Unchained - Inside Robinhood's Big Super App Plan: ‘There's Still a Lot of Work to Be Done’ - Ep. 983

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Thank you to our sponsors! Figure Uniswap Robinhood is moving toward offering a full suite of crypto services and overhauling the infrastructure underpinning its stock trading services with blockchain technology.  In this episode of Unchained, Robinhood Crypto Senior Vice President and General Manager Johann Kerbrat discusses the company's “super app ambitions” and potential competition with Coinbase.  He also discusses the platform's entry into prediction markets and resistance from state regulators. Could state opposition to prediction markets drive businesses offshore? Plus, will tokenized stocks make IPOs redundant? And where are we in the crypto market? Guest: Johann Kerbrat, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Robinhood Crypto Links: Previous appearances on Unchained: Why Robinhood, a TradFi Hub, Is Growing Its Crypto Business Globally Unchained: Robinhood Is Building Its Own Layer 2 Blockchain Perps Are Coming to America. Will Coinbase and Robinhood Win the Race? OpenAI Says Robinhood’s Stock Tokens Are Not Equity Coinbase Expands Into Tokenized Stocks and Prediction Markets Coinbase Launches Digital Token Sales Platform Coinbase Buys Cobie’s ‘Up Only’ NFT and Echo in $375 Million Deal Timestamps: 🚀 00:00 Introduction  🤔 1:33 What drove Robinhood's 3x year-on-year crypto revenue growth in Q3? 💡 5:34 Why Johann says we are still far from a bear market 💥 7:49 How the crypto users on Robinhood have evolved overtime ⚔️ 11:08 How Robinhood views competition from Coinbase 🧏 14:30 What Robinhood's Susquehanna deal for prediction markets brings to the table 👀 18:48 Could state opposition to prediction markets drive businesses offshore? 💡 20:34 Why Robinhood chose Ethereum over Solana 🤔 25:19 When will Robinhood bring perps to other jurisdictions? 📍 27:00 Why Robinhood chose to invest in Lighter over the competition ⚠️ 29:17 Why Johann says the crypto industry needs to build resilience after 10/10 📈 33:50 How Robinhood's tokenized stock offering might come to the US 💥 39:16 Why Johann says private companies would eventually seek retail participation 💡 43:26 What tokenization of physical assets would look like 💫 47:12 How tokenization could impact the financial lives of users 🚨 49:18 Why Johann thinks crypto founders should talk less about the protocol 🧏‍♂️ 51:19 How Robinhood is looking to combine with DeFi  🤔 53:03 Will Robinhood follow Coinbase to launch an ICO platform? ⚡️ 54:22 Why Robinhood is expanding to Indonesia 🗣 56:28 What being a “super app” means for Robinhood  🔮 58:11 Johann reveals his crypto predictions for 2026 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We think that in the future of tokenization kind of level everything else. The customer could have the same right as an important VC or someone with a hundred millions of dollar, and it could also give the same type of access to these companies. Clearly, still some work in progress to be done, but I really think that's where the buck is going. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hap resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Before we get started, a quick reminder. Nothing you hear on Unchained is an investment advice.

This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guests and I may hold assets discussed in the show. For more disclosures, visit UnchainedCripto.com. Looking to unlock your crypto's liquidity? Figure offers crypto-backed loans with an industry low 8.91% fixed rate. They're the only major provider with decentralized MPC custody and new liquidation protection. Take out a loan at Figuremarkets.com slash Unchained. Are you a builder who needs to add on-chain trading to your product?

The Uniswap Trading API from Uniswap Labs offers plug-and-play access to some of the deepest liquidity in crypto. It's on-chain execution at an enterprise level. More liquidity, less complexity. Visit hub.uniswap.org to learn more. Today's guest is Johan Kerbrot, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Robin Hood Crypto. Welcome, Johan. Hi, good to see you again. How are you? Nice to see you.

I'm good, good, glad to have you. So for Q3, Robin Hood saw quite a boost in earnings from the year prior, and crypto revenue tripled. Why do you think crypto revenue on Robin Hood grew so much year over year? Yeah, I mean, it's been a great year. You're right. And QS3 was a great quarter for us. I think the combination of the environment that just really part in crypto, but also like all the new features that we built around crypto, we added a lot more assets.

We started to offer sticking in most of the states in the US. And we also focused a lot on advanced trader. And so I think that kind of resulted into these growth that we've seen. But really, I think it's also the interest from the retail customers that have just grown in the past few years and especially last year. And Robin Hood has had some. such a journey. I mean, you know, if you just think, like Vlad and his co-founder, they started as young guys, not that they're like old by any stretch. But, you know, they kind of weathered the

whole storm during the meme coin, the GameStop mania. And then, you know, we saw the very slick presentation you guys did introducing a bunch of crypto, you know, products over the summer. And now Robin Hood is part of the S&P 500. And I wondered if you could just talk about, you know, kind of how reaching that new milestone, if that's influenced Robin Hood's plans or at least how you think about or approach the business. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there is so much to tell about this story. I think for a lot of reason, I have a ton of respect and admiration for our founders.

But I think one thing that I often explain is the story, story of crypto within Rominoid. They actually decided to launch crypto in 2018 just in the first quarter. So really at the moment where most companies were actually turning their back to crypto and they were like, you know, it's a winter. It was past the 2017 ICOs and NFTs, like Sega. And so instead of going into this direction like everyone else, Vlad and Bejou were like, you know what?

some customer want to have access to his type of financial instrument. They actually believe that it will be part of the next financial system of tomorrow. And so they still decide to build on it and to offer it to the customer and to stop building. And so I think it just shows that they have this very unique capability to understand where the trends are going and to understand where they think that there is actual interest when everyone else thinks the opposite. But I think the success that we've seen around, you know, the recent quarter is just a result of a lot of many years of work. You know, like, for example, we've been building a lot of this feature that we announced during the Cannes event for multiple years. And so for us, it was more of a celebration because finally these features are out.

But we know that the job is not done. Like at this point, most of the financial trading is still happening. off-chain, on centralized places. And so we don't think that we are where we can be, and we think there is still a lot to do. So Vlad is someone who is really pushing us all the time. And so when the S&P announcement happened, I'm not even sure that was a quick message about it,

like progress and let's keep working basically. So I think that's the main thing. the mental model he has for himself. And I think that's what we always inspire to do also for the company. And we want to just keep building feature that people are excited about. So I am so interested to hear your thoughts on where the crypto market is headed. Because as I'm sure you're very well aware, crypto market or crypto price action has been a bit choppy ever since 1010. There are a lot of people saying we're entering a bear market.

I've had other people on my show who say that 2026 will be. prove that the four-year cycle is dead. They, at least somebody from BitWise, Ryan Rasmus, and he predicted that we would reach new all-time highs in crypto in 2026. I was so curious for your thoughts. Do you think crypto is entering a bear market or not? And just generally, how was Robin Hood preparing for any, you know, changes in the market? Yeah.

So I always say that I'm very bad at predicting Bitcoin prices and, you know, if I was a bit better at it, I would probably not be working right now. So that's why I always say that. But I think what has been interesting is to see that, you know, there is a lot of supports still. You know, it's been a few times that Bitcoin is going in the low 80s and still rebounding. So I think that shows that, you know, there's still a lot of strong supports. I also think that we're still seeing a lot of activity coming in from our customers, not just on trading the actual assets, but on buying crypto and transferring it out to Defi platform and doing things on Defi.

So that to me shows that we are far from the bear market or at least the one that we've known in the past. And so I think, you know, so far what we see from our customer is that they actually, they have a pretty long-term horizon. They are usually a younger demographic. And so they see it more as a pie-the-deep kind of opportunity. And so our focus has been more into building the right tools for them to take advantage of this kind of situation, especially for Adventistrader. For example, just out new fees that if you use our smart exchange writing feature, you can trade for as low as three basis points. So that's been more for focus. And then we let the customer kind of decide if they think the price is going to go down or up because like I said, that wasn't very good at it.

And I was wondering because you guys have, you know, rolled out so many new crypto offerings. Obviously, you know, we have tokenized stocks. There's, you know, prediction markets, perps. There's just a whole bunch of new things. And I wondered, you know, if you could just talk about the evolution of the crypto users that you have on your platform. If you think that they've kind of, you know, evolved over time, you know, what are they like now? or what are the different categories of them? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, we have, I think, almost every segment at this point where, you know, initially a lot of customers were thinking about Robin Hood for crypto as more of a playing ground for people that were not really serious about crypto and they were mostly holding starts but wanting a bit of exposure to Bitcoin or Ethereum. But since then, we graduated from this place a long time ago and we know, Now I've, you know, all the advanced customer that I was talking about to the people that are really into more leverage with perpetual products to people that just want to hold. And so for them, like staking is very important so they can get yield on the asset that they all

on the platform. And we also have a lot of people that are active on Dify. So we have built a self-custody wife for that and they are really engaging with it. So I think we have all of them, what is more interesting is to see the cross between the different products. And I think that's where Robin Hood is pretty interesting being this all in one application where you can start by investing into Bitcoin for the first time or you can start using a prediction market or you can just go straight to equities or opening a retirement account. So I think it's a pretty interesting platform where we're introducing a lot of new investors to just like the investing world.

And so for a lot of them, they didn't have a retirement account until they started to trade crypto or started to trade prediction market. And then they realized on the app that we had this retirement account feature. And then they went to it. And so it's like opening it for a lot of customers. They're thinking about just investing in general and what is their financial journey for for their entire life. Yeah, so in a way, it's like you're trying to build out offerings for all levels of sophistication with crypto. That's right. All levels of sophistication of crypto, but also any other type of assets.

I think it's really important to start thinking about the multi-asset class. So for example, we have features on Bitcoin and East and we also have the underlying asset. So if you're an advanced trader, you can actually hedge or collect premium between the two different assets, same thing with the ETF, for example, if you want to hold Bitcoin for the long term, again, buy Bitcoin ETF on your retirement account. So it's really about giving all the choices and the accessibility to the customer, and then the customer can decide where they want to invest their money. So given that you have offerings across that huge range, I did want to ask you a little bit about how you see Robin Hood in comparison at Coinbase. I'm sure you're very well aware

that tomorrow, Coinbase is doing a big announcement and already there's reports that, you know, they're going to be competing basically with Robin Hood in some of the offerings they already have, such as prediction markets, tokenized stocks, et cetera. So I just was curious to hear, you know, how you think about, you know, where you're starting from, where they're starting from, and how you compete against a competitor that is different for now, but you guys are just like converging on the same space, at least as how I see it. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think for us,

it took us quite a long time to actually build a brokerage and all the features that are around equities and to get to the level of sophistication that you can get on robin hood. So I'm not necessarily like thinking that tomorrow, everything will be the same between the two applications. But I think the reality is that we are going to start seeing a lot of this super app being created. And, you know, Robin was the first and perfect example of the super app. And we've been very vocal about how helpful it has been for our customer to be able to buy, you know, a stock like Microsoft or Tesla and being able to sell it and buy Bitcoin the same day,

without having to transfer between different accounts. So I'm not necessarily surprised that it's where they are going. And same thing with prediction market. You know, we've seen that it's been one of our fastest growing business at Robinwood. We've seen a lot of enthusiasm from our customer about it. And so obviously we do expect competition to come in and to try to do the same thing. What I think is pretty unique at Robino, it is more around. around like how we put the customer at the center of everything that we're building.

And the way that we're designing our tools and features, we go about doing a lot of user reserves. We spend a lot of time with our customers to understand if they like the product, if they don't like it, what are the things that are preventing them to use it? Or why do they prefer something else? And through that, we get to, I think, a level of UI and UX that at this point has not been equaled. And really, I think that's what makes Robin unique. You know, when you look at our credit card, for example, a lot of people have been launching credit cards since we launched it.

And if you look at the numbers that we published, you can see that a lot of people are preferring our credit card. And the reason for that is that we really spent a lot of time trying to understand what people didn't like from other products. And we went with a pretty simple offering where it's like you get 3% of cash back on all categories. And so in my head, as a customer, for example, initially I was a bit doubtful about the credit card. And now it's like the only credit card I use in my wallet. And I think that's the type of user focus that is really giving us an advantage of the competition. Okay. Yeah.

And I did want to ask a little bit more about the prediction markets because as you said, They're all the rage now. And Robin Hood has not only launched prediction markets with Kalshi, but then it also recently announced that it would launch a new futures and derivatives exchange through a joint venture with Sasquahana International Group. And that would be for expanding its prediction markets product. To explain how this initiative differs from what you're already doing with Kalshi. Yeah.

I mean, the the exchange basically is the backend in a way. And so on the front end, like any products that we have on the platform, we usually connect to multiple exchanges to give us either the best price or to give us more offering. And so we were already integrated with more than one exchange in the past. So this initially will just give us more optionality and it will also allow us to build more products that are kind of unique to rob in. But I think at the end of the day for the customers, it doesn't really matter. But being able to add more exchanges and creating more competition will create more pressure

on prices and on the type of products that we can offer. So I think more competition is always great for the customer. And because this is now the largest, sorry, the fastest growing area of Romanhood, I was curious, like what are you noticing and trying? trends amongst like the users, what types of users they are, what their behaviors are. Like, why do you think that it became so popular so quickly? You know, I think there is many reasons. But the one that I think is the most easy to explain is that it's a bit, it's giving like

very advanced tools to a lot of customers that didn't necessarily have these tools before. So for example, if you, I don't know, you wanted to. edge against AI or against a particular event. Before event contracts, you could pick some select stocks and you could decide that, you know, I'm going to go long or I'm going to short or buy options accordingly. But you still add a lot of variation around the results because maybe you were right and AI is a boom, but the companies that you picked is actually having a bad time. because I don't know, their manufacturer or maybe one of their product line didn't work as well.

But with a prediction market, you can actually buy a contract that will actually give you the same hedge that is in a way simpler way. Just, you know, is AI going to be important next year or not? And so I think that gives a lot of opportunities for a lot of our customers to get their fit wet into the market. And the other aspect is just that a lot of these contracts are closer to the actual individual. So when there is a mayor election contract for a lot of customers, they can actually engage with it because there is a direct impact for them. So I think that's the reason.

And then obviously, you know, we have different categories and some people are engaging with one category more than the other. But I think it's just a very unique tool that gives you. a lot more capabilities that until now you were not able to. And how do you find that those users differ from others? Like, are there certain traders on Robin Hood that only like to trade prediction markets? Or do you find that there's just a lot of crossover? And if there is a lot of crossover, is it with the crypto traders in particular? I got to be honest with you. I don't have this data on top of my head, but, you know,

Robinhood is at more than 26 million customers now at Chonneton. So I'm sure you have like some segment that are just prediction markets and some the dock crossing with crypto and some of the dock crossing with all the products. So it's all to tell you just like that. And I also have to ask, I'm sure you're very well aware that Connecticut's consumer protection department issued cease and desist orders to a whole bunch of different prediction market platforms, including Romah Hood. and they accused you and these other platforms of conducting unlicensed online gambling and sports wagering.

What's your response to that? You know, we've been working with Regulner for a very long time since the inception of Robin Hood. And so I think there is always a lot of time that we spend with our legal team and compliance team. And we engage a lot with the regulator for the case of production market with the CFT. But in the case of crypto, with the SEC, or with the New York DFS, in the US, and we have multiple license across the globe. So I have full confidence in our legal team. And overall, you know, if we launch a product, it means that we felt confident into our ability

to do so. Overall, it's a moving topic. And it's a pretty hot topic that has been going on for the past few months. And my hope is that, you know, we can avoid the same situation that we did with crypto. in the past four years and, you know, create a situation where there was starting to be almost a bad on crypto and then everyone was kind of leaving the United States to build on offshore, to as a user to use VPN to be able to access all this platform.

And so I hope we can avoid the same situation here and that instead we can find the right regulatory system that everyone can contribute to because Robin knows how to work with regulators. So if at some point there's a framework that is in place and we can used that framework, we'll be able to adapt to it very quickly. Okay. Yeah, so let's now talk about some of the big announcements from the summer, as I'm sure you're very well aware. Robin Hood made huge waves when it announced that Robin Hood chain would be an L2 on Ethereum. And I wondered if you could talk about that decision.

You know, why did you decide to build an L2 on Ethereum as opposed to, for instance, deploying straight on Solana, which had been rumored. as the other plausible option. Yeah, I mean, we look at multiple options. Like anything we do, we spend a lot of time comparing different options, what could be the outcome. And we love the Solana team. We are a pretty good partner.

We partner in a lot of other ways. For example, each you use a robin wallet, we'll cover the gas fees on Solanas through some of our partnership with them. So, you know, it's not, we didn't decide to go We didn't decide to go with the E-3ML2 just because we didn't like so. And I was more about what we were trying to achieve. And so what we are trying to achieve is we really want at some point to replace the traditional finance that is still working in a very old way.

And for that, we felt like we need to have enough customization and enough ways for us to kind of control what we wanted to build on the chain. And we didn't feel like we could do that through those ways and having our own stack, basically. So the question was more about building our own L1 versus an L2. And the reason what we decided to build an L2 on YSleum was we felt like we were getting the security of the Ethereum network for free in a way. And we could just focus on building the feature that we think are missing for the financial system and not have to worry about the different decentralization aspect and security of the actual R1. And I think that's something that we often forget because Ethereum has been running for so long and other platforms have been running for so long.

But having a clearly decentralized and secure blockchain is actually not an easy feat. and takes a lot of resources, takes a lot of investment. And so getting that for free through 3-3-3-3M is an important point for us. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I did also want to ask, you know, I think I heard you on the Edge podcast talk about how liquidity on Ethereum was another reason that you chose to build an L2. And I just wondered, you know, currently that's more siloed probably than I think I, I do. ideally it would be. And I wonder, do you have faith that this will get resolved?

Or like, how do you think about that factor that that is currently the state of play? Yeah, I mean, for us, it definitely makes it easier being an EVM, a compatible chain, to be able to move liquidity easily between the different chain. And to your point earlier, like around the, or good competitor at Koonbase, themselves are also on an L2 on this term. So it's helpful, I think, for the customer at the end of the day to be able to move equally between the different chain easily. But at the end of the day, I think our goal is really to get all this complexity away from the customers and the way that you can buy your start tokens on our European app, for example,

the customer doesn't even really know what is happening behind the scene. Like we are showing a pill that clearly show that it's a token and so that it's a token. crypto purchase, but all the complexity on gas fees and transaction and, you know, wallet addresses and everything is taking care for the user. And so I think that's where we're going to go in the future for everything. Clearly you see that there's more and more chain being created on a regular basis. There's multiple L1 being announced and, you know, everyone is going to want to have also their stable line or at least their own.

I please need a lot more stable coins now that there was five years ago. And so I think our role as Robin is going to take away all this complexity and make sure that we aggregate the stable coins and aggregates the right transaction process for our customers. And that way, customer can just focus on what they're trying to achieve, which is, I don't know, buying stocks or something like that, and not have to worry about anything around the crypto technology behind it. So I also wanted to ask about perps because they were obviously also a big part of the, you know, boost in revenue in Q3 and in the crypto, you know, vertical in Robin Hood.

And I think right now they're just in the EU. And I was wondering if you, you know, could give us a preview of when they might be expanded to other jurisdictions. Yeah, I mean, we've said before, like we would love the perps to be ready. to launch in the US, clearly we have the technology. It's running in the EU. But currently, Perps as it is, are not allowed through the CFTC. So there are some equivalence or attempt to be equivalent to perps that are starting to exist. Like the Coinbase one. Yeah, like the Coinbase one, which is more or less of a long-day-date future.

And so we have some options available already on the platform. We have long data structure as well on some of the assets. But in true, perhaps the same way that we have in the EU or that you can find on different platform are still not allowed. But in the EU, it's something that we've seen a lot of stickiness, like our customer are really liking it. I think they also like the UI's that we built. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's like this cool ladder that you can move, you'll take profit or your stop loss very easily.

and you can change the margins fairly easily as well. So we're pretty confident that it's a product that people would love here in the U.S. So hopefully we can get the regulators to approve it quickly. And I noticed that you guys had invested also in Leiter's recent fundraise of $68 million. And obviously, this is just easily one of the hottest, you know, verticals that we've seen in crypto in the last year with Hyper Liquid kind of kicking the whole thing off. But I was curious, like, why is it that Robin Hood

chose lighter out of all the different contenders in the DFI-P-P-P-SPAS? Many reasons. We know the LIDO team for a very long time. We've been working with them on and off for a long time as well. And we felt like we liked a lot of what they built. They're also using the O'DonRage Proof for a lot of their system. And I also felt like during the 10-10 situation, they were actually handling all the situation

pretty well. And so we think it's a great team. We think the product is good. And we wanted to be part of that journey. I think for us, it's also giving us optionality if we want to do more into Defi and into perps. And so it's pretty important as a business to have options. So yeah, that's why we did it.

And so can you just expound on that a little bit? Is it something where lighter might power kind of something on the back end in a Defi way and then Robin Hood might be the user interface or something like that? Yeah, for example, that's something we could do, especially since we have a self-custly wallet that already connects to taxes and already connects to any kind of app that you can use on Defi. So that's something that you could see, for example, the wallet having, a purpose of firing through it and lighter being one or the only one platform that is connected to. But at this point, there was no set plan. And that's why I was talking about this optionality.

Like, I think when we really get excited about the technology and we really like how teams are working, it's when Robin would start thinking about potentially investing in these teams and getting an option in the future to do more work with them. Okay. And you mentioned the 10-10 liquidations, and I just had to ask, obviously that does look like a sort of watershed moment, maybe not in a positive way for crypto. And just because you are familiar with like trading infrastructure and all the things that can go wrong in that type of world,

I wonder, you know, when you looked at what happened that day, what do you think the industry could improve or what were your thoughts on like why things went so wrong? Yeah, you know, it's hard to say exactly. Like, I think we're still not too convinced by some of the explanation that we're published. But I think overall for the industry, it's more about building resiliency, making sure that we don't have a single point of failure. you know, like the same way that we are building all technical system in this kind of mindset where we want to make sure that if one system is down, we can rely on another system. In that case, there was this problem and there was, you know, making sure that a price, you will have multiple feeds to make sure that you don't just look at one price feed.

But at the end of the day, you know, a lot of this platform also brand new and So I think it is to be expected that you will see some of these problems. I also think it's critical for the institution that are getting into this platform to make sure that to not put all their eggs in the same basket and to also think about diversify, things about looking at your diligence and these kind of things. But overall, I think for the industry, it's just like one of these bad moments where it's eroding a bit the trust of not just the institution, but the retail customers.

And usually what we see is that people are taking a bit of a breather from the markets and coming back to it a bit later in the year. And we've seen that multiple times. There was the FTCs moment, obviously not so far ago where it really took us a few months before people really started to re-engage again. And I think for a lot of the team that are on Defi in the decentralized exchanges, They're all very good team and very strong engineering forces. But sometimes we're building fast.

Sometimes the leverage is maybe very, very high and too high for some instances. And that's where we need to be careful. All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk about some of the other things that Robin Hood's been doing in the crypto space. But first, we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors make the show possible. Today's episode is sponsored by Figure, which is transforming financials. services using blockchain. They're the largest non-bank mortgage lender in the U.S., with over $19 billion unlocked on their lending platform. Now they're offering industry low crypto-backed loans

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Get access to the same liquidity that powers billions and swaps through one powerful API. Visit hub.uniswap.org to learn more. Back to my conversation with Johan. So the other big announcement that Robin Hood had this past summer was that you launched tokenized stocks. And this really feels like it would be at the sweet spot of, you know, all of Robin Hood's, you know, offering. and its history and its expertise. And I heard that, you know, now you're at the stage of having 1,000 stock tokens available to European customers.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you managed to grow that number so quickly and just, you know, also the regulatory aspect, because obviously people probably remember there was a little bit of a kerfuffle with Open AI right after the launch. So, yeah, just talk a little bit about those issues and how you managed to get that growing so quickly. Yeah, I mean, so there is two different products. There is public stock token that we launched. And to your point, we are at more than a thousand now.

So what was exciting for us was really to build the tokenization engine ourselves so that we could actually support this rapid growth. And the engine actually can work for any type of asset. So we started with public stock for US markets and US ETF. But in the future, we can expand to any other market, could be European, could be Asian. Or we could also go to any type of red water assets like real estate or arts. So I think that's kind of the one thing that we were really excited about. The single item that you mentioned is private stock.

And so the reason why we really want to do something on private is because we feel like it's still one of this big gap that there is between the ultra high net worth individual and the normal kind of people that don't have multiple million in the bank. And so we want to find a way where we can tokenize the private equity from some of these companies, put it on chain and give access to customers. But the launch that we did in the EU was a giveaway, so it was a one-time thing for opening and space size. But the vision is a lot wider than that. We think that, you know, customer can actually have access to private equity firms, but we also think that private

equity firms could start raising money through blockchain technology instead of having to go through the classic VC structure and then going to have a banker and then going to go public and paying all these exchange fees. So I think that's kind of the idea behind it. The problem is that for a lot of this private company, if they are really hot or really in demand, they don't really need to have this raising capital problem. So they don't necessarily want to deal with retail. And we still think that it's not necessarily fair. Like a lot of the retail customers that are using the products are the reason why the company

is actually valuable. And so we think that in the future of tokenization kind of level. everything else. The customer could have the same right as an important VC or someone with a hundred millions of dollar, and it could also give the same type of access to these companies. Clearly, still some work in progress to be done, but I really think that's where the buck is going. And so let's just focus on the public company side is the kind of like impetus to take the U.S. stock market, which is not necessarily accessible to other geographies and give people price exposure to that. And so you wouldn't like have tokenized U.S. stocks in like available to

U.S. customers. Is that the thinking? Currently not. I mean, that's why we launched into you because we didn't really have a poor courage there and we did have a running Robin Hood with millions of customers there. But I think in the future, you're going to be a year. You're going to start saying blockchain being developed more and more in the US. You know, you already have a lot of exchanges talking about modernizing their stack or using blockchain. You have the TTC's explaining how they are going to start using blockchain. And so it's more about how do we connect all this system together so that in the US you can have 24-7 or you can have instant settlement and not wait a day.

And when it's necessary and we have to use blockchain for it to have access to to these benefits, we will definitely do it. But right now for the largest impact, we felt like the EU was a better playing ground for launching this product and seeing really the impact there. And there's a lot of countries in the EU or even in the world where it's still difficult for you to open a US brokerage account and it's still difficult to covert your local currency into US dollar to be able to invest. So the product that we launch as zero spread, zero PFO, zero fee.

We just charge the FX from euro to dollar at 10 basis point. And so we are really trying to create a competing product that gives you a lot of advantage to get into the space. Okay. And then so for the private equity or private, I guess, stock side, I know. So I guess initially you guys were given some, or you had access to some tokens that you used to, sorry, some equity that you used to make those tokens. So in the future, like, yeah, how do you plan to expand that? And do you feel like this is something now companies that are private will just come to expect

that there will be interest in trading, you know, equity in them in this way? I think so and I think it's something that it's a bit of a cultural shift that will need to happen. And the same way that if you think about it, it took us at least what, like five years to get the idea of stable coin being as a real as dollar. You know, for a very long time, people were not sure and you can still trade a stable wine under the dollar in some places. they still spread. And so it took like a bit of time for people to understand the value of the stable coin. And same thing with retail trading for a very long time. Bankers will recommend companies that are going public to not allocate to retail or to only allocate to ultra high net worth individuals.

But mostly to just give it to institution. And slowly you're starting to see. things changing. Some of the recent big IPOs, for example, I've given a lot more to retail. One that was public about it, bullish, claimed that they allocated 20% to retail, which I think really shows the transformation from, you know, a few years ago. And so I think it's going to be the same thing for private equity. A lot of companies don't want to deal with kind of the pressure of having the asset traded outside, but there are also ways to go around it that, could remove the noise for the companies,

but still give access to the retail investor. And at the same time for the company, it will be beneficial because they will be able to raise capital more easily and at lower cost because there will be less intermediary in the between. So I think you're going to see that developing. It's just we are at the very beginning. We're at day zero of this journey.

But I'm pretty sure that if we talk again in a couple of years, you will just be the norm to invest in some of these corporate is. And so I'm sorry, so for like when they do IPO, do you feel like the holders of the tokenized equity, will they, is, it's just like giving more access to them so that they can kind of like take advantage of the IPO. But then also, do you think it could potentially change IPOs in some fashion. I mean, you could see a world where there's just no more IPO, basically. It's just you don't have to go to this process where you have to pay in exchange and a lot

of bankers and all these things. But even outside of that, I think it's more about being able to have this access to customer and they're able to write to write the course of the company. And so instead of waiting to invest in any company when they are going public, basically being at a higher valuation since creation, they can invest in the CED stage or the C stage A stage or BCD. And I just think it's just a more fair system for a lot of this customers. Like instead of having to wait for the company to be public, you can actually invest in it

if you're excited by it because you build it in AI or you build it in the tool that you're using on your computer, you should be able to access it at the beginning of the launch instead. Okay. So I heard you also, I mean, you even mentioned it briefly here, but I also heard you talk about this a little bit on the Edge podcast about tokenizing, you know, all kinds of other things, including things like art and real estate. And that was interesting to me because those concerned physical objects. You know, things that aren't as kind of inherently digital as crypto or even stocks. And I just want to hear you talk a little bit more about what that looks like.

And do you actually see Robin Hood getting into those markets? Because it feels like it would just take a whole new apparatus at the company even for a single one of them. Yeah. I mean, look, I think the company is really good at creating new businesses. Like we were talking about prediction market earlier, you know, It was not something that we were doing until we started to launch it. And so I think we are just, you know, Vlad and Bejou are great founders. I've kind of created a business entrepreneurship spirit within the company where a lot of team are starting from scratch and building product from scratch.

So I wouldn't say that it's a limiting factor. Usually our limiting factor is more about customer demand and what are people really interested in. And I think tokenization of something like real estate or heart actually give accessibility to a lot of these customers to things that they are not just able to access otherwise. Being able to buy, I don't know, an apartment in New York is difficult. And so for you to be exposed to the growth of New York as a city, you don't necessarily have a ton of ways.

You have obviously rates and some ETF. for some stock that will be linked somehow to the growth of the city, but it's not the same as owning a piece of an apartment. And so there are different companies that have done this kind of things in some ways. You know, they will create a fund. The fund will buy the underlying property or the underlying piece of art. But usually the issue is that you still have a lot of middlemen, you still have a lot of fees that are being passed to the customers.

And so it's hard to justify the return of investment. And so that's where tokenization can be helpful, where you buy a piece of property, you divide by X tokens and people can have a portion of an apartment in New York or a painting. So I think it's definitely possible. The question is more about customer. demand, how do you manage the physical location and the tokens and how do you make sure that you tie them together correctly? But we meet a lot of startups that are working in this space and the progress that we've seen in the past has been very exciting. And so I definitely think it's

something that we will see in the future, like as of one of the next type of asset that people will start tokenizing. The question, for us for launching it at Robin will be more around to do our customer care about it and do they want to have access to it. And if they do, we will definitely build it. But if they don't, we can focus on something else. Yeah. I honestly, initially, I wasn't thinking about the investment piece.

And I was literally thinking about like tokenizing a deed, but then you also have to transfer the house. So that actually seems much more up Robin Hanzali, what you describe. I did also just want to ask, you know, what you were talking about, how this technology just enables a lot of new things. And one thing I think you briefly touched on was just like, you know, settlement can happen a lot more quickly or be like basically instantaneous. I just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about how as crypto, you know, becomes more adopted as this technology, you know, kind of powers a lot of backends and

gets integrated and more of finance. I wondered what you thought that, would unlock for users? How would it impact their financial lives? Yeah, I mean, there are a few things where basically because of the settlement being delayed by business days, a lot of companies need to lock capital. And so that capital doesn't work, doesn't generate yield. And therefore, that's what the cost. And so the cost sometimes is passed to the customer or sometimes it's just passed on the underlying

asset. But overall, you know, that could help. The other thing that I often explain to customer is that I don't know if you've tried to transfer a brokerage account to another. There's this process called ICATs where you basically fight a form and you wait three to five days, sometimes more. And you don't really know what's happening, but sometimes it's transferred correctly. Sometimes you're missing assets. Sometimes you're missing cost bases. All of this is very lunky, frankly.

And so having the tokenization of this asset can just make it instant. And you have all the information transferred because it's in the contracts. And so I think overall that's kind of where we're going to see for customer. It's going to give more functionality. It's going to increase competition because more people can trade using the same technology. And therefore, you start to see a world where you also reduce the cost. customers should be able to trade for all the work costs at the end of the day. All right. So I did also want to ask,

Ramadanhood is famously one of the best product companies. And I'm sure you're very well aware that crypto maybe could use some help in this area. And I wonder, you know, when you look at some of the different crypto offerings or just kind of where crypto is in its development, how do you think about about what crypto needs in order to make itself more accessible to mainstream users? Yeah, I mean, I think that's something that I often talk about is I always think that crypto was made by engineer for engineer and we forgot 99% of the population at the same time. And sometimes what I recommend to funders is to actually stop talking about crypto,

you know, and to focus about what are you trying to launch? What is the product you're trying to build? And if it's using crypto rels and it's working well in the other hood, that's great. But otherwise, just don't talk about it and let's focus less about the protocol and more about the actual use case that you're trying to develop. And I think that's what we've been trying to do with some of the product we launched recently. And I told you before, like for our stock tokens, like we don't explain which layer two is or how it's working with the gas fees. all these things. We just tell you like, buy the Tesla's token, you buy it and it's like the same experience that if you were buying it on the US brokerage. And I think that's really key for

us to succeed as a community is to focus less about what is going on in the hood. The same way that I'm sure that when you're using your phone and you're texting your friend, you don't really know what's a protocol happening behind the scenes and is it using RCA or is it using something else, you just send the text. And so I think that's what we need to do for crypto, and that's what we need to focus on. So I did also want to then ask you, because we've kind of talked around this a little bit, or you hinted at this, it does feel like, and already we're seeing that Coinbase is doing a little bit of this, it does look like Robin Hood could use Defi a lot more than it already

is. And obviously, you know, you have the Robin Hood chain and so potentially, this is probably what some of your plans are for that. But I wondered if you could just talk about how you think Robin Hood could use more of Defi or what it would look like to have the two become kind of more combined. Yeah, I mean, I think the world where, you know, defy really develops, well, actually you will see a lot of interaction that we have on the platform that are currently centralized. That could actually happen on Defi. And I think a lot of the assets, the new asset that we've been talking about, will exist on Defi as well.

So it's more a question of when versus if. I will say right now, I don't think we have the technology set up yet. That's why we're building our chain and that's why we're building all the compliance tool within it. But once it's going to be live, I think you will see more and more for systems starting to use it. Because you can do a lot more on Defi than just trading assets. You can also create a system to verify and identify customers, make sure that the wallet that is interacting with our system is the same one as it was like a week ago and not someone else spoofing it. So a lot of that can be built.

I just think we're at the beginning, to be honest. And I do have to ask about one other offering that we know that Coinbase has that potentially maybe Robin Hood might be thinking about, I don't know. But, you know, they acquired Echo, which is a token launchpad. And I wondered if Robin Hood is thinking of doing any kind of ICO type product. You know, at this point, I think for us, we're more in the concept of listing what our customer are really asking for and less about telling customer what to invest in. And so I think for now, we are feeling pretty good about how quickly we've been able to

list asset that our customer would have been wanting. And, you know, we will see. But frankly, we have a very similar product called IPO access before. And we think that it's not very hard to duplicate it if we wanted to. But overall, I will say that, you know, I want to see a bit more. what is going to happen in the space before we stop launching into our customer. Yeah, yeah. Clearly that area is, yeah, I think it's undergoing a change of some sort, maybe, is how to put it.

Okay. I did also want to ask about the recent news that Robin Hood is buying the Indonesian brokerage, PT Buona Capital Securitas, and another company, they're a crypto trading company. any PT pedagon, I think, asset crypto. And now with all your offerings in Europe, I just wondered if you could talk about a little bit about why you chose Indonesia and how you think generally about international expansion.

Yeah, I mean, international expansion is one of our key pillar. We've been pretty open about it and clear about it. So we require an exchange called PITSTAP in Europe. They have licenses a bit across the globe. We also announced the acquisition of Wanda in Canada, and we are live in the EU and in the UK in multiple forms. So for us, international is definitely something that we want to push on.

In Asia, we are currently alive on the Bidstam side in Singapore. And so for us, it was like one big region. But if you think about crypto in Southeast Asia, Indonesia is one of the population, population that is the most excited about crypto and engaged about crypto. So that's why we wanted to get this acquisition done. It's giving us the opportunity to launch there and, you know, to be able to enter market that is very crypto friendly.

But I think at the end of the day for us, like you shouldn't be surprised if you see this announcement because it's really part of this pillar that we said that we wanted to at Robin Hood basically offering any type of financial instrument that you're interested in and available globally everywhere in the planet. So we have some work to do there. Yeah, I actually lived in Indonesia right after I graduated from college. So I have a soft spot for it in my heart. Yeah, that's awesome.

It's a special, yeah, special country. Okay, so I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, which is, you know, talk about like Robin Hood. future as a super app. Just describe a little bit more like what that looks like and how you see, you know, some of the different themes that we talked about in this episode playing a part, you know, like tokenization or just, you know, crypto generally. Well, you know, we also announced a few more things like banking, for example, we started to write out to customer. And so you can see that slowly we are trying to get all the, the pillar of your

financial ecosystem. And I think the question between the different products will just become more and more intertwined with the evolution of regulation and the technology as well. You can see a world where the brokerage is using a lot more of the blockchain technology. You can see a world where we're tokenizing more and more of the brokerage and all the products that's with the offer. And I think that's really the benefits we are getting from having one complete one company that is specialized in all these different financial elements. But there is still a lot of work to be done. And especially in the U.S., we also have a lot of work to be done on the regulation side.

You know, we are still waiting on the market structure of bill, for example. That should really help define some of these elements and tell us what we can do or not. And so I think it's maybe a little too early to tell you exactly how this is going to happen. Okay. Okay. Well, last question. For 2026, do you have any crypto prediction that you would feel comfortable making? Any prediction?

I think what I would be excited about is to see how prediction market and crypto are going to intertwine even more. You already see it, you know, a lot of prediction markets are using crypto technology. technology, but you don't see yet a lot of them using crypto in between. So for example, if you invest in a very long term contract, your capital is logged. So I think it could be interesting to see how people are going to start using crypto to find a way to remunerate the time that you're spending on a contract. So yeah, that's probably the prediction. And the second one I always think about more is AI and crypto are the two big thing that

are happening. And we haven't seen yet the cross that we were thinking will happen a lot sooner, like around lending GPUs or remunerating GPUs and all these things. So excited to see if 2020 is going to be the year finally. Huh. Okay, that wasn't the last question because now I have a follow-up question, which is just for the prediction market one, turning the assets that you know, you've put into any one bet into a productive asset? Like, what do you think that could look like? I'm not sure yet, but I think it's something that we definitely need to start thinking about, especially if you want to encourage more and more of people to invest in the long term and not

just the thing happening in real time, basically. Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, I, that sounds really interesting to me. So I hope to see that happen. Joanne, it's been a pleasure as usual. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Unchained is produced by Laura Shin with help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Oranovich, Margaret Curia, and Pam Majumdard. Thanks for listening.