Robinhood (HOOD) rolls out public blockchain as it expands deeper into crypto
By Margaux Nijkerk, Krisztian Sandor|Edited by Nikhilesh De
Jul 1, 2026, 6:25 p.m.
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Summary
Robinhood (HOOD) officially launched the public mainnet for Robinhood Chain, marking the company’s biggest step yet into onchain financial infrastructure as it looks to expand beyond brokerage services and into decentralized finance.
Announced during a Wednesday event in London, Robinhood Chain is a layer-2 blockchain built on Arbitrum (ARB) and designed for tokenized real-world assets and decentralized finance applications. The launch comes about four months after Robinhood began testing the network on testnet.
With the launch of the public mainnet, Robinhood’s tokenized stock products are now also fully live. Stock Tokens are available through Robinhood Wallet in more than 120 countries, although availability varies by jurisdiction. The company said the goal is to allow users to trade tokenized equities around the clock and use them across decentralized finance applications, including lending protocols and as trading collateral.
Robinhood also introduced Robinhood Earn, a decentralized lending product that allows users to lend USDG, the company’s dollar-backed stablecoin, through a self-custody wallet. The product offers an estimated annual percentage yield of 7%.
Beyond the Robinhood Chain ecosystem, the company announced several additional product launches and international expansion efforts. Robinhood said it is expanding perpetual futures trading in Europe to include commodities, ETFs and foreign exchange markets alongside crypto. It also plans to launch crypto trading in the U.K. and said its services are now available in Canada following its acquisition of WonderFi.
The company also unveiled Agentic Accounts for crypto, an AI-powered trading tool that will allow eligible U.S. users to connect AI models to Robinhood’s trading infrastructure while retaining control over capital allocation and trading parameters.
“Decentralized finance unlocks possibilities beyond what traditional finance can offer, but historically, it has required technical expertise to navigate,” Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president of crypto.
Robinhood’s product push shows how the lines between crypto and traditional finance are continuing to blur. The brokerage has steadily expanded beyond stocks and spot crypto trading into tokenized equities, derivatives and event contracts, better known as prediction markets. That strategy fits into the race for the “everything exchange” to host all kinds of trading and financial activity under one roof, increasingly on top of blockchain rails.
At the same time, the company also said last month it would lay off 10% of its workforce, some 290 employees, to streamline its organization and management structure.
Robinhood (HOOD) shares were up 5% during the day, still some 30% off from its October record.
Read more: Robinhood starts testing its own blockchain as crypto and tokenization push deepens
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