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- [00:00]
A
We think that in the future, tokenization kind of level everything else, the customer could have the same rights as an important VC or someone with $100 million 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 puck is going.
- [00:24]
B
Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host Laura Shinobi. 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 Unchained Crypto.com looking.
- [00:44]
C
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- [01:21]
B
Today's guest is Johan Kerbrat, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Robinhood Crypto. Welcome Johan.
- [01:27]
A
Hey. Good to see you again. How are you?
- [01:29]
B
Nice to see you. I'm good, Good. Glad to have you. So for Q3, Robinhood saw quite a boost in earnings from the year prior and crypto revenue tripled. Why do you think crypto revenue on Robinhood grew so much year over year?
- [01:47]
A
Yeah, I mean it's been a great year, you're right. And Q3 was a great quarter for us. I think the combination of the environment not just really part in crypto, but also all the new features that we built around crypto. We added a lot more assets. We started to offer staking 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 this 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.
- [02:29]
B
And Robinhood has had 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 mania, the GameStop mania. And then know, we saw the. The very slick presentation you guys did, introducing a bunch of crypto, you know, products over the summer. And now Robinhood 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 Robinhood's plans or at least how you think about or approach the business.
- [03:13]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there is so much to tell about this story. I think for a lot of reasons. I have a ton of respect and admiration for our founders, but I think one thing that I often explain is the story of crypto within Robinhood. 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, it's a winter. It was past the 2017 ICOs and NFTs kind of saga. And so instead of going into this direction like everyone else, Vlad and Baiju were like, you know what? Some customers want to have access to this 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 customers and to start 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 the recent quarter is just a result of a lot of many years of work. For example, we've been building a lot of this feature that we announced during the can eventually 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 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 and P announcements happen, I'm not even sure if there was a quick, slight message about it, like, congrats and let's keep working, basically. So I think that's 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.
- [05:35]
B
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 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 prove that the four year cycle is dead. At least somebody from bitwise. Ryan Rasmussen, 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 Robinhood preparing for any changes in the market?
- [06:15]
A
Yeah, so I always say that I'm very bad at predicting bitcoin prices and 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, and still rebouncing. 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, from our customers, not just on trading the actual assets, but on buying cryptos 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 so far what we see from our customer is that they have a pretty long term horizon. They are usually a younger demographic and so they see it more as a buy 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 administrator, for example, just roll out new fees that if you use our smart exchange routing feature, you can trade for as low as three basis points. And so that's been more for focus. And then we, we let the customer kind of decide if they think the price is going to go down or up because like I said, I wasn't very good at it.
- [07:49]
B
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, 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, what are they like now or what are the different categories of them?
- [08:22]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean we have I think almost every segment at this point where initially a lot of customers were thinking about Robinhood for crypto as more of a playing ground for people that were not really serious about crypto and they were mostly holding stocks but wanting a bit of exposure to Bitcoin or Ethereum. But since then we graduated from this place a long time ago and we now have all the advanced customers 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 staking is very important so they can get yield on the asset that they own on the platform. And we also have a lot of people that are active on DeFi, so we have built a self custody wallet 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 Robinhood is pretty interesting being this all in one application where you know, 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 investor to, 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 into it and so it's like opening it for a lot of customer there they're thinking about just investing in general and what is their financial journey for their entire life.
- [10:21]
B
Yeah, so in a way it's like you're trying to build out offerings for all levels of sophistication with crypto.
- [10:29]
A
That's right, all level 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 futures on Bitcoin and ETH and we also have the underlying assets. So if you're an advanced trader, you can actually hedge or collect premium between the two different assets. Same thing with ETF for example, if you want to hold Bitcoin for the long term, you can 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.
- [11:10]
B
So given that you have offerings across that huge range, I did want to ask you a little bit about how you see Robinhood in comparison to Coinbase. I'm sure you're very well aware that tomorrow Coinbase is doing a big announcement and already there's reports that they're going to be competing basically with Robinhood in some of the offerings they already have, such as prediction markets, tokenized stocks, et cetera. So I just put was curious to hear how you think about 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 definitely converging on the same space, at least as how I see it.
- [11:56]
A
Yeah, I mean, 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 Robinhood. So I'm not necessarily 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 Robinon 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 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. We've seen that it's been one of our fastest growing business at Robinhood. 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 Robinhood is more around how we put the customer at the center of everything that we are building and the way that we are designing our tools and features. We go about doing a lot of user research, 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 Robinhood unique. When you look at our credit card, for example, a lot of people have been launching credit card 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 on the competition.
- [14:31]
B
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 Robinhood 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 Susquehanna International Group. And that would be for expanding its prediction markets product. So explain how this initiative differs from what you're already doing with Kalshi.
- [15:00]
A
Yeah, I mean, the exchange basically is the back end 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 Robinhood. But I think at the end of the day for the customer, 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.
- [15:55]
B
And because this is now the largest, sorry, the fastest growing area of Robinhood, I was curious, what are you noticing in trends amongst the users, what types of users they are, what their behaviors are? Why do you think that it's. It became so popular so quickly?
- [16:17]
A
I think there is many reasons, but the one that I think is the most easy to explain is that it's giving 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 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 company 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, 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 feet 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's a direct impact for them. So I think that's the reason. And then obviously 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.
- [18:07]
B
And how do you find that those users differ from others? Like, are there certain traders on Robinhood that only like to trade prediction markets? Or do you find that there's just a lot of crossover? And, and if there is a lot of crossover, is it with the crypto traders in particular?
- [18:28]
A
I gotta 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. So I'm sure you have like some segment that are just prediction markets and some that are crossing with crypto and some that are crossing with all the products. So it's hard to tell you just like that.
- [18:49]
B
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 Robinhood. And they accused you and these other platforms of conducting unlicensed online gambling and sports wagering. What's your response to that?
- [19:10]
A
You know, we, we've been working with regulator for a very long time since the, the inception of, of Robinhood. And so I, 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 is for, for the case of prediction market with the cftc, but in the case of crypto with the SEC or with 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, we felt confident into our ability to do so. Overall, it's a, it's a moving topic and it's a pretty hot topic that has been going on for, for the past few months. And my hope is that we can avoid the same situation that we did with crypto in the past four years and create a situation where there was starting to be almost a ban on crypto and then everyone was kind of leaving the United States to build on offshore 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 Robinhood knows how to work with regulators. So if at some point there's a framework that is in place and we can use that framework, we'll be able to adapt to it very quickly.
- [20:34]
B
Okay. Yeah. So let's now talk about some of the big announcements from the summer. I'm sure you're very well aware Robinhood made huge waves when it announced that Robinhood chain would be an L2 on Ethereum. And I wondered if you could talk about that decision. 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?
- [21:04]
A
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, if you use a Robin Wallet, we'll cover the gas fees on Solana through some of our partnership with them. So we didn't decide to go with the Ethereum L2 just because we didn't like Solana. It 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 other ways and having our own stack, basically. So the question was more about building our own L1. Versus an L2. And the reason why we decided to build an L2 on Ethereum was we felt like we're 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 Ethereum is an important point for us.
- [23:04]
B
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, I did also want to ask, 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, currently that's more siloed probably than I think ideally it would be. And I wondered, do you have faith that this will get resolved or how do you think about that factor that that is currently the state of play?
- [23:35]
A
Yeah, I mean for us it definitely makes it easier being an EVM compatible chain to be able to move liquidity easily between the different chain. And to your point earlier around, our good competitor at Coinbase themselves are also on an L2 on Ethereum. And so it's helpful, I think for the customer at the end of the day to be able to move liquidity 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 stock tokens on a European app, for example, the customer doesn't even really know what is happening behind the scene. We are showing a build that clearly shows it's a token and so that it's a crypto purchase. But all the complexity around gas fees and transaction and 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 on a regular basis. There's multiple L1 being announced and everyone is going to want to have also their own stable coin, or at least there's a lot more stable coins now than 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 aggregate the right transaction process for our customers and that way customer can just focus on what they are 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.
- [25:21]
B
So I also wanted to ask about perps because they were obviously also a big part of the boost in revenue in Q3 and in the crypto vertical in Robinhood. And I think right now they're just in the EU and I was wondering if you could give us a preview of when they might be expanded to other jurisdictions.
- [25:43]
A
Yeah, I mean we've said it before, 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.
- [26:10]
B
Like the Coinbase one?
- [26:12]
A
Yeah, like the Coinbase one, which is more or less of a long dated future. And so we have some options available already on the platform. Like we have long day literature as well on some of the assets. But a true. Perhaps the same way that we have in the EU or that you can find on different platforms are still not allowed. But in the EU it's something that we've seen a lot of stickiness, like our customers are really liking it. I think they also like the UIs 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 us so hopefully we can get the regulators to approve it quickly.
- [27:01]
B
And I noticed that you guys had invested also in Lighter's recent fundraise of $68 million. And obviously this is just easily one of the hottest 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, why is it that Robinhood chose Lighter out of all the different contenders in the defi perp space?
- [27:27]
A
Many reasons. We know the layout 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've built. They're also using zero knowledge proof for a lot of their system and I also felt like during the 1010 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 their 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.
- [28:15]
B
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 Robinhood might be the user interface or something like that?
- [28:29]
A
Yeah, for example, that's something we could do especially since we have a self custody 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 offering through it and LiDAR 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. 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.
- [29:18]
B
Okay. And you mentioned the 1010 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 trading infrastructure and all the things that can go wrong and type of world. I wondered when you looked at what happened that day, what do you think the industry could improve or what were your thoughts on why things went so wrong?
- [29:52]
A
Yeah, it's hard to say exactly. I think we're still not too convinced by some of the explanation that were 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. 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 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 a lot of this platform are 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 due diligence and these kind of things. But overall I think for the industry it's just 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 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 FTX 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 teams that are on DEFI and the decentralized exchanges, they're all very good team and very strong engineering forces. But sometimes we are building fast, sometimes the leverage may be very high and too high for some instances and that's where we need to be careful.
- [31:55]
B
All right, so in a moment we're going to talk about some of the other things that Robinhood's been doing in the crypto space. But first we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors make this show possible.
- [32:04]
C
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B
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- [33:51]
B
Back to my conversation with Johan. So the other big announcement that Robinhood had this past summer was that you launched tokenized stocks. And this really feels like it would be at the sweet spot of all of Robinhood's offerings and its history and its expertise. And I heard that 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 also the regulatory aspect because obviously people probably remember there was a little bit of a kerfuffle with OpenAI right after the launch. So yeah, just talk a little bit about those issues and how you managed to get that growing so quickly.
- [34:37]
A
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 real world assets like real estate or art. So I think that's kind of the one thing that we were really excited about. The second 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 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 OpenAI and SpaceX. But the vision is a lot wider than that. We think that 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 these private company, if they are really hot or really in demand, they don't really need to have this raising capital problem. And so they don't necessarily want to deal with retail. And we still think that it's not necessarily fair. Right. 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 tokenization kind of level everything else, the customer could have the same rights as an important VC or someone with hundreds of millions of dollars 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.
- [37:18]
B
And so let's just focus on the public company side is the kind of impetus to take the US stock market, which is not necessarily accessible to other geographies, and give people price exposure to that. And so you wouldn't have tokenized U.S. stocks available to U.S. customers, is that the thinking?
- [37:45]
A
Currently not. I mean that's why we launched in the eu, because we didn't really have a brokerage there and we didn't have a running Robinhood with millions of customers. There was. But I think in the future you're going to start seeing blockchain being developed more and more. In the US you already have a lot of exchanges talking about modernizing their stack or using blockchain. You have the TTC explaining how they are going to start using blockchain. And so it's more about how do we connect all these systems together so that in the US you can have 24, seven 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 its 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 U.S. brokerage account and it's still difficult to convert your local currency into US dollar to be able to, to invest. So the, the product that we launch has 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 get to create a competing product that gives you a lot of advantage to get into the space.
- [39:17]
B
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. To 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 equity in them in this way?
- [39:55]
A
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 took us at least what like 5 years to get the. The idea of stablecoin being as real as. As dollar, you know, for a very long time people were not sure and you can still trade a stable coin under the dollar in some places. So they still spread. And so it took like a bit of time for people to understand the, the value of the stablecoin. And same thing with retail trading for, 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 or 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, have 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 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 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, it will just be the norm to invest in some of these prior companies.
- [41:55]
B
And so I'm sorry. So for like when they do ipo, do you feel like the holders of the tokenized equity will they. 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?
- [42:23]
A
I mean, you could see a world where there's just no more ipo, basically. It's just you don't have to go through this process where you have to pay an 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 valuable to ride the course of the company. And so instead of waiting to invest in, you know, any company when they are going public, basically being at the highest a higher valuation since the creation, they can invest in the seed stage or the sales a stage or pcd. And I just think it's just a more fair system for a lot of these 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. You believe in AI or you believe in the tool that you're using on your computer, you should be able to access it at the beginning of the launch instead.
- [43:27]
B
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 all kinds of other things, including things like art and real estate. And that was interesting to me because those concern 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 Robinhood getting into those markets because it feels like it would just take a whole new apparatus at the company for even for a single one of them?
- [44:08]
A
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 Bijou are great founders have kind of created a mis 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 necessarily 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 REITs and some ETF or some stock that will be linked somehow to the growth of the, 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 these 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 middlemans, you still have a lot of fees that are being passed to the customers. And so it's hard to justify the return on investment. And so that's where tokenization can be helpful, where you buy a piece of property, you divide it by X tokens, and people can, 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 as one of the next type of assets that people will start tokenizing. The question for us for launching it at Robin will be more around, do our customer care about it? 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.
- [46:55]
B
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 Hood's alley, what you described. I did also just want to ask what you were talking about, 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, 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 in more of finance. I wondered what you thought that would unlock for users, like how would it impact their financial lives?
- [47:50]
A
Yeah, I mean, there are a few things where basically because of the settlement being delayed by a 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 one of the cost. And so the cost sometimes is passed to the customer, or sometimes it's just passed on the underlying asset. But overall 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 ecat where you basically file 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 basis. All this is very clunky, 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 are going to see for customer. It's going to give more optionality, it's going to increase competition because more people can trade using the same technology. And therefore you should start to see a world where you also reduce the cost and customers should be able to trade for the world cost at the end of the day.
- [49:17]
B
All right, so I did also want to ask. Robinhood 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 wondered, 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 what crypto needs in order to make itself more accessible to mainstream users?
- [49:48]
A
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 founders is to actually stop talking about crypto 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 rails 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, for our stock tokens, we don't explain which layer two it is or how it's working with the gas fees and all these things. We just tell you buy the Tesla token, you buy it. And it's the same experience that if you were buying it on a US brokerage. And I think that's really key for us to succeed as, as a community is to focus less about what is going on under 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 the protocol happening behind the scenes and is it using RCA or is it using something else? You just send a text. And so I think that's what we need to do for crypto and that's what we need to focus on.
- [51:20]
B
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 Robinhood could use Defi a lot more than it already is. And obviously you have the Robinhood 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 Robinhood could use more of Defi or what it would look like to have the two become kind of more combined.
- [51:54]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think the world where Defi really develops, 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 assets 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 are 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.
- [52:58]
B
To be honest, and I do have to ask about one other offering that we know that Coinbase has that potentially maybe Robinhood might be thinking about. I don't know, but they acquired Echo, which is a token launchpad, and I wondered if Robinhood is thinking of doing any kind of ICO type product.
- [53:24]
A
At this point. I think for us we are more in the concept of listing what our customers 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 assets that our customer have been wanting and we will see. But frankly, we had 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 I want to see a bit more what is going to happen in the space before we start launching into our customer.
- [54:11]
B
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 Robinhood is buying the Indonesian brokerage PT Bwana Capital Securitas and another company there, a crypto trading company, PT Pentagon, I think asset crypto. And now with all your offerings in Europe, I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about why you chose Indonesia and how you think generally about international expansion.
- [54:52]
A
Yeah, I mean, international expansion is one of our key pillars. We've been pretty open about it and clear about it. So we acquired an exchange called pitstamp in Europe. They have licenses a bit across the globe. We also announced the acquisition of WonderFi 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 live on the bitstamp 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 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 optionality to launch there and to be able to enter a market that is very crypto friendly. But I think at the end of the day for us, 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 have. Robinhood 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.
- [56:17]
B
Yeah. I actually lived in Indonesia right after I graduated from college, so I have a soft spot for it in my heart. 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 Robinhood's future as a super app. Just describe a little bit more like what that looks like and how you see some of the different themes that we talked about in this episode playing a part like tokenization or just, you know, crypto generally.
- [56:51]
A
Well, you know, we, we, we also announced a few more things like banking for example. We started to roll it out to, to customer. And so you, you can see that slowly we are trying to get all the, the pillar of your financial ecosystem. And, and I think the, the question between the, the different products will just become more and more intertwined with the evolution of, of regulation. And the, you can see a world where the brokerage is using a lot more of the blockchain technology. You can see a world where we are tokenizing more and more of the brokerage and all the products that they offer. And I think that's really the benefit we are getting from having 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 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.
- [58:02]
B
Okay. Okay. Well, last question for 2026. Do you have any crypto prediction that you would feel comfortable making?
- [58:14]
A
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. A lot of prediction markets are using crypto 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 locked. So I think it could be interesting to see how people are going to start using crypto to find 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 things 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 around remunerating GPUs and all these things. So excited to see if 2026 is going to be the year, finally.
- [59:23]
B
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've put into any one bet into a productive asset. Like, what do you think that could look like?
- [59:38]
A
I'm not sure yet, but I think it's something that we definitely need to stop 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 the real time, basically.
- [59:55]
B
Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, that sounds really interesting to me, so I hope to see that happen. Johan, it's been a pleasure, as usual. Thank you so much for coming on Unchained. Unchained is produced by Laura Shinn with.
- [60:11]
C
Help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Aranovich, Margaret Curia, and Pam Majumdar.
- [60:16]
B
Thanks for listening.