Bankless - Robinhood Announces Tokenized Stocks! LIVE with CEO Vlad Tenev, Johann Kerbrat, and AJ Warner

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

In this series of three interviews from Cannes, we host Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, Johann Kerbrat, GM of Crypto at Robinhood, and AJ Warner from Arbitrum to explore key announcements from their recent Token Summit. They discuss the introduction of tokenized stock options for private companies like SpaceX and OpenAI, aiming to democratize access for retail investors. Vlad highlights Robinhood’s commitment to addressing investment inequities, while Johann shares insights on the technological challenges and their Layer 2 blockchain initiative facilitating 24/7 trading. They also navigate the regulatory landscape with the SEC and CFTC, envisioning a future where private shares become accessible and entrepreneurial capital raising is enhanced. The conversation wraps up with plans to improve user experience for new financial products in Robinhood’s evolving crypto offerings. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🟠 BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Interview with Vlad Tenev 21:00 Interview with Johann Kerbrat 37:30 Interview with AJ Warner ------ RESOURCES Vlad Tenev https://x.com/vladtenev Vlad’s Washington Post Op-Ed https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/28/investing-crypto-tech-robinhood-stock-market/ Johann Kerbrat https://x.com/johannkerbrat AJ Warner https://x.com/ajwarner90 ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

I'm here with Vlad, the CEO of Robin Hood, right at the end of their To Catch a Token Summit. Vlad, you guys launched so many things today. As this wraps up, share a little bit of your sentiment. How are you feeling? I'm feeling really good. I mean, I think that there was one technical glit, which you probably noticed. Oh, the slow connectivity? I thought that was easily overcomable.

Yeah, yeah. So what turned out what happened was so many people were downloading the app and trying to get the stock tokens that it brought down the network. So, yeah. it turned out everything worked. I thought the team did a nice job and it was a lot of fun. You know, we put so much work into these products. The engineers are building them. They've been working for a long time that I think the least we can do is put on a nice event so that we can communicate the value as nicely as possible. So I think it was a lot of fun. It was hopefully the crowd enjoyed it too. You guys did a great job. Now, I had the embargo. You guys gave us the

embargo, so I knew what was coming. Yeah. Except for the private tokenized companies of SpaceX and OpenAI, which I think kind of stole the show for what everyone was excited about. And that's really something that is something that Robin Hood is really tapping into what feels like just the financials like Ice of Our Times. You know, with so much VC capital out there, companies are able to stay private later and later.

This is something that we talked about last time you were on the show. Was this something that because after you built out the tokenized stocks, products offering, you were like, oh, we could easily just extend this to private companies? Or what was the thought process behind that? Yeah. So the thought process was twofold. I don't know if you've caught the op-ed that I wrote in the Washington Post earlier this year. And really, I've been thinking about tokenization for many, many years. And the benefits of tokenization is very, very clear that it's the future. And it's very useful for Europeans and folks outside the U.S. And then when you communicate the value of the technology inside the U.S.

It's sort of like talking about high speed rail when you already have medium speed rail. Right. And by that I mean in the U.S., we already have pretty robust financial infrastructure. It's not amazing, but, you know, we don't have 24-7, we have 24-5 trading of stocks. It's pretty good.

It's pretty easy to use. Robin Hood, I think, has played a role in democratizing it and making it accessible to tens of millions of customers. So the delta between tokenization and the existing infrastructure for public stocks is there. I think it will happen, but it's perhaps a little bit less severe than outside the U.S. But one benefit that I think is very, very strong is the ability to make all kinds of assets tradable, even those that aren't on liquid exchanges. And private stocks are this thing that, you know, it's frankly a big problem.

You have companies like SpaceX and Open AI that are worth hundreds of billions. They're essentially able to raise unlimited amounts of capital while staying private. And if you're a retail investor, you're shut out from all of that appreciation. Even a high net worth investor has difficulty getting into some of these companies. And interestingly enough, they're also the coolest companies that everyone wants access to. Yeah. It's actually, it concerns me quite a bit that AI, I believe, is going to be an incredibly transformative, platform shift, probably bigger than we've had it before, bigger than mobile, maybe even bigger

than the internet on relative terms. And yet, it's not like the internet where you had the dot-coms and you could have exposure to all of these assets in the private markets. By and large, a lot of the innovation is in private companies that shut out retail. So if we can democratize it, make it available outside the U.S. where there's clarity, but over time, bring this technology, which truly will allow 24-7 real-time trading of private companies to the U.S. as well. I think that could, I mean, I think that could resolve one of the greatest long-standing in capital markets today. So I'm imagining this rollout to Robin Hood Retail.

There can only be so many shares of OpenAI and SpaceX on the market. It is a private company. There are shares that do float, that do trade. Correct. But there can't be that many. I could imagine the hype behind this. growing quite large, and then all of a sudden, there being a supply shortage of OpenAI or SpaceX shares to create a pretty premium, a premium on the shares. Do you have enough of those shares

to actually supply to the market that has the demand for them? Well, this is just the beginning. And as I mentioned on the presentation, the OpenAI and the SpaceX shares right now are a gift to these users. So we had, I want to say, a million Open AI, half a million of SpaceX. So you're right. The focus now is on making sure we can get them tradable 24-7. I think that will be a big technology unlock, and we believe we have a path to do that. And then over the long run, we're going to open this up much bigger. So I think you should be able to, on a secondary basis, transact a huge number of private companies, large number of private companies, thousands. And then I think this could actually grow to a primary source of capital as well.

So if you think about OpenAI, SpaceX, companies of that nature, they have raised tens of billions in funding, maybe hundreds of billions. And so if retail can become a mechanism and a vector, not just for secondary transactions, but for entrepreneurs when they want to raise primary capital, even at early stages, I think that's super transformative for entrepreneurship. And people don't talk about that enough. I think that could lead to more startups and more entrepreneurship in the world. by a very, very wide margin. Yeah, certainly there's something that the NASDAQ and the New York stock exchange should really be taking a look at, which is that there's a possibility that OpenAI, SpaceX, say, this tokenization vertical out of Robin Hood really gets a lot of traction, the traction that I'm

sure you wanted to. If there is dominant liquidity for these assets that happen on chain and inside of crypto venues, and the companies can also raise money from retail investors or just from the private market world, even though it's trading publicly, there's perhaps just never a need for these private companies to actually do the traditional IPO and go on the public traditional markets, but they can go on the public blockchain markets. Is that a world that you're trying to foster? Well, I think a lot of people ask about, you know, alternatives to the traditional IPO process. I think we've already seen an alternative to the traditional IPO process, which is companies just staying private,

essentially forever. I mean, these. companies have an alternative. They could just keep raising unlimited amounts of capital in the private markets and in doing so shut out retail potentially forever. I mean, you've had some founders say that they're not they never plan to go public. It's a burden. Yeah. So I think I think the solution for that case is I mean, I'm generally pro the IPO as a process. Of course, it's gotten very burdensome, but Robin Hood became a public company in 2021. I think some people in the environment will just choose to not go public. And for that, we need to figure out how to unlock the private shares and make them available to retail as well.

Certainly. Now, there's a notion that capital begets capital liquidity against liquidity. And again, if these private companies start trading on crypto venues, you can see the dominant price discovery of these assets, the liquidity of these assets happen on chain or on BitS stamp for, and its weekends and amongst those other things. And one of the big features of this is the 247 365 markets that tokenization really enables for you. There have been some promises that the crypto industry checks that we wrote as an industry back in 2011, 2013, everything is going to come on chain. We're going to tokenize the world. 247.365 trading include retail earlier and earlier in the process. And just there's a couple announcements here, the tokenized stocks, tokenized private companies,

and 24-7365 trading of traditional assets all happening in this announcement. And so I'm getting this idea that, well, there's a few instances of Robin Hood actually cashing that check that the crypto industry conceptually wrote in 2013. So it gets me excited. There's no real question here. But there's a full circle coming here at this event. Yeah, I think that it's really interesting. So there has been a lot of talk and legitimacy.

not a ton of action in the form of usable products that are compliant in like real jurisdictions. And I think the problem, the reason it's taken this long is you need to be incredibly strong at two things that are very, very different. One is there needs to be a certain amount of like regulatory know-how, working with regulators, trad-fi muscle, I'll call it, that we've kind of, you know, refined over 10 plus years of being regulated very, very, very heavily across multiple jurisdictions. We also have to understand these assets and these traditional assets that we have to tokenize. And we've built up a very, very scaled traditional financial services business while simultaneously becoming one of the

largest players in retail crypto in the U.S. but now expanding outside. And so I don't think too many companies can bridge that gap of being very, very strong in TradFi and crypto. And I think that's what's needed to merge the two. And also just being sort of like more, more muscular from a regulatory standpoint where, you know, we've worked hard over the past 10 years. And a lot of the policymakers and regulators that have helped make this happen are actually at this event tonight. Certainly. Yeah. So one of the announcements that you guys had is perps, futures, perps for crypto assets. But once you have a tokenized stock, that also becomes a crypto asset. So down the is there on the roadmap perps, perp futures, as you announced for crypto, but for tokenized

stocks? That's a good question. I think the intent is the technology that we've built here is incredibly general. It can be used to power and tokenize pretty much anything. And actually, you know, private stocks and public stocks are quite different mechanically as assets. So, you know, we'll take customer demand. We'll probably have futures versions of crypto assets. I mean, we've listed a bunch of those in the U.S. already with, you know, the micro-XRP and ETH and Solana futures, which are sort of like trad-fi instruments of crypto products. And then with tokenization, it's crypto instruments that reflect trad-fi products.

And we'll just offer everything. customers want in a, you know, safe and compliant manner. That's, that's the goal. The crypto idea is that perps are better than options. And so the crypto believer will say, like, oh, well, if it's a head-to-head competition between perps and options, people are going to use perps every single time. It's more intuitive. It's more easy to think about. And so I would hope that as perps becomes more understood by the audience, the consumer base, that perps as a financial instrument would proliferate, you know, alongside the rise of tokenized equities, tokenized That's my attitude.

I don't know if you have a comment on that or anything at all. You know, I don't want to upset my options friends. I think they have their unique use cases. I mean, there are certain scenarios where an options trade might make sense. And, you know, you could put together a multi-leg strategy and benefit from sideways markets, perhaps a little bit more easily than you could with a straight up perpetual future. You could have, you know, iron condors or butterflies. You know, these are things that are active traders are really experts in many cases.

So, you know, if there's a demand for those products, we have the capability of adding them as well. And with the access for the United States markets, which I'm sure plenty of United States viewers watching this and also watching the announcement, I'm sure just chomping at the bit to get their hands on perps on side of Robin Hood or tokenized ox on side of Robin Hood. I know you guys are barred by the CFTC. You guys need the CFTC to give yourselves a thumbs up. Coinbase, I'm sure, is also waiting for that same regulatory green light to launch these tokenized stocks for their retail base. Are you in conversations with the CFTC? Are we at the beginning of this conversation?

Kind of where are we for U.S. citizens getting their hands on these things? Yeah. I mean, it's our belief that tokenized stocks in the U.S. will end up being governed by the SEC, regulated by the SEC. I mean, that was the perpetuals conversation. Pardon me. Yeah, the perpetuals. the perpetuals would be governed by the CFTC.

And when it comes to stocks, I think there's openness from the SEC, the Crypto Task Force, who we have been, we have been having meetings with. You know, Johan, our Crypto GM was in Washington a couple of weeks ago on the tokenization roundtable, which was hosted by the Crypto Task Force. And yeah, it's our belief, actually, that this can be done by the SEC alone without the need for additional rulemaking by Congress. And they seem open to it. I think in the U.S. in particular, we want to make sure any product we roll out is like fully compliant.

Totally. And the regulators are on board every step along the way. In particular, because our offerings in the U.S. are so good already. Right. I mean, we've got 24-5 trading of a huge universe of stocks. It's very easy to use with Robin Hood. So, I mean, you would get weekends and holidays. which are nice, but we want to make sure that it's very, very good and an amazingly compliant product.

And we think we can get there. We have the technology. We think we can get there relatively soon. Certainly. So Robin Hood has become a leading crypto platform for its retail user base, largely because you guys have so much distribution. Your crypto products previously have lagged other competitors, whereas, like, Coinbase has more assets on their platform. They had their wallet before Robin Hood had the wallet. When Robin Hood would release a product, it would generally be somewhere between six to 12 months behind a Coinbase product because Coinbase is crypto-specific, is crypto-native.

Robin Hood, you have plenty of Tradfai activity that you also need to maintain. But on this, the announcements here today, some of them are products that Coinbase just announced just a few weeks ago. And with many of the on-chain stocks, that's actually leapfrogging Coinbase. They kind of beat them to a punch on a number of the things. So is this Robin Hood becoming a leading crypto-native company? I know 30% of your revenue already comes from crypto. And so where do you think your relationship with crypto grows? Are you investing even further into this industry?

Are you guys trying to go and take down Coinbase? What do you think? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I'd say traditionally, you're right. Our approach to building products and rolling out features has sometimes been described as Apple-like in the sense that Apple will really use it. It's usually not the first to market, not like the bleeding edge innovative. but they sort of like focus on the on the user experience and the design and the product quality and make it very, very accessible. And I think that's been a good analogy.

I mean, we, I think when you bring up the wallet as an example, like our wallet wasn't the first to market, but I think it was the first to market in an intuitive way that rolled out features like gasless swapping, which I think if you're a retail user and you expect this technology to go mass market, Like thinking through the gas and the fees and a different currency is just very, very confusing. So we felt like gasless swapping was important. And I think we were actually one of the first to enable that. But you're also right that, you know, now we're kind of pushing the frontier. And I think we are the first big platform, or at least among the first, to roll out these tokenized offerings.

And with the private company, stock tokens, definitely on the bleeding edge. So it's a new place for us to be in. And we're usually used to, you know, coming in later into a market, taking share through just like price competition, efficiency, sort of a war of attrition, and now being first, but bringing that capability of lower pricing, great technology. It's fun. So we'll see how it goes. Last question, Vlad, and I know you have to hop to another interview. The layer two, the Robin Hood chain. Yeah.

Talk to me about what the long-term relationship is between the Robin Hood app and the Robin Hood chain. And I think, you know, listeners and myself are frames of knowledge are going to come from the relationship between Coinbase and Base, where base is actually a pretty big universe in of itself. And then Coinbase also uses base to get Bitcoin back to loans and they offer that straight through the front end. Is this kind of something that you're trying to do similarly with Robin Hood? Where you have, it's a developer ecosystem. Developers can build permissionlessly on the Robin Hood chain. Or are you more using it just to settle back end logic for your own needs and your own simplicity? How do you think about the long-term relationship between Robin Hood and in its own layer too. Yeah, and by the way, I think the team over at base, it's a good team. I think they've done a very, very nice job. And they're pushing the sort of like base is for everyone campaign, which I think has been relatively effective. I think our niche in the space is it's maybe not going to be useful for everyone in every use case. But what we intend to do is make it the best chain for real world assets. I think real world assets have very specific needs and qualities and making this the best chain for real world assets, starting with stocks,

going into private company shares. We mentioned real estate and art, and those things are very, very interesting to me as well. And combining that with the lowest possible fees, and really, I like to call it, you know, we're trying to build like military grade robustness. I think that's going to be exciting. And I do think that that's going to be an interesting proposition that should attract some developers. We talked to a lot of folks building chains, and the value prop that I hear a lot of is, you know, this is the number one chain for DGens.

Sure, yeah. I probably, I probably met like seven or eight Dgen chain builders. And we're trying to go in the opposite direction. We wanted to be the number one chain for real world assets and for it to sort of confer fundamental utility to all participants. Cool. Well, Vlad, I can say I'm excited for what you guys have announced.

I'm pretty optimistic for what you guys can do. And it's nice to see another big company helping the world move on chain. So we appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for joining us here and helping be part of the journey. I do have to ask. Last time we had you on the show, we talked about tokenization of activities.

And you talked about the private markets and all that. And I wrote this article on bank lists the next day saying Vlad wants to tokenize SpaceX and OpenAI. Yes. So these plans have been in the works for a while? or when did that idea come about? Let's see. Well, I talked about SpaceX and OpenAI in the op-ed. And what I found is if you write about stuff often enough, sometimes it ends up happening.

You manifested it. Yeah, I'd like to think so. And, of course, it's really nice to see that a lot of competitors have been, like, jumping on and trying to do this stuff too, which I think would be good. I think I'm here for the future when everything is on chain. and we move beyond Bitcoin and meme coins into a place where crypto is actually very, very useful, and it confers fundamental utility to participants. And I think that's going to be exciting. And the time has come.

I think it's this year. Vlad, congrats, and thanks for coming on the show. Thank you so much. Cheers. In the wild west of Defi, stability and innovation are everything, which is why you should check out Frax Finance. The protocol revolutionizing stable coins, DFI, and Rolex. The core of Frax Finance is FRAXUSD, which is back.

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Explore Mantle at mantle.xyz or follow Mantle underscore official. Mantle, bridging Tradfai and Defi so you don't have to. I'm here with Johan, the GM of Crypto at Robin Hood. Johan, people are familiar with Vlad, the CEO. I think people are a little bit less familiar with Johan. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your role in the whole Robin Hood universe? Yeah, so I lead the crypto business at Robin Hood. So everything that is related to crypto usually goes around my team. And, you know, we are really excited to have launched all these products today. I initially joined Robin Hood a bit more than four years ago as a CTO for the crypto group. And I've been running the business for a few years now. And so all of the big decisions that happen in the crypto universe of Robin Hood, the BitSamp acquisition, the Robin Hood wallet, all of this is under your oversight. Yes, that would be right. So my team and I, you know, we work very hard on all this, announcement and this project and this acquisition. And so we are really excited to see, you know, the enthusiasm from people here. So the acquisition of BitSamp was a pretty big deal. Before that, there was the Robin Hood wallet. Before that, there was just, you know, you could buy select crypto assets on Robin Hood. There's been certainly a crescendoing of activity on the crypto side of things from Robin Hood. Just talk a little bit about Robin Hood's long arc with crypto. It seems to be growing. It seems to be like crescendoing and excitement. Talk about that arc and where we are today. Yeah, so, you know, we launched crypto in 2018 to your point, which just a few assets,

and then we started to add more assets. We started to add functionality, like transferring the Robin Wallet, which was our self-custody wallet. And slowly we, you know, really build on this vision that crypto and blockchain technology can be the backbone of the financial system of tomorrow. And really what this event is about is how will we rebuild Robinode using blockchain technology? And, you know, in the EU, we're actually almost all in blockchain technology. So now EU customers can actually trade crypto, stake crypto, but they can also do perpetual on two assets. And they can also do stock tokens to get exposure to U.S. stocks and ETF.

And so I think that's what's really exciting for me. You know, I joined Robin Hood because I wanted to bring this mass adoption and stop talking just about the technical and the protocols and actually giving tools that people can use every day and use blockchain. So Perps is one of the big announcements that you guys had this today. And Perps is a financial instrument that was created in. the crypto universe, but isn't inherently crypto by any means. It's just a neutral financial instrument in theory that could have gone into the regular Robin Hood app for regular tokenized or non-tokenized assets, normal equities. But instead it is first being primarily introduced in the crypto context, of which it's native. So that's under your domain. Talk about that choice

to keep it inside of the crypto context when it could have also been applied to like more normal financial instruments in the rest of Robin Hood. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there is a few issues. on the CFTC side. And for example, Perps are not necessarily something that exists in the US today. We can do like long-dated contracts, but it's not something that really is a perpetual

that roll over indefinitely. And so in the EU, we received our license, our MIFID license, and our MECA license. So we're able to actually bring perpetuels. And it's something that is really exciting because, you know, a lot of what we were saying on stage

was about how complicated it is to use Perps on different platforms. And you can very, very hardly do it on a phone. You know, you always have to update your you'll take profit, your stop loss. You want to make sure that you're not going to lose too much money or take too much risk. And so you're always having to kind of stay at a desktop to use it.

And so what we wanted to build on Robin was really an interface that you can use on a on-to-go basis, basically. And just with a swipe of a finger, being able to update your position and your strategy and make sure that you don't take too many risks. Do you see the PURPS instrument spreading further and more integrated into the rest of Robin Hood, or is it kind of you'll follow the demand, we'll see how it is adopted.

How do you see it expanding? Yeah, I think, you know, there is two aspects for the purpose. There is the retail. There is also the institutional aspect. So the backend that we're using for purpose is pit stamp, and that exchange is actually open to institution.

So we expect to see institution also coming to that. But we also announced stock tokens today that are like token that gives you exposure to U.S. stocks, USATF, in a world where you have crypto tokens and perps combined together, you could see a world where you can

have perps on tokenized asset basically. Let's talk about the chain because I think that's one of the most exciting amounts that we've seen out of today. But there's also a choice that was made. I'm fuzzy on the details, but I understand that there was also a potential deal, some sort of deal with Solana about

some interest in working with Solana. Maybe that deal is still open, I don't know. But what we heard from today out of Robin Hood was the launch of a layer two on the Arbitrum Orbit Tech Stack. So talk to us about that choice, that strategy. Why was that the right strategy for Robin Hood? Well, you know, there was a few things.

We talked to a lot of chains. So, you know, when the rumor started, it was just about the fact that we were talking to chains. And for us, we wanted to understand, like, do we want to use an existing permissionless chain or do we want to build something that is custom for us? And really, when we started to look at the complexity of what we are trying to build and all the ambition that we have are on stock tokens and bring. bringing the financial system on chain.

We felt like having our chain was giving us a lot more optionality. We are able to build the right regulatory requirements on the chain and also making sure that it can scale with us. And why arbitram, you know, for us, there was a few things. We really like the fact that the way that you can use stylus, which is a system that basically allows you to use any kind of code. So you don't have to be stuck with one as a type of code, but you can actually bring like Rust, C++, whatever you want.

And so that's very helpful if you're thinking about the long term and the type of products that we want to build. The second thing that we liked was a priority queue system that is non-predatory. And also, you know, we've been a good partner with Arbitrum for a long time. We've partnered a few times on the wallet. And we overall expect to be a good partner with every chain.

So you mentioned Solana. We, you know, we offered, like, for example, no fees on the wallet on Solana if you're a gold customer. We also offer staking on Solana on multiple platforms. So we want to be good partners with everybody. Okay. So just to trace over what I heard you say, the main reason why the Arbitrum layer two was selected was, one, the customizability and also to the reading between the lines, the MEV control. As in if you guys run the sequencer, you know, MEV is a very legally dubious topic. And if you outsource that to external parties, and all of a sudden there's a little bit outside of your control. So if you have a single sequencer, which I would imagine Robin Hood is going to run, you guys just can make sure that there is no things like front running, back running things that would otherwise be legal in a traditional context because you guys are operating the chain. So customizability and

control, is that kind of the two key features here? Yeah, some of the of the future. You know, there was also the entire possibility between multiple ecosystems, you say I'm being a big one. You know, there's many on EVM. So we were really excited about that. But yeah, I think I think you're right. I think the idea of having just one sequencer is not necessarily true. Like, you know, I think at some point we'll want to bring a decentralization. And I think using the arbitral staker is helpful for that. But, you know, I think you're right. We want to make sure that we can control the products that we are going to launch at the beginning, but also build tools that are kind of the platform for everyone else to build on top of it and use the technologies that

we are creating today. Listening into that interoperability word, if you say that you are interested in interoperability right after you talk about an announcement of tokenized stocks, I get images of these tokenized stocks moving beyond Robin Hood chain. Is that an explicit part of the plan? We'll talk about that future. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think for us, the idea of tokenized asset has been that we are removing them from the wall garden. And so you can transfer them between broker. You can do a lot more things with it. Maybe, you know, you can use all the things that you're thinking about defy and assets. And so for us, we know that, you know, people want to move to

a different chain or they want to move to a different platform. And I think it's part of the DNA. But if we want that product to be really successful, we don't want to recreate another traditional finance system. So definitely. So are the stock tokens, are they whitelisted or what are the transferability like conditions that are built into the token contract of the Robin Hood Stock tokens? Yeah. So right now, what we announced today for the launch, we are going to just allow it within the Robinhood app. And we are going to open self-custody pretty soon. You saw it during the demo. We, we tried to transfer from our self-custody wallet to the Robinhood app. And so we are kind of ready to go. We just want to make sure that, you know, the product is working well before we open the gate.

Okay. So are there, is there a whitelist contract as in if I say, say I'm a, I have a Robin Hood account or, or excuse me, an Arbitrum wallet. And I send my equity tokens to my wallet. Can I send it to a friend who has another Arbitrum wallet or would they have to also be a part of the Robin Hood KYCD universe? Yeah. In the future, we would want everyone to be able to transfer between each other. I think where, you know, the mint and burning, will be where you will need to be either a Robinode customer or you will have to be a customer of somebody that is compatible with all tech. Okay, cool. It makes sense that you guys have chosen Arbitrum. I was talking to A.J. about this because Arbitrum is so inherently defy focused. So it's one thing to be able to buy and hold tokenized equities, you know, private companies especially, but it's another thing to be able to compose those into a broader defy ecosystem, which, you know,

Arbitrum definitely has. And so are you envisioning a world where, you know, there's an obvious, a implementation on the arbitram layer two. Or, you know, there's a uniswap. So can you see these tokens being interoperable with the existing DeFi arbitram ecosystem? I mean, that's a goal. You know, like, I think we want in the future to be able to do all this. I think it's going to be hard for me to tell you, like, is it going to be a high age? It's going to be a morpho or something else.

But we want to make it compatible. And that's why we picked kind of an EVM-based solution for our layers. Otherwise, you know, we could have done our own layer one. have kept it on a non-permissionless chain, it would have been a lot faster and easier. But there's also nothing inherently stopping you guys from issuing these tokens on Solana in the future, right? If there's demand there, could you also see yourselves tokenize these across many chains? I think bridging is going to be part of the strategy. Overall, you know, like I think, again, we want everyone to be able to use it.

And so for that, I think you need to be able to give access to everybody. And you won't be able to do that if you limit yourself to just one chain. So when I was listening to Vlad talk about with the whiteboard session, he talked about all the different components of the Robin Hood world, especially as it kind came to issuing these tokens. And then also having them trade on Bit Stamp when, you know, the very constrained traditional markets are only alive, you know, of so many hours of the week. But now BitStamp can trade them 24-7. And then you also have the Robin Hood wallet as well. There's a very tightly integrated ecosystem of components that are being woven together there. Was that your mastermind? Is that your strategy?

Well, I don't know about that. I think, you know, we have a very big team, a lot of talented people. But I think for us, that was kind of the idea. The exchange when we acquired BitStamp was this idea of not being only reliant on market maker, but being able to support some of the new products we are thinking of, like tokenized assets. And the Robin Wallet is also something that, you know, four years ago when we were starting to build it, the idea was really to think about the defy world and think about the fact that at some point, people may not want to use centralized platform. And so it's great to see everything going together.

And, you know, we hope to keep going like this. And there is a lot more plans that we have shared also on the private stock, for example, that is going to really get together nicely in the second system. Spawning a brand new chain is, you know, a pretty big undertaking. You know, it's one thing to use your own chain to deploy your own assets and to do the back-end things that Robin Hood needs to do, which, I mean, I think we're all very happy about. That's what blockchain is.

before. That's one of the big bull cases. But there's also the conversation of, well, the Robin Hood chain is also going to be permissionless as well for developers and users. So that means that any old developer can come and do things on Robin Hood chain. Is that a specific vertical that you are trying to foster? Yeah, we are really excited about that. I think, you know, we call all the developers that want to be working on the hood chain. I want to talk to Robin Hood about this. Like, it's something that we want to do and we think that will happen. For us, it's the, you know, it's a big long-term vision is that everybody can use the stock tokens, everybody can build on it, and you can see more

type of real world assets. And so for that, we will need a lot of developers because as, you know, important Robin Hood is and with a great team that we have, we can't build the entire Defi world. There's so many things being innovating every day. And so we think that it's all coming together. So Robin Hood, about 30% of Robin Hood revenue comes from crypto products, which I think if you told that to the average Robin Hood shareholder or just the average person in traditional finance, they might be shocked about how high that number is. Where do you see the trend of that number going? Because Robin Hood also has a bunch of Tradfai products.

They just launched Robin Hood banking. They just launched Robin Hood strategies. So it's not like neglecting by any means. It's Tradfai side. But also some of these amountsments are pretty amazing. So where do you see this 30% crypto revenue going in Robin Hood? Do you see that increasing, staying the same? You know, I think it's hard to say.

Like if you think about last year, we had so many great product on Robinon, not just on the crypto side. but, you know, event, contract, future, like so many new things. And so I think it's just the business as a whole has been growing. And so that's been what's really exciting. But I think for us, what we've been mostly focused on is less about the, you know, the share internally of what is a Robin Hood crypto doing versus the other businesses, but more like what market share we're able to get outside of Robin Hood.

And, you know, we've been able to grow a market share nicely in the past few quarters. And I think that's really a good signal that we are building what our customers are really excited about. Let's fast forward five years, 10 years, and everything that you want about your, on the crypto side of Robin Hood comes true. Paint us a picture of what that looks like. You have the Robin Hood app, you have the Robin Hood chain, you have the Bit Stamp Exchange, you have these tokenized equities, tokenized private companies. There's a big, there's a good number of puzzle pieces here when all of these puzzle pieces that we know of come together and maybe some additional ones that we don't know of, what does that picture look like? Well, I think for us, we've been not really keeping a lot of secrets. Like we want to make Robin Hood available everywhere in the world.

So that's one big thing. We have a wallet that is available in a lot of countries, but we also want to bring the entire Robin Hood stack, like stocks and futures options, all these things. And the next thing also would be like we want a lot more of the traditional system to be on chain. So ideally for me in a few years, you use the same revenue that you are using today as a U.S. customer. and most of it is using on-chain.

It's a lot faster. It's instant. It's 24-7. And you don't even know it because you don't need to know all the details about the protocol. Do you think you guys can dethrone the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange

as the centerpiece of liquidity in the future? Well, I think, you know, it's going to be interesting to see how the market response to this type of asset that are being tokenized. But it is going to create a lot of opportunity. Like, you know, during weekends, off-market hours, all these things.

like you will start to see a lot more people trading these assets. Will there be a token for the Robin Hood chain? Currently nothing to announce there. I think right now for us, the focus is to launch some of these new products and see how people are using it. And then we'll share more detail on that later. John, you've gotten a lot of people excited today, including myself. So thank you for all the hard work that you've been putting in. And I think we'll be watching Robin Hood with pretty good interests.

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How do you feel? Yeah, it's awesome. It's really exciting. I'm really excited to be partnering with Robin Hood on this. I really excited about their vision, particularly about sort of re-instructing their platform for their users with Crypto Rails. And, yeah, it's an incredible day. I'm sure we'll get into it.

But, yeah, it feels kind of surreal in the moment. The Arbitrum Robin Hood Partnership goes back. Pretty far, like two plus years. I don't know what the partnership looks like way back when. Maybe it was just an initial deal, but it's certainly crescendoed over the years to where we are today. We're seeing Robin Hood do something very innovative, which is launch stocks that are not trading on Robertram

with a little Arbitrum logo right there. Talk about the crescendoing of the Robert Hood Arbitrown relationship. Yeah, no, it's been really cool. So I remember, I think it was Eiff, Denver, 2024. we announced sort of like the beginning of our partnership together. And it started with like a really simple like Robin Hood's going to support arbitrium in their crypto wallet, easy access for users to trade on dexes and sort of do other activities through that, through that wallet experience.

But we sort of started like laying the building blocks for a deeper, close relationship. Our team's got close. Joe and I in particular, you know, sort of fostered a great working relationship. And our thesis with them has always been like be good partners. you know, for us, we don't have this vision that crypto needs to be at the forefront or that Arbuchar needs to be at the forefront. We're a powerful technology that can power user experiences. And for us, Robin Hood sort of and its place in FinTech was always the best partner. So we, you know, we develop this relationship and obviously crescendoed into where we're at today. But the same like elements and thematic components of these guys are the best at building user experiences.

and we want our technology to be able to be flexible enough, to be supportive of their vision to make their users happy. So I would imagine that there is not one long-standing arbitram Robin Hood deal. There's one deal at a time, and every single new thing that you guys do together has to be done on. Is this right for both of us? Do we like working together? So every single deal has to be one, right?

Yeah, I think in many ways, like, you know, I think one of the core things that's really important for businesses that are moving as quickly as sort of both, our business and their business is like flexibility to make sure that the products are right. Like for example, today they announced like Salana Staking as well. And that's a great thing for their business or bringing that utility to their users. I would say tokenized stocks was always like the main prize that we were after. Right. Obviously, you know, I joined crypto in 2014. And for me, it was ownership, sovereignty and democratizing access. And there's nothing that does that more than

just the tokenized access to everything. And as Vlad mentioned in phase three, the goal is, is for that to be, you know, self-custody, do with it what you want. And like that vision is incredible. So that was always, I would say, like the North Star of what we were hoping to collaborate on. And obviously, that's where we're at today. And we're starting with them on Arbitram 1. So like today, for example, the demos that they did, those assets are all minting and burning on Arbitram 1 and trading. Eventually they're going to be transitioning to the Robin Hood chain, which the Arbitram Orbit Stack is going to power.

And I think that's one of the really cool things. and one of the things that excited them about Arbitrum is the flexibility of what we can offer as a platform, right? We have Arbitrum 1 as a core economic hub of, you know, crypto and financial activity and also the ability for them to take a stack and own it, own the customizations of it, whatever they want to do with it, and our team is going to be, you know, a strong partner in product design for what is the best product for their users. And there's a lot of reasons why people talk about wanting their own chain, but the ability for them to continue to compound their users on the Robin Hood chain is going to be a very powerful thing

as they build their hire company again on CryptoRail. So again, that flexibility of what Arbitrium can offer I think is something that was a key component of this because the Arbitron platform offers the flexibility that they might need in order to continue to build their business on chain. Now, I think people are pretty familiar with the deal structure of base and the optimism collective.

It's something like 15% of base sequencing sequencer fees or 2.5% of total profit, which everyone's greater, goes to the optimism collective. And that's kind of the deal of the optimism collective. Then that's kind of like set to standard for the OP stack ecosystem. If you are willing to share, what are the economics of the Robin Hood chain and Arbitrum? Arbitrum has a similar model with the Dow. It's a little bit different, but it's similar in the sense that if you want to launch an L2, which is what Robin Hood is choosing to do, then you do a 10% profit share as well with the Arbitron Dow. So it's a very similar model.

I would say the differences in model are maybe similar philosophical differences between super chain and orbit. So super chain, you kind of opt in to like a shared governance model with interoperability. With orbit, it's, you know, just sort of contribute back into the Arbitium Dow on the profit share through what we call the AEP and then do whatever you want with it. Right. We expect there to be interoperability, but it's almost like an orthogonal product question to use of the stack. And because we're not sort of locked in on orbit into specific interoperability and governance mechanisms, we can have a lot more flexibility in design of the stack. So that's why you sometimes see arbitram like you see L3s, you see L2s, you see custom gas tokens. You see all these different changes because the orbit stack provides a lot more flexibility.

And that was something that was like really important to Robin Hood on this journey was to make sure that they had that flexibility with the stack to own it. So, like, they don't have to opt into shared governance or interoperability. They can if they want to. My suspicion is they won't prefer to. But, yeah, that's how the orbit stack structure works. Yeah. So it was pretty cool to see the Arbitrum logo right next to the Open AI, you know, transfer one million shares of Open AI in the Robin Hood app that everyone's familiar with.

And you see the little Arbitrum logo. Yeah. As you alluded to, and as they said, you know, it starts on Arbitrum 1. It'll migrate over to the Robin Hood chain when that thing is, you know, up and running. Yeah. But also at the same time, Arbitrum 1 already has, you know, fantastic DeFi. infrastructure, which the Robin Hood chain will have to start from scratch on. I don't know if they're going to leave the option to do tokenized stocks on Robin Hood Arbitrum 1 persistently. Will that always be

an option? So it's a great question. It's really going to be up to them. I mean, the reason to do it is it's another environment where they can sort of integrate. They don't already have been integrated, so they don't have to like uproot some of the existing established relationships that they might have on Arbitrum 1. The reason not to do it is fragmentation potentially of liquidity. So that's probably going to be a key product question that we're going to work on with their team over time. But, you know, like I guess you said, Arbitron 1 has a really robust DFI ecosystem. I'm sure a lot of our builders are going to want to work with them on the Robin Hood chain as well, which is great and something that, again, we encourage and support.

I think that's probably like, we don't know yet. We'll figure that out sort of. Remember, like on phase one, these assets aren't integrated yet into DFI, right? So it's still more of a self-contained box. So today, if they migrated, they wouldn't have some of these sort of liquidity fragmentation concerns it would probably just be some sort of mint and burn mechanism, but it probably depends on how mature and engrossed, or if there's demand for it.

Sure, sure. You could just imagine that, like, there's a ton of potential TVL up for grabs. Yes. And, you know, if there's some inherent interoperability inside of the Arbitrum stack, maybe, I don't know, I can take my Robin Hood tokenized stock

and take it into GMX or AVEA on side of Arbitrum 1, but that would necessitate transferability of these tokens. Now, you are not. on the Robin Hood team. So I don't know if you're privy to these details of the transferability of the Robin Hood stock tokens. Do you know anything there? So, yeah, I don't want to speak for them. I think what Vlad was referring to is in the later phases that that isn't very much their intention.

Like they want self-sovereignty. Like so, for example, when you saw Vlad do that like live demo transfer, that was self-custody, right? That was not in the contained environment. Like he linked out to Arbiscan, he sent it to somebody else's wallet. So the infrastructure is already there, as they clearly. showed and I think what they're going to be planning on is, I think figuring out the rollout, like this is an extremely ambitious thing that they did today. Like, yeah.

I think they made more announcements today than you typically see from companies in like a two or three year timeline. Yeah. Really incredible across so many different components. But I think like, again, and this is sort of goes back to what I was saying about, like what I really find so excited about this, they're really focused on crypto rails for their existing user base. And they're going to focus on the product that will make sense for that user experience.

Like when they were talking about the perps, they said, you can do this like two or three taps of the finger. And like, that's why I love working with this team. We're instead of saying, how do we get crypto users to do more stuff on chain? It's how do we get more people who are regular financial traders to be actually just using crypto rails? And again, I think Robin Hood is best positioned to be able to do that. And we're extremely excited to work so closely with them. When people are digesting this news, they're just going to see the take that Robin Hood has a chain now. And they're going to look at the correlates between Robin Hood.

in Coinbase. You're like, oh, Robin Hood has their equivalent of base. And people are also going to look towards Arbitrum as well and compare that to optimism and the Opie Sack. It's like, oh, Arbitrum has its equivalent of base now with Robin Hood. But maybe you could also kind of continue that conversation and get into the nuances of the difference. How is it the same and how is it different?

Yeah. So I think it's, so I think it's the same, obviously, in that like we have a huge user base that's using the stack sort of exogenous to the sort of Dow governed chain. And the reality is, is that. that as we see like WorldCoyne, you know, Athena and securitized or building Converge, also using the Arbitum OrbitStack, there's plenty of demand for people to have their own chains. And that's really one of the Ethereum's killer features is the flexibility and customization for that to happen.

I think that there's two distinctions, I would say, sort of between the Arbitram-Rabhood relationship is, two, is like, Robin Hood, they have crypto users, but their core user base is not crypto. So the overlap between maybe, you know, Arbitrum 1 users and the people that, you know, who are going to be the first users of the Robin Hood chain are definitely probably going to be different. There's, of course, going to be on-chain activity happening from crypto natives on the Robin Hood chain as well, I'm sure,

but it's an additive user base. The second difference is, you know, I think especially with the expansion of time, like I think Coinbase and Optimism was probably a couple years ago, Arbitrum 1 is very entrenched as, you know, I would argue the most credible neutral liquid L2, right? Obviously, Coinbase and Base is huge, just Arbitrcham 1 and Coinbase are probably neck and neck in terms of different metrics.

But Arbitram 1 has a very strong home if you're looking for a credibly neutral environment. And again, the way we've designed the Arbishop path is if you want to launch an Arbitrum 1 and migrate to your own chain, it's seamless, right? That's what we're doing with Robin Hood. That's what we're sort of pioneering. And I expect that journey to continue to happen for more people. Launch an Arbitrum 1, have a great experience, expand your user base. Build yourself a mandate to be able to have your own chain, your own user base. and we're going to help work with you through that migration. So that's probably a little bit of the difference,

but it's maybe a little more nuanced than some people might appreciate. I think this is going to keep people's attention focused on what exactly Robin Hood is going to do on chain. How fast will the tokenized stocks come on chain? How fast will they spin up their own chain? What does arbitram growth look like downstream of all of this? How does arbitram keep this momentum going? What do you guys have next in the chamber to fire? Yeah, it's a great question.

It's hard to beat this one. But I think that for us, you know, we've had a very, very specific focus and thesis, which is we want to make sure our product can best serve our user base. And that user base is very broad, right? Like if you look at Arbitrism probably most known for Defi, both on Arbitrum 1 and also a lot of the chains that are launching using the stack. But also basically every gaming chain, for example, that launches uses Arbitrum 1. And the reason for that is because, like, we've had really fast block times. something I just want to use stylus because they might want to bring in traditional gaming libraries. So our goal is still like find use cases that we have conviction in. And, you know,

I would say the highest conviction today is probably this merge of TradFi and Defi into what Stephen or CEO likes to just say, finance. Like in 10 years, we're all just going to call it finance. That's probably our strongest focus right now, both on Arbitrum 1 and also across supporting ecosystems that want to launch their own chain and just finding more use cases. right? We're very focused on, you know, traditional RWA's lending capital markets. You know, I would say Arbitrum doesn't do as well in the meme coin craze as other ecosystems. And, you know, every ecosystem sort of has their different communities and cultures. But this has kind of been always our focus.

And during the DeFi Barrier days, we probably went down with it. But, you know, as this is all coming back, I think Arbitrum's the excitement, the euphoria for the ecosystem is coming back with it. Yeah, I do like that sentiment of, like, you know, the OP mainnet are the governance philosophers and the base chain are like consumer crypto in crypto culture. And Arbishop has always been defy and execution optimized. And so it makes sense that that's what Robin Hood chooses because that's what their core product offering is. There's always, there's been a, there's a strong alignment between those two brands. Yeah, 100%. I think that people like to say like crypto and like Tradfi or FinTech are that different.

I don't think they are. I think there's a lot of cultural similarities, but of cultural elements. and it really all comes down into relationships, teams, and obviously product. And, yeah, we've been, I think, very focused. I think we've had a very product focus. I remember, you know, everyone talks about fast block times now. It's like the new hot thing. Arbitron had sub-250 milliseconds blog times since 2021. Right?

And like for us, that was something we identified really early as going to be a critical thing to expand use cases. And that's why Arbitram did so well with perps as they sort of expanded off of the theory. And may not with, you know, GMX, vertex and others. I think Stylist, which is not as popular today, is going to be that sort of next unlock, just so in case your listeners aren't aware, arbitrams at EVM compatible chain, but Stylist now enables you to launch contracts in Rust C, C++, fully interoperable. So we're seeing a lot of teams now that, like, you know, FinTech is meeting crypto, privacy and privacy layers are really important on top of this.

And Stylist enables you to have, like, privacy optimized because you can just pull in cryptographic libraries, like super cheap, right? So we try and stay ahead of the ball in terms of what we think are the features that our users and developers are going to want and execute on that thesis. I do see privacy becoming an increasingly important and discussed. It's starting to crescendo as a topic, especially as Tradfai comes on and realizes like, oh, no, all my assets are totally transparent to everyone. And so it's good to see that there is potential path for loss of the arbitrage stack to also access some of the privacy that we so desperately need. 100%. We have like, for example, there's a team, like when they launched on day one with Stylis called Renegade Finance, and it's essentially on chain dark pulls. And it's the coolest thing. And I think they have like more than 30 ZK proofs generated on each transaction. Again, they're doing it on Arbitrim. It's a super cheap transaction because, again, they're utilizing Silas. So we extended the EVM. We recognized early. The EVM is the huge mode of the Ethereum ecosystem, but we can do more. And that's like what the flexibility of L2s offers without compromising on the EVM. And we thought that, you know, stylus is a great, a great. great combination there.

Cool. AJ, congratulations. It's been a very big day. Congratulations. Awesome. Thank you. Cheers.