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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to another edition of Galaxy Brains Miami Tapes interviews that we recorded at the Miami Beach Convention center on site during consensus 2026 in May. We have another great interview for you. Johan Kerberat, head of crypto at Robinhood is our guest. We'll talk about, I mean, what is Robinhood doing?
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B
How big of a.
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A
How big of a part of their business is crypto? What are they thinking about and doing on tokenized securities and much more. Let's hop right into the interview with Johan.
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B
Let's go now to our guest, Johan Kerbert, head of crypto at Robinhood. Johan, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brains.
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C
Excited to be here.
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B
We're consensus in Miami in the Miami Beach Convention center inside this humorous galaxy box that we have here on the floor. What are your impressions of the conference so far and the vibes? Like, what kind of market are we in? Does the atmosphere tell you?
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C
I mean, I think it's been a pretty good conference so far. You know, a lot of people were saying that conferences have been empty so far, and there is, like, people everywhere. Like, it's very hard to get around, but definitely a bit more institution than, than retail, that's for sure. But I think it shows that the market also is maturing and evolving.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. People are saying the same thing about the bitcoin conference in Vegas last week. It was empty. I was there. It was packed. So I think it's like one picture or two of like, an empty stage and people run wild with that. Right? It seems very vibrant.
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C
No, I, I think we were in Vegas as well, and the, the, the place was packed everywhere. I think the picture was during the industry day, like the first day, and so maybe that's why. But if you go here, even the stage behind us is fully packed, so it's pretty exciting.
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B
So Vlad, the CEO founder of Robinhood, has said many times he's described Robinhood as a financial super app, famously was one of the easiest and still is probably places to buy and sell stocks, but has options trading, crypto. I mean, at one point I remember, I think dogecoin trading alone was like a huge part of Robinhood revenue. Where does crypto fit in the vision of the super app today?
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C
Yeah, there's two ways. One is that we want it to be part of a financial instrument, like any other financial instrument. We think it has the same kind of place in the app. So we never really thought about should we even put crypto or not on Robinhood, like, as soon as we decided to list it in 2018, you could find crypto very easily on the search like you are looking for any stock. And I think for us it was very important because a lot of customers are asking for accessibility but a lot of crypto players were very hard to get through and you had to set up your wallet or you had to do very complex purchase. And so I think at this point what we've been focusing on is really making it as a first class citizen. The second part is to use the actual crypto technology to power some of the Rails and some of the backend that are on on Robinhood to make sure that we can offer instance settlement or faster trading or maybe 24,7 trading for, for some of the assets and all of that we think we can optimize using crypto technology. Easiest example will be stablecoin. We use it for settlement with some of our counterparty or market makers. And you know, it's been a big change for us because instead of waiting for Monday to be able to send a wire, we can send it in the middle of Sunday.
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B
Yeah. How important has that been with stablecoins like for your business? It sounds like a big change, but are you saving a lot of money? Is it like helping you be operationally more effective? What's your sort of experience been?
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C
Yeah, it's a combination of being more efficient, taking less risk because the more you can settle with your counterparties, the less risk you have, like an open position you have. So I think for us it was just like a benefit. And also you can onboard more market makers and things like that. So not just relying on one system for us is very important. There's always something that will go wrong at some point. And so for us it's very, very important to make sure we don't have a single point of failure. So now if we want to sell with somebody, we can use wire, we can use a stablecoin, we can use other ways. And that way we never have one point of failure there.
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B
I like that a lot. And so another way you guys are using crypto technology is for tokenized equities. People have really wondered a lot. You guys gave that great presentation in Paris or in France at that conference. I guess that was last summer at this time.
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C
That was last summer, yeah.
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B
And it was sort of two paths were described then. One was tokenizing privates and the other was just tokenizing equity securities. I had my team look, there are some amount of tokenized equities that we can attribute to Robinhood, but they're sitting in one Address still, they haven't really started doing, which I get there was a regulatory. Is that. Is there a. Is there a barrier because of regulation or like something else you're waiting before you unleash it? What. What is going to unleash tokenized securities in your mind?
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C
Yeah. So for us, the idea was really to use tokenized stocks as a way to expand internationally. Like we, we felt like building Robinhood from scratch the same way we built it in the US will take too long if we wanted to do it in every single country of the planet. And we think that actually using blockchain technology could actually make us go a lot faster. So in France last year, we were able to start launching in every country of the EU our tokenized stocks products with 2,000 US stocks and ETFs that are now available. So we think it's pretty important. But yes, to your point, when we decided to launch it, we show a three phases plan. Vlad was very famously showing that plan on stage. And the phase one was really to just launch it in a centralized way. And now we are going to focus on the other faces, but we are not too far from unleashing. But I think the question is more like, how do we do it in a. In a safe way for all our customers?
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B
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense bringing US capital markets access to the rest of the world. We have the best and most vibrant capital markets. I think almost all of the top companies in the world are listed here. Is it hard for people abroad to get access to stocks? Is that one of the big bull cases for tokenized equities?
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C
I think it's one of the cases. I think you also want the opposite, where right now we are just talking about U.S. stocks and ETF. But I think in the future we want to do a lot more like EU stock markets, Asian stock markets, maybe private equity. To your point earlier, maybe real estate, maybe arts. What is the beauty of this tokenization discussion has been that it can work for almost anything. And so we should not just focus on one item or the other. And obviously right now we are more focused on the US stocks and etf. And mostly because it's still very hard for a lot of countries to get access to a brokerage account and to be able to trade what we can trade very easily on Robin and all the brokerage.
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B
Vlad has said that tokenized stocks, this is interesting, could prevent the kind of buying freezes that occur sometimes during meme stock volatility. How is that possible? Is it because of settlement risk?
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C
Is Reduced or I think what he meant there was like some of the market breaker that are like in the centralized exchanges and obviously on defi we don't necessarily have the same one but there will still be some requirements around those. So it will depend a bit. I do think what's going to be exciting with tokenized asset is that you can really imagine a world where any type of asset is going to be tokenized. And so I, I think in this world you, you will be able to invest in AI for example not just with a stock but also with maybe the, the. The plants that is manufacturing the cheap and, and these kind of things.
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B
I mean one of the big questions in tokenized stocks. I know the SEC characterized the taxonomy this way. They said there are basically issuer sponsored securities like what we did tokenizing our own or allowing Galaxy shareholders to tokenize their, our stock. And then there's third party issued issued ones where I think the, the big players are really cracking or X stocks Ondo and Robin Hood right now they have sort of different trade offs but it's. I want to before even not so much talk about that. But the tokenizing the privates is a similar sort of trade off. And I remember there was a little bit of a dust up when Vlad said they were tokenizing OpenAI privates and this is one of the most widely invested private companies, everybody, every venture firm owns some piece of OpenAI but they said we're not aware of this, we don't explicitly condone it. That's the case for all the third party issued stocks where it's not the issuer. How do you think about that? And also what about privates? We were promised SpaceX stock on the blockchain. When's that coming?
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C
Well I think for us private is still a big focus. We still think that this is a massive gap between what an institution can do, a famous hedge fund or high net worth individual can do versus what the rest of the population can do. Not a lot of Americans are accredited investor for example. And so they can't even do it even if they wanted to or even if they got access. So for us it's still where we think that tokenization can help. We did do this giveaway for SpaceX and OpenAI and as soon as there is a public event or if they raise more money or something customer will be able to get the benefit from that. And so that's what we did with our tokenized product. It's a derivative so you don't issue directly the stock on chain and the reason for that for us was really to get access to a wider spectrum of assets and being able to do it at scale. If we have to go with one issuer by one issuer and tokenize one by one, you know, the idea of being able to tokenize the entire market will take some time. But right now the private situation is more a problem of like regulation than really people not wanting to do it. Like we, after our announcement last year, we got reached out by many private companies that want to tokenize their assets. They want to give access to retail to their asset. They don't want to wait to go public for that. They don't necessarily want to know, have all the burden of being public just to give access to retail. So I, I think there is something to do here in the eu for example, we don't need to be an accredited investor. You just need to pass an assessment showing that you understand the risk. And I think that's what we, we would want the US to, to go through.
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B
That makes a lot of sense. I feel like there is a lot of demand and companies are staying private longer, which makes it harder to gain access. Let's shift gears a little bit. Robinhood acquired Bitstamp. Yep. In 2025. Bitstamp, I think at the time maybe still was the oldest continuously operating crypto exchange. It has licenses in 50 countries. Is my understanding is that being run as a separate business now and are there plans to somehow further integrate it into Robinhood?
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C
Yeah, it's a bit of a combo of the solution in some ways it's integrated within Robinhood. So we use a lot of bitstamp technology to power some of our system. All the advanced trading you can do where you can buy crypto as low as three basis points, that's all using exchanges routes including bitstamp. And for example, our perpetual product that we have in the EU is also using bitstamp as the exchange behind it. But we also wanted to keep some of the quality of bitstamp as an exchange. And so that's still separated from Robinhood. And so we have a lot of institution working there and making market there and we also have a white label solution where you can integrate a bit some technology and offer crypto to your customer. And we think that's very important to keep.
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B
Yeah, like a crypto as a service product.
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C
Exactly.
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B
Who's the market for that primarily? Is that like the institutions that are coming Traditional finance?
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C
Yeah, exactly. We have a few banks for example in Europe that recently launched using crypto as a service and so they are able to give their customer access to crypto using Altech, you know, from custody to trading. So it's been really good to see
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B
switching gears a little bit again, talk about your use of the blockchain. In particular, I think Robinhood had launched on Arbitrum 1, which is a roll up, an Ethereum roll up. Now you guys have talked about building your own sovereign layer two. Why the change? And one thing that you guys have said is that it's partially because you'll be able to better embed compliance into the chain. What does that actually look like in practice?
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C
Yeah, so the beauty of Farbit from one is that you can really build this chain that are basically duplicates. They are not L3, they are basically just L2 and they all connect together. And so it really gives you the opportunity to customize things, including compliance. So some of the tokens that we are going to launch will have specific roles based on the country that you are in. And this will allow you to really give the speed. It will allow you to really keep the speed of the chain without having to have a lot of code in each. Smart contracts, for example. So for us, I think this idea of being able to still get the liquidity, still get the security of Ethereum and benefit from all the work that the Arbitrum team has done. And on top of that, being able to customize every time we want to build something, it's a. It's a really great way to get optionality.
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B
It really makes sense, I think. And we've seen Coinbase, frankly is taking now a similar approach, sort of. It's not quite clear what they're doing, but it's something more specific than just using optimism out of the box as they had been doing. Vitalik has said that roll ups have to accept sort of certain different trade offs when it comes to decentralization and that this is. Presents an interesting tension. I obviously agree with that. And you're seeing this sort of like a resurgence of the permission blockchain again. I mean, I think this thing has been, I guess, not quite nail in the coffin, but being lowered this idea of a permission blockchain into the grave for some years now, but yet is rearing its head again. How do you think, how does Robinhood think about the tension between an institutional grade blockchain experience, maybe with the compliance required and the tension with the ethos of decentralization?
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C
Yeah, it's something that we have to find the right middle ground here where if we want to be able to give access to all the tools and all the elements of traditional finance. We also need to have a bit of flexibility on what the regulations are asking us to do. So a world where you have full privacy and full you can do whatever you want, not KYC and at the same time trade securities and all these things I think is it's still a bit far for us. But what we are trying to find is a good middle ground. So you will be on a permissionless chain, you will be able to interact with defi, you will be able to do a lot of things with your stock tokens. And so we think it's a pretty
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B
great compromise and you can embed a lot of that at the application layer or at the token layer, which we've done with ours as well. I got to ask this. Everyone's doing it. Everyone's getting an OCC charter, Everyone's thinking about issuing their own stablecoin or is already. Does Robinhood have any plans in this regard that you could share?
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C
So we are part of the global dollar network, usdg and we actually think it's a great product. We can share the revenue with the participants, which we think is really important. We don't want people to be at a disadvantage if they hold stablecoin. We want them to get the same benefit as if they were holding cash. And so for us, we are contributing to this network. We just recently put it on the platform as well so that people can start using Robinhood as a ramp for usdg. And right now that's going to be our focus.
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B
You already mentioned that you guys treat crypto in the Robinhood experience as a first class citizen. What is like, I mean, I don't know, at a high level even citing whatever your prior recent financials are, like, what is the breakdown between, I don't know, volume or activity between traditional assets and crypto assets at Robinhood? Robinhood's user base. 5050 is it?
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C
Yeah, it will depend on the segment. But we have some customers that are crypto first. They don't even touch equities and we have the opposite. But I think, you know, for us crypto is still a bit less than 5050 for sure.
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B
I was going to say because there's been so much volume on Robinhood especially like I remember during COVID this was like the number of people were stuck at home. And this goes into the next question too. The user experience truly like app UX of the Robinhood app is so high. It's such a great app. Like it feels so native. How important do you think the quality design of Robinhood's products, its app, has been to Robinhood's growth?
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C
I think it's key, I think not just the UX and ui, but also education and learning tools. I think it's key because for a lot of these customers, it's the first time they are using an investment instrument or an investment app. And so for us, making sure that they understand what they are doing along the way, making sure that they not just decide to invest in one specific asset, but also understand, like should they use a retirement plan or should they use a saving account or like this kind of things, it's key and it helps a lot of this new investor into the process. And it's critical, I think, because, you know, in this world where retirement is less and less certain, with AI coming up now, you're not even sure about what your job is going to be. And so I think for people to have a safe way to invest and understand how to manage your money, it's going to be critical.
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B
Yeah. And let's talk about AI briefly too. I love asking everyone this question. First we'll ask about Robinhood. What is Robinhood doing with AI? Or are there plans for Agentic trading
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C
and all that many things. So we use AI internally, externally, internally, you know, obviously for engineer, for almost all the teams at this point. And externally we. We launch a lot of feature on AI. So Cortex Digest is one of our top features. You see a notification of Bitcoin moving, you tap on it. We will tell you exactly what's going on in the market. Again, really trying to level the playing field for the people that don't have access to a Bloomberg terminal or very fancy tools, they can see all these details. We also have an assistant now that will tell you more information about your portfolio, will help you make decision as well. So we think it's going to be critical. And we also have an API available for crypto. So if you want to plug your agent to trade directly on your Robinhood account, you can actually do that as well.
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B
That is really cool. And then are you building anything at
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A
home or what do you use AI for?
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B
I always ask is one of my favorite questions. You're doing so many different things.
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C
Yeah, I use it recently to build actually my own trading bot using our API. I wanted to test it, but I use it all the time at work because basically now to think about merger, acquisition or partnership, or to build a new product, all of this can be simplified and actually be done better with more research through AI.
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B
What about in Washington. So much of the regulatory, so many of the market catalysts have been regulatory since the president's reelection. We've got the Clarity act here, I'll say, trudging its way along in the Senate. Hopefully we get something soon. How important is it either for Robinhood or this market that we get the Clarity act signed to law in your mind?
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C
I think it's important because still a lot of institutions are staying on the sideline, waiting to get that clarity. Same thing for Robinhood. You know, a lot of time we are thinking that we have a fragmented product. We don't have all the same feature available in all the states because of different regulation per state. So having one federal rule will actually simplify things quite a bit for, for Robinhood as a company, but also our customers. And at the end of the day, we're also late. You know, like the EU has a framework, like many countries have a framework. I think it's time for the US to have one and that we can build on top of it.
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B
Last question here. Before we wrap, two more quick questions. One, what gets you very excited for Robinhood in the next 12 months?
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C
Our tokenization plan, I think, you know, for us, we were at the beginning last year and we want to keep building on top of it and we are not just going to stop on U.S. stocks and ETF.
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B
Very last question. What's something that you've changed your mind on in the last year?
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C
That's a great question. I think, you know, in a lot of ways we were thinking of AI as just a way to improve engineering, but it's pretty interesting to see how it's changed the job of a lot of people still already.
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B
Johan Kerbert, head of Crypto from Robinhood, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brains.
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C
Yeah, thanks for having me.
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A
Thank you for listening to Galaxy Brains, the weekly podcast from Galaxy Research. I'm Alex Thorne, head of Firmwide Research at Galaxy. Follow me on X at Intangible Coins. Follow Galaxy Research on X at GLXY Research. Read our written reports@galaxy.com research and don't
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B
forget if you like Galaxy Brains to
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A
like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platforms like YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and more.
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B
We'll see you next time.