MENLO PARK — Robinhood Markets Inc. HOOD turned on the blockchain it built itself Wednesday, and with it came three products no regulator has yet had a chance to weigh in on: an AI trading agent with access to customer accounts, a lending pool advertising 7 percent yield with none of the deposit insurance a bank offers, and a stock market that never closes.
The launch, four months after Robinhood opened the network to public testing, turns the company’s crypto side business into infrastructure for the rest of the platform. Stock tokens tracking US equities are now live through Robinhood Wallet in more than 120 countries, availability varying by jurisdiction. A UK crypto launch and a Canadian expansion, the latter following Robinhood’s acquisition of WonderFi, arrive alongside it. None of it requires a customer to leave the Robinhood app, and none of it works the way a traditional brokerage account does.
Johann Kerbrat, the company’s senior vice president for crypto and international, framed the rollout as a bet that decentralized finance has been held back mainly by complexity rather than risk. “Decentralized finance unlocks possibilities beyond what traditional finance can offer, but historically, it has required technical expertise to navigate,” Kerbrat said in the announcement, according to CoinDesk, which reviewed the product details ahead of launch. Robinhood Chain itself is a layer-2 network built on Arbitrum, the stack Robinhood began testing publicly in February.
The most consequential new product may be the one Robinhood is not calling a savings account. Robinhood Earn lets users lend USDG, the company’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, through self-custody wallets for an advertised yield near 7 percent a year. Robinhood’s existing disclosures for its crypto products already warn that holdings there carry none of the protections applied to stocks or bank deposits: no coverage from the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, which insures up to $500,000 in securities at a traditional brokerage, and no FDIC insurance, the guarantee that protects up to $250,000 in a bank account. A yield nearly double what federally insured savings accounts pay is, by definition, compensation for a risk somebody is taking, and that risk lands on Robinhood Earn’s users the moment a borrower fails to repay or USDG itself slips from its dollar peg.
Alongside the lending product, Robinhood is opening Agentic Accounts to eligible US users, letting them connect outside AI models directly to its trading infrastructure. The company says users retain control over capital allocation and trading parameters, though it has not said how a customer would intervene in the seconds between an AI agent placing a trade and that trade executing on a market that, unlike the New York Stock Exchange, runs continuously and never pauses for a circuit breaker.
Robinhood is not the first platform to hand a trading account to code it does not fully control. A smaller crypto-native rival raised funding this spring for a self-improving trading agent built on the same premise, and Binance expanded its own AI agent trading tools earlier this year. The industry has effectively decided that customer demand for automated, always-on trading outweighs the unresolved question of who is liable when an agent trades badly. Robinhood is simply the first to attach that question to a company with tens of millions of funded accounts and a regulatory history that includes a Massachusetts securities regulator’s 2020 complaint accusing the app of “gamifying” trading for inexperienced investors, a case Robinhood ultimately settled.
The international expansion adds jurisdictions with their own securities regulators, none of which has said whether tokenized shares of US companies trading on a Robinhood-controlled blockchain count as securities, commodities, or something else entirely under local law. Neither CoinDesk’s coverage of the launch nor a separate report from Cointelegraph cited a response from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, which has taken a more cautious approach than US regulators to retail crypto access.
Chief Executive Vlad Tenev has spent the past year describing tokenization as inevitable, comparing it to a freight train that “can’t be stopped,” Cointelegraph reported, and predicting it will eventually reshape the entire financial system. He has also argued that real-time settlement on a blockchain could prevent trading halts like the one Robinhood itself imposed during the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, a decision that triggered congressional hearings and a class-action settlement. Wednesday’s launch is Robinhood’s answer to that history: build the exchange yourself, and the next time markets seize up, there is no one else to blame.
