”: it reaches the main app and wallet, underpins new features, and is intended to help Robinhood expand across 120-plus countries.

5. The chain becomes useful when customers stop seeing it

  • Robinhood has 13 business lines generating at least $100 million each, spanning credit cards, banking, brokerage, and options. Kerbrat calls the chain “the infrastructure of tomorrow”: stablecoins could make international wires faster with potentially cheaper FX, tokenization can reach markets where traditional brokerage is impractical, and on-chain lending can reduce the middlemen who dilute yield.

  • The host presses the economic trade-off: Robinhood could own every DEX and perps venue, but would sacrifice open-network effects. Kerbrat says roadmaps rarely begin with maximizing revenue; they begin with customer pain and product-market fit. Crypto orders, for example, go to competing market makers to drive prices down, while Robinhood can still earn sequencer fees from inexpensive on-chain activity.

  • Kerbrat’s own first Robinhood account in 2015 or around 2016 turned a small deposit into sustained study of stocks, economics, and finance. His lesson is that many people fear “just taking the first step,” even though earlier financial habits compound for longer; Robinhood now wants products for every milestone, including children’s Trump Accounts, retirement, brokerage, and joint accounts.

  • For crypto, his diagnosis is blunt: it was “made by engineers for engineers.” Kerbrat points to transaction approvals that can drain a wallet, while the host recalls his old “grandma’s gonna have a seed phrase” thesis. Earn hides Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum, and L2 mechanics but permits private-key export to MetaMask. The host concedes that the times are sticky; Robinhood now wants builders across RWAs, prediction markets, banking rails, and meme coins to identify what is missing.

Full transcript
Thread Guy

Yo, yo, yo, what is good? It is Thread Guy, and I'm back with a recorded episode today. I'm joined by Johann from Robinhood, who is making the rounds right now on the podcast circuit. Are you sick of doing these yet?

Johann Kerbrat

No, it's actually pretty fun. I love talking to the teams.

Thread Guy

I know, I've enjoyed it. I've seen you on quite a few. You've had some really good ones. I don't usually love the intro question, but you might be new to some faces on YouTube, especially. Do you want to give us just a quick intro into who you are and what you're working on right now?

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah. Well, I'm Johann. I lead the crypto business at Robinhood. I've been at the company for more than 5 years, and before that I worked on payments and crypto for a very long time. So I'm really excited about talking today about the Robinhood Chain, Robinhood Wallet, and everything that we are doing in crypto at Robinhood.

Thread Guy

I love it. Thanks for being here. Also, quick lore: I'm from Northern Virginia, and I know Vlad went to TJ, so he's a Virginia—he's a local legend—

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah.

Thread Guy

—in my town, so shout-out to Vlad as well. But I mean, I guess to start, Robinhood Chain is live. You guys have really made a splash. I'm live every day talking crypto, TradFi stocks, and doing a lot of on-chain stuff, and Robinhood and Robinhood Chain have just been a topic of our stream every single day for the last couple weeks, definitely the last couple months here. I'm curious: how would you grade and think about the success of Robinhood Chain so far, and what were your expectations in really making this push?

1. Robinhood Chain Takes Off

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah. I think we're pretty happy to see the engagement. Some stuff that we were not expecting was how many developers would be building on the chain right away. We've seen on L2s, for example, that Robinhood Chain was one of the most active from a developer standpoint, so that was really exciting.

I think we were expecting a lot of enthusiasm around a company like Robinhood, which was more on the traditional finance side of things, getting all into crypto. But right now, we're really looking 10 years out. The target is when the blockchain is going to replace a lot of our traditional system. Not just the usage that we're seeing right now—it's just at the very beginning. So there's still a lot of work to do.

The teams are still cranking. We launched on July 1, and we've seen about 360 million transactions so far. The team is still working like it was day one, really trying to make sure that we have the whole ecosystem to support developers, as well as all the use cases that our customers are looking for.

Thread Guy

So, Robinhood kind of has this interesting story with crypto specifically, right? There's this 2023 bear market, crypto's a mess, and there's the infamous delisting of Solana and other assets. It's funny how it plays out because we get into 2026, where you could argue crypto sentiment is as low as it's been in a long time—maybe since FTX, maybe worse than FTX—and Robinhood is like, "You know what? Now is the time. We're going to make the push and double down on Robinhood Chain, double down on crypto."

Could you walk me through the hero's journey progression of how we got back to here, with Robinhood taking crypto as seriously as it is right now?

2. Building Through The Bear

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah. I wouldn't say sentiment is what has been driving some of these changes in strategy. If you think about it, we launched crypto at Robinhood in 2018, in the winter of 2018, when everyone was saying that Bitcoin was dead, when all the NFTs took a huge hit, and all the ERC-20s as well. We still got feedback from customers that they wanted to be able to trade and hold all these crypto assets. So even if sentiment was at its lowest, Robinhood still launched crypto.

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

So I wouldn't say sentiment is what's driving us in terms of strategy and roadmap prioritization. I think what happened in '23 was very different. There was regulation that was not very clear. There were Wells notices being sent left and right. Robinhood also received one.

We were also trying to protect the business as a whole and make sure that we were working with the regulator the way that we've been working with them since the launch of the company. We have licenses across the globe, and so for us it's very important that we make sure we work with regulators in a great way and make sure that we can still support our customers as a whole.

But the vision of the chain, the vision of tokenization, has been multiple years in the making. Vlad published an op-ed in The Washington Post more than a year ago explaining how tokenization is going to take over the financial system. That's really the vision that we've been working on for multiple years now.

Right now, seeing the cycle, it's more a focus on building for us. What we've been doing is, every time there's a bit of a down market, we make sure that we build features that people are excited about. When the market is coming back up, people can actually utilize all the features that we built.

The chain, the tokenization effort, all of that has been in the making for multiple years, and we're very excited to finally start seeing that happen. For example, we launched stock tokens on our chain. We see millions of trades happening on weekends—things that are not possible using the traditional system. That's the stuff that's really making us excited to keep going.

Thread Guy

I think as someone that's so focused on crypto, it's inspiring to see Robinhood do it now because, if you're really close to crypto and spend a lot of time trading on-chain, interacting with perps, trading on Lighter and Hyperliquid, and interacting with your primitives, you see that underneath the price, there's real innovation happening.

But I would argue that the macro TradFi global sentiment is really, really bad. I'm curious from your perspective, because you definitely have better—or at least a different—set of eyes on it than I do: what is the broad perception of crypto right now? More importantly, how do you think Robinhood's legitimacy can be used to leverage that into a more positive light? How does that evolve?

3. Robinhood Distribution Wins

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah. I think the big difference that we're seeing between Robinhood and some of the other chains and projects is, one, to begin with, we didn't launch a token with our chain.

For us, the blockchain is a technology. It's going to be the infrastructure that supports all this new development that we're doing and all this new build that we're launching. We don't have as much of this constant prioritization change because we're trying to keep a token up or flat in terms of pricing. I think that's a distraction that we don't have, and it's a huge advantage for us as a company.

The second thing is that we have this distribution. We have 27 million funded accounts in the U.S., and 28 million globally. It makes a huge difference when we launch projects to actually have this influx of customers utilizing the blockchain.

We launched Robinhood Earn, which is our lending protocol, with Morpho, where you can earn approximately 7% right now on your stablecoins.

Thread Guy

Nice.

Johann Kerbrat

That's on the main app, right? Anyone using their Robinhood account—the 27 million funded accounts—can see this. When they interact with it, we will create a smart wallet for them. We will lend their tokens directly into our vault on the chain.

That makes it super easy for people to access this technology. They don't have to create a self-custody wallet with a private key and everything. Everything is done for them.

The third part is that Robinhood has this massive business with multiple market makers on the crypto side, but also on the traditional equity side. When we're building new projects, all these institutions are actually excited to work with us because they've been working with us for multiple years.

For us, it's actually a lot easier to bring legitimacy to products like the DeFi stock tokens, for example, where we have major market makers behind them to support them.

Thread Guy

The Morpho thing is crazy. I think people forget that. It's in the main app.

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah, it's in the main app. We're introducing millions of customers who haven't touched crypto or blockchain technology before directly to our chain. They don't necessarily have to understand the underlying part.

The same way that when they send a text or an email, they don't really understand the protocol and don't really care about it. They just want the email to be sent, right?

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

It's the same thing here. They get the benefit of the high yield that we can get on DeFi, and they also get the convenience of having it within the main Robinhood app.

Thread Guy

How is adoption on that product so far? I know it's very, very new.

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah, it's been very good. We passed our TVL—I think we published around $275 million, and I think since then we continue to grow. It's one of the top vaults already on the Morpho protocol, so we're pretty excited by seeing the adoption. And I think it's just the beginning. I think a lot of people are going to try it and see how it works.

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

And then slowly put more money into it. One thing that I think is really cool in the future—I don't know if you tried it—but when you put money on it, it will automatically update every few seconds.

Thread Guy

Wow.

Johann Kerbrat

And so you see your money accumulating right away. So I find it very cool.

Thread Guy

Yeah. Get those dope mean heads in.

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah.

Thread Guy

So I think the thing we've seen, at least narrative-wise, really with Robinhood Chain is the perspective of tokenized stocks and RWAs. In crypto, we've sort of distilled the narratives down. There aren't that many things to get excited about, but the things to get excited about are potentially massive, right? Perps—huge. Huge, huge, huge idea. Tokenized stocks, RWAs—it's a huge idea.

And so we've sort of focused, I think, around these couple of optimistic verticals that have infinite potential. In a lot of ways, I feel like the rhetoric around tokenized stocks is as optimistic as it could possibly be, but the metrics show it's not really happening yet, right? Everyone's talking about it everywhere you look: tokenization. Brian Chesky, CNBC, Bloomberg—everyone's talking about tokenization. Vlad: “Tokenization, tokenization, RWAs, RWAs.”

But the metrics show that it's going up and to the right, but it isn't like everything is on-chain right now. Why do you think that is? Do you think it's just early? Is it maybe a relatively niche concept that isn't going to eat everything? Why do you think the metrics and the rhetoric are separate?

4. Tokenized Stocks Go Global

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah. I think we're at the very beginning, in my opinion.

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

If you think about the amount of people that just have a wallet to begin with and interact on-chain, it's a very small portion compared to the rest of the global population. And if you think about tokenization of assets, there still aren't a lot of them. You have U.S. stocks and ETFs like us, where we created a stock token that gives you exposure to them. We have about 200 that are available right now, but it's still a small amount compared to what's available on NASDAQ and NYSE.

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

It's also hard to get other exchanges or private stock and things like that. So we're just at the early, early stage. But where I get excited is seeing the instant-settlement piece. If you think about what happened at Robinhood with GME, this would not have been a problem if we had instant settlement, where we didn't have to lock up a massive amount of capital because you can just sell within a few minutes, or even seconds, on-chain.

The second piece is the 24/7 element. The market is moving during the weekend. The world moves during the weekend, right? You get news sometimes happening after hours on a Friday, and people have to wait until Sunday evening or Monday morning to basically hedge their position. You actually see a lot of our stock-token volume happening on the weekend.

And I think that's a huge element as well, because now you can actually trade news and think about your portfolio when you're not working, necessarily. I'm working all day long. I don't necessarily have time to manage my portfolio. I do it at night or on the weekend. So that's the kind of thing that I get really excited about.

And also fractionalization. Fractionalization is a huge element for Robinhood. Why we were successful at the beginning was allowing anyone to invest with as little as $1, because not everyone can afford a share of Amazon right away or a share of Microsoft right away. All of that, you get by default on-chain. You also get other elements like transparency and decentralization. You get better access, better latency—all these kinds of things.

So I think we're just at the beginning. It will take time to move the entire financial industry, right? We have some hedge funds or some companies that are still using technology that was built 20 years ago. To move them on-chain, it's going to take some time.

But the idea for us is really: How do we bring these values that I just mentioned—24/7, instant settlement, all of this—to our customers without them necessarily having to worry about whether it's on-chain or not on-chain? They just want to be able to trade the asset—

Thread Guy

To trade—

Johann Kerbrat

—that they are looking for, and then we will optimize for the rail that makes the most sense for them.

Thread Guy

It's crazy that GME couldn't have happened—the Robinhood GME situation couldn't have happened with instant-settlement tokenized stocks.

Johann Kerbrat

It would have been different. It would have been—

Thread Guy

It would have at least been different.

Johann Kerbrat

—a very different world.

Thread Guy

Yeah. Yeah, that's wild. I'm curious: What do you think is a bigger market? When I think about the marginal user of Robinhood tokenized stocks, is it a bigger market for Americans that are already on Robinhood and can now trade after hours and on weekends, or is it non-Americans that maybe don't have easy access to the American stock market and can now potentially access tokenized assets?

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah. Right now, we've been focusing on that latter point: people that are not necessarily able to access the U.S. market. If you look, for example, in Europe, a lot of brokers are still charging commissions or asking for a minimum before investing. If you look in different countries and different parts of the world, going to a brokerage in-house or a bank is actually pretty difficult. They don't necessarily have easy access there.

But most people now have access to the internet and have access to a phone where they can have their wallet. That's the type of market where we think there is something to do—where really anyone can start thinking about investing and start building their portfolio and their wealth through tokenization.

And I think the more you'll be able to add different types of assets from different parts of the world, or maybe private assets or maybe real estate, the more you'll see people slowly migrating into these tokenized RWAs—

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

—and understanding their value.

Thread Guy

And so, in a more niche market, I'm trading on-chain all the time, just paying attention to what's happening and experimenting. I know you're aware of what's happening and paying attention as well, and it seems like the first use case that I've had my hands on with tokenized stocks is creating meme coins or some sort of on-chain asset and pairing them with these stocks.

Some of these—most of these things are niche. Some of them have gotten a lot of traction. There have been some cool spots where there was GME, GME, and because there wasn't that much tokenized GME, the price went crazy, and people were minting new shares and arbing the price back and forth. It just sort of creates this new environment, if you will.

So I'm curious: Where do you see the evolution of tokenized stocks when it comes to being composable with other protocols? How experimental does it get? Is there anything that you want to see get built that doesn't really exist yet? How do you think that plays out?

5. Composability Opens New Markets

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah. I see it as a primitive—a new primitive. You talked about perps earlier. I think it's something that is really exciting for the crypto space. It was invented about 10 years ago.

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

And now we're actually seeing more and more traditional systems starting to use perps, and I think that's the type of innovation we want to see. I think stock tokens are a perfect example, where you can have this type of composability, using them as collateral in different places and being able to create microloans on top of them. There is so much to be done. We're just at the beginning.

Right now, we're focusing on giving the primitive to people and developers—giving access to these stock tokens. But I'm pretty excited to see what people are going to build on them.

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

The meme-coin pair, for example, is something that we didn't think about.

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

People putting memes against stock tokens, necessarily. But I think it's cool. You can see premiums, you can see arbitrage opportunities, and you see liquidity coming in.

I think that's the beauty of blockchain and crypto: You have so many brains from across the world working together on building new things that they're creating stuff we never thought about. And overall, the idea that meme coins and RWAs are two different things isn't really something that we're thinking about.

We built our chain to be optimized for very low latency, very fast block times, and cheap gas. Obviously, that works for both RWAs, but it also works for meme-coin trading and other types of assets that we're seeing on the chain.

We also saw a major pair creating more and more volume over the past couple of weeks. It’s all part of the process where liquidity has to come into the chain, and it’s starting to really increase. I think the market cap has already passed $1 billion on the chain, so then you need market makers, crypto-native people, and the non-crypto-native people we’re trying to bring in with Robinhood.

Thread Guy

You mentioned perps. I’m a huge Lighter fan. I’ve had Vlad on the stream a couple of times now, and I think Lighter’s an incredible product. I use Hyperliquid all the time. I’m curious how you think about integrating with Lighter versus building your own Robinhood perpetuals, versus a perpetual platform that is only on Robinhood Chain. How do you think about working with Lighter versus doing it yourself, or working with someone that’s only on Robinhood Chain?

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah. Really, for us, the goal is always: How do we get the most value to the customer? How do we bring the best experience for the customer?

I think we could have built a lot of things ourselves on the chain. We could have built our own DEX; we could have built our own perps DEX. But at some point, we also have to understand prioritization and what we’re really good at. I think what Robinhood is really good at is creating unique user experiences and very easy-to-use products.

Partnering with perps DEXs, spot DEXs, or other platforms is just a great way for us to focus on what we do best. We build the UI and UX on the Robinhood Wallet to use the perps product, and it’s pretty easy to use, I think.

Try it one day and you’ll see. It’s different from what we see on some other platforms, where it’s more web-first and pretty hard, in my opinion, to set all your orders and different parameters. We really focused on that aspect to make sure that it was one of the best, if not the best, UX and UI available for perps trading.

The engine in the back is powered by Lighter, and we have some pretty fun things coming up with Lighter around their points program with the Robinhood Wallet. We’re also pretty excited about that.

Thread Guy

I’m excited to see what you guys do with mobile perps, which is a huge market that’s fairly underexplored, because obviously Robinhood Mobile is the experience. I’m excited to see what you do there.

How do you think about attracting developers to Robinhood Chain, where you do have a lot of competition? Even though crypto is in somewhat of a downturn activity-wise, there are a lot of competitive places to go, right?

Solana had a crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy run. Base, while it isn’t the flashiest chain right now, is Coinbase, and Coinbase is crypto in a lot of ways. Then there’s Robinhood Chain, among a few others. How do you think about why somebody would come build their protocol on Robinhood Chain?

6. Making The Chain Core

Johann Kerbrat

I think what we did well was have a lot of partnerships ready for the launch of the chain. We have multiple custody providers, from BitGo, Privy, Fireblocks, and others. We have multiple oracles. Chainlink is probably the one we’re most embedded with across all our stock token products.

Like you said, we have multiple DEXs as well. We made sure that we had skills for AI development if you wanted to create your own wallet with Prevy, or trade directly on Uniswap with different scales. All of this was done in a way to create the environment to support any developer and make sure that they have everything they need to build on top of the chain.

The main reason we see developers getting excited is that they understand the chain is not just a side project for Robinhood. It’s going to be core to our strategy. We’ve been very vocal about the fact that it’s in the main app, not just in our wallet. It’s also in our wallet, but it’s in the main app.

We’re using it in some of the features that we’re currently launching. We want to do more with tokenization. We want to use the chain and our wallet as a way to expand internationally in 120-plus countries. It’s really core to our strategy.

A lot of developers understand that this will allow them to tap into the distribution Robinhood is going to bring to the chain, whereas some of the other chains are still at the beginning of attracting users and customers. Right now, our goal is to make sure that we can support them.

When people reach out, we’re always trying to make sure that they get what they’re looking for. Based on the feedback we get, we’ll also be able to improve the chain and make sure that we build anything that’s missing for them.

Thread Guy

On that side-project point, it’s a good callout. Historically, exchanges that have had blockchains have run into this issue where they’ve never really formalized the relationship between what is the exchange, what is the blockchain, and how do we intertwine them.

I think the one that’s probably done it the best is Binance. You have BNB Chain, and if you’re a token that is very successful on BNB Chain, you get listed on Binance Alpha. If people like it on Binance Alpha, you eventually make it to the exchange. You have this vertical integration stack.

I think the one that’s gotten the most criticism was Coinbase, because Coinbase launched Base, and it’s kind of unclear what makes it to Coinbase, what Coinbase wants, how the two things intertwine, and what this looks like. I’m curious: What is the formal relationship between Robinhood Chain and Robinhood, and how do you think about these things intertwining?

Johann Kerbrat

We really see the chain as the infrastructure of tomorrow. A lot of the systems that we’re using across all the different businesses—we have 13 different business lines at Robinhood that are making $100 million or more in revenue.

Just to give you an idea of the variety of businesses that we have: credit card, banking, brokerage, options. For us, a lot of the value we see on the blockchain is not just this idea that you can transact using wallets and everything, but everything that we’ve talked about, from instant settlement and transparency to better rails for sending wires, for example.

When people are going to use banking, right now we’re still using ACH and some of the traditional systems. But you could see a world where, if a Robinhood customer is sending a wire across the world, they could benefit from crypto rails using stablecoins, because we would have faster delivery and potentially cheaper FX. These are the kinds of things we’re thinking about.

For us, the goal has really been to make sure that the chain isn’t just going to be that side product, as I was mentioning, but also something that any team or any business across the company can tap into if they see some value from it.

That’s where we’re going to see it with tokenization. In places where we’re saying, “Hey, it’s actually too hard for us to offer the traditional brokerage system,” we were able to launch through our stock tokens product.

With the Earn product, instead of creating a lending program that is manual, with a lot of middlemen where everyone is taking a cut and therefore reducing the return, we were able to launch it through the chain. That’s kind of the idea.

We’re also making sure that we’re supporting our developers. We recently listed one of the tokens that was first on Robinhood Chain. We’re really going to make sure that the chain is part of the strategy at Robinhood.

Behind the scenes, when we talk with Vlad and the rest of the leadership, the chain is always part of the discussion: Where can we utilize the blockchain to bring value to the customer, reduce costs, or improve speed?

Thread Guy

To follow up on that, with Robinhood Chain, how does Robinhood handle the distinction between which financial services are best on-chain versus off-chain?

Off-chain, Robinhood can own the full stack and have full control. With some of these products built on-chain, maybe they get a ton of activity and Robinhood doesn’t get as much economic upside, but you get the decentralization of ideas and allow people to build on top of it.

There’s an argument to be made that Robinhood should just build and own every single product in the stack: own every DEX, own the perp. It would be the most economically viable, but then you would lose the network effects. It’s obviously a tightrope that you have to walk.

How do you think about what belongs on-chain versus off-chain, what should be owned by Robinhood versus left to the free market?

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah.

I will say, when we work on the roadmap and on new features and things like that, we rarely think about how to optimize for the best revenue outcome for the company. Obviously, sometimes we think about it.

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

We’re still a for-profit company. We’re still looking at how to make revenue, but we really have this core value that we call customer-centric, where we want to put the customer at the center and really understand what pain point they’re having and how we fix it.

When you do that, a lot of the time you’re actually going to make the decision very easy. My example is around sending a wire. The customer pain point is usually the foreign exchange fee and the time that it takes for the wire to settle. If we can do the same thing using stablecoins and make it cheaper for the customer, there’s absolutely no reason for us not to do it, because people will actually come to Robinhood to utilize our product because it’s better than what they have on the competing product.

That’s always the concept that we have here: trying to get to product-market fit first, or trying to attract customers because of our better products, versus optimizing just for revenue. I think it’s been working pretty well for Robinhood.

There’s a ton of stuff that we haven’t done internally. For example, when you place a trade on Robinhood Crypto and you buy crypto, we actually send it to multiple market makers. The reason why we do that is to put the market makers in competition, to drive the prices down on the crypto that you’re buying. The result is that we’re one of the lowest-cost places to buy crypto in the U.S., for example.

That’s the type of stuff that we’re really trying to optimize. We’re always finding new ways to generate revenue on our side. Even if it’s happening on the chain, and to your point, we may be losing some of the value to a perps DEX or to a spot DEX, we also get sequencer fees on our side. Even though we have very low gas fees, we still get some of that. That generates revenue.

It’s always a trade-off, but for us, what’s really important is what can benefit the customer and how we make the product better for them.

7. Onboarding Crypto For Everyone

Thread Guy

And I guess on the point of the best product for the customer, one of the last things I want to ask you about is Robinhood’s onboarding sauce. I’m 24, so I was getting financially literate in the viral era of Robinhood. All my friends are on it. I was learning how to trade options in high school and whatnot.

In a lot of ways, Robinhood invented the playbook, or popularized the playbook, for retail trading and getting normal people financially literate with financial products. I’m curious, as much as you could say about it, what is that sauce?

The reason I ask is, to the point of whether that same strategy can work in crypto, there’s always been this clashing idea that we throw around: onboard retail, onboard retail. What exactly does that mean? Is that a stock trader depositing money to earn yield into one of the Morpho pools on the Robinhood app, or is it bringing somebody on-chain to trade meme coins? I don’t entirely know what it means, but I’m curious how that onboarding sauce works as it relates to crypto.

Johann Kerbrat

Yeah. You know, I’m a lot older than you, so I didn’t have the same training.

I didn’t really learn about economics or finance at school. I didn’t learn it from my parents because they didn’t really have any money to worry about. I think, for us, when I started to actually learn about it was when I opened my first Robinhood account in 2015, I think—

Thread Guy

Wow.

Johann Kerbrat

Around 2016. I put a little money into it, and then slowly I started to track the portfolio and the stocks, trying to understand the metrics. More and more, I spent time on it, and then I was really hooked. I spent my weekends learning about economics and finance.

I think that’s what we need to do for a lot of folks. A lot of folks are just worried about taking the first step and really understanding what finance can do. That’s the sad part about it, because the earlier you start implementing some financial hygiene into your life, the more you’re going to get a compounding effect until you retire.

That’s where we’re really trying to push Robinhood, where we have the Trump account now—

Thread Guy

Yes.

Johann Kerbrat

—for your kids, if you just have babies. We have a retirement account as well, the brokerage account, and the joint account. All of these things are about having a version of Robinhood at every step and every big milestone of your life.

That’s what we’re trying to do with crypto. I’ve been in crypto since the beginning, around 2010. I always felt it was made by engineers for engineers.

Thread Guy

Yeah.

Johann Kerbrat

The first time you try to create a wallet and you have to authorize a transaction, if you authorize the wrong transaction and your wallet is drained, this is not made for everyone.

When I joined Robinhood, the idea was: how do we bring the 20 million-plus customers that Robinhood had on-chain without them necessarily having to worry about all the chain complexity?

That’s where I’m really excited about the Earn product that you mentioned, because a lot of people don’t need to understand what a blockchain is, what Robinhood Chain and Arbitrum and Layer 2s are, and everything else. They just want to get the better product at the end of the day.

For us, that’s what we’re going to try to do more and more: give people the education when they want to know and learn more. For example, if you want to export your wallet from the Robinhood app using the Earn product, you can take the private key and utilize it on your MetaMask or whatever wallet you want.

But for most people, I don’t think they’re going to use these options. They’re just happy with it on Robinhood. More and more, we’ll see some features using Robinhood Chain in the background, while others may not. It’s just about creating the better product for the customer.

Thread Guy

I like the “by developers, for developers” thing. It’s funny. I remember, in 2020 and 2021, when I was really trading crypto, having this conversation with my dad where I was like, “Man, you know, Grandma’s going to have a seed phrase and a MetaMask back in the day.”

He’s like, “I don’t think so.”

I’m like, “No, no, no. It’s get with the times or get left behind.”

But then you realize the times are sticky; they have their own way. You actually have to get with the times, not vice versa.

It’s inspiring to see what you guys are doing, and I really appreciate you coming on. I guess, as a final question to leave the audience with: especially for developers and people who are building stuff, what are you guys looking for? What does Robinhood Chain want to see? What are you trying to push people to work on? What verticals do you want to see innovation in?

What are you guys excited about and want to see more of?

Johann Kerbrat

Really, we’re excited about everything that we’ve been seeing so far, so it’s hard to pick. I think there’s still a lot of work to do on RWAs, prediction markets, banking rails, and also meme coins.

We’ve seen new launchpads being created on the meme side. We’ve seen these pairs trading with RWAs, and more and more being created.

For us, we just want feedback, actually, to be honest. Tell us what’s missing on the chain that you need to develop the product you’re trying to launch, and we’ll try to make it happen.

Thread Guy

Johann, it was awesome, man. By the way, I think we all appreciate the podcast tour you’re going on. You guys are active, you’re listening, and you’re going on the shows. Hopefully we get to do a part two sometime, but congratulations on everything.

Johann Kerbrat

Sounds good.

Thread Guy

I’m looking forward to seeing how you guys progress here.

Johann Kerbrat

Sounds good. Thanks for having me. It was fun.

Thread Guy

Of course. Thanks, everyone, for listening. I’ll see you on the next one. I’m out. Peace.