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- [00:00]
A
And I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years everything is tokenized and you can access any exchange24.7 because the benefits kind of outgrew the old regulations that are in place.
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B
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream and we will first take a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by Cape America's Privacy first mobile carrier. Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location and your data actually stay yours. Get 33% off six months at Cape Co Unchained. Today's guest is Johan Kerbrot, SVP and GM of Crypto and International at Robinhood. Welcome, Johan.
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A
Hey, how are you doing?
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B
Good. You must be doing good. Congratulations.
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A
Thank you. We are excited.
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B
Yeah. I mean, the last couple of weeks just must have been pretty wild for you guys. You launched Robinhood chain. It's already got about $200 million in TBL and DeFi. But what was interesting is on July 2nd on CNBC, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev so that he felt that rwas were the future of crypto and meme coins were not very beneficial. But then of course, we've seen training of meme coins just really take off on Robinhood chain. Cash Cat, which is affiliated affiliated with Robinhood's early days, has been taking up a lot of the air in the room. And of course after that happened, he tweeted that Robinhood chain also works great for meme coins. But you know, looking at the numbers I saw RD, RWAs are still just about 60, $17 million of the market cap of Robin Hood chain. And you know, these numbers are changing a lot. But according to like some rough calculations they did a few hours ago, it looks like maybe about 85% or more of the daily dex trading activity on Rama chain is actually meme coins and only about 1% RWAs. So why do you think the numbers have ended up in this way?
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A
Well, well, you know, I think for us what's exciting to begin with is the traction and the early activities that we're seeing on the chain. I think it's great to see developer building that. You see user engaging and you see the chain performing very well like what we were designing. So not only it's super fast, but also the gas are also pretty low. And so so far we are seeing a ton of excitement from the customer about just that and the fact that the chain is really working like we we attended. We just launched super recently, so it's only two weeks ago that we announced some of these changes and we're seeing the TVL actually increasing quite a bit. It's it passed 370 million. A lot of that is stablecoin because we are connecting directly the Robinhood app to the chain for our earned product where you can get approximately 7% on your stable coin. And I think that was kind of the main hero moment that we are trying to push on when we announce all these new products in London. That being said, I think we build this chain in a permissionless way and the reason for that is that we wanted to create an open and accessible infrastructure so that anyone can build on top of it. And obviously Mincoin is a bit easier to build than some of the larger product like RWAS and everything. But I still see benefit from other chain. You know, it's going to bring user to the chain, it's going to bring liquidity. You have market maker engaging more and more with the chain because they're trying to make market on some of these coins. And at some point we will be able to cross this customer and this market makers and everyone building on it to also start using more and more of our world asset products. So I think, you know, there is an ecosystem basically that we are building and we are just at the beginning, just a couple of weeks in the launch and so far we're pretty excited to see where things went.
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B
Yeah, I mean it makes a lot of sense because obviously for the RWAS there's just so many more hurdles. But out of curiosity, was it a surprise to you how things played out the first couple weeks?
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A
I wouldn't say it was a surprise. I will say that we launched probably at one of the lowest moment in terms of crypto market in the past couple of years or so. And so for us it was a bit hard to predict exactly how people will react to the launch, but actually we're really excited to see how people reacted to it. From the London event where Vlad Multiple of my team and myself presented 12 plus more products, we saw a lot of engagement during the event, we saw a lot of engagement on socials and obviously with the chain we are seeing a lot of traction. So I think it just shows that crypto and blockchain technology is something that is sometimes cyclical and that the strategies that we've been using, which is to use the more calm time to build and focus on just building is actually beneficial because when we Launch new product. People are actually excited to start using them and to start engaging with them.
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B
Yeah. And something else that happened during the frenzy was that PumpFund made Robinhood chain tokens available to trade on PumpFun. And that mashup between PumpFund and Robinhood chain just makes a lot of sense to me because I imagine both have user bases that maybe take like a more gamified approach to trading. But I was curious, like, is that also something out of the blue for you or did you know that they were going to do that?
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A
I, I think for a lot of the partners that launch the, after the, the initial launch, it wasn't organized, orchestrated with us, but I think it was part of our strategy. We, we, like I said earlier, like we wanted to make the, the chain permissionless. We invested a lot in documentation. One of the reasons we also wanted to have an L2 and one of the reason we picked Arbitrum as a platform for it was because people know it and there's a lot of values to use Arbitrum in terms of language you can launch on and everything. We did a lot of partnership with providers, for example Alchemy, Chainlink and others, so that people could actually integrate very quickly with the chain. All of that was kind of the plan to make sure that anyone who wants to build on the chain can. And that's really what we are trying to encourage. Obviously there are some that we are more excited to see when they are launching than other, but in general, our goal is to make sure that everyone can access this chain and everyone can interact with the RWA system that we created or some of the AI features that we enabled for the launch. And also in the future, all the interaction that we'll have with the Ravinode kind of main application that we have in the US
- [07:16]
B
So as we mentioned earlier, Robinhood Chain has to do a pretty careful rollout of certain features and products, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Those are the ones we Talked about earlier RWAs, but perps, stock token products, all those kinds of things fit in that category. And so I wondered now that we are seeing so much meme coin activity on Robinhood Chain, and again, obviously it's so early, but I just wondered, is that at all changing the types of questions you're getting from regulators?
- [07:47]
A
I don't think it changed the question so far, at least I haven't heard about that when I was in some of these meetings. But I think people overall are excited about the launch. For a very long time, people were talking about tokenized assets and Tokenized stocks and RWAs as a way to talk about the future. I think if you think about the past three or four years, I heard the word tokenization a billion times. And it's really only last year when we started to launch our stock token product that we saw people starting to actually launch product using them. And I think everyone is starting to understand the benefits from RWAs. So the aspect of being able to trade stock tokens 24, 7, the fact that you can land on chain and actually get better return, that if you're using traditional systems, all of that makes a lot of sense and get people excited. And I think on top of that, the reason that revenue is successful is that we are not trying to just launch products that already exist somewhere else. If you think about our on chain lending, not only we launch with an API that was pretty high, approximately 7%, but we also launched with an insurance program, and we also launched with a way that the rates stay stable until different milestones are hit. So I think the strength of Robinhood has been to understand what our customers really want and take the time to work with regulators and work with our teams to really build a product that customer will be excited to use.
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B
And because the chain has both the permissioned and the permissionless elements, I actually wondered just how you think about where Robinhood's responsibility ends and then where the permissionless network begins.
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A
Well, I think for us, it's really on the application side that we spend a lot of time on the network itself. The blockchain, like I said, is permissionless. But where we want to spend time on is how do we introduce the customers into the chain. So if you're using the Robin wallet, for example, which is kind of the official wallet for the Robin chain, if we are connected to multiple providers that are scanning the different tokens that are accessible to make sure that there's no security issues on the token or, you know, it's not a rug pull, basically. And if at some point we see this provider telling us like, hey, this token is a problem, we will actually display a bunny on the application and warn the user that this is probably something that they should not do. So that's where we really spend time on. And obviously the wallet, for example, has jurisdiction system in it. So, for example, if you're a US customer using a wallet, you cannot trade the stock tokens, but if you're in one of the jurisdiction that is allowed, you can actually use it. So that's where we really spend a lot of time on.
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B
All right, so In a moment, we're going to talk a little bit more about RWAs perps and stablecoins. But first we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. If you hold crypto on your phone, your biggest vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your carrier. AT&T Verizon and T Mobile have been breached again and again and SIM swaps are still one of the easiest ways for attackers to drain accounts. That's where Kape comes in. America's privacy first mobile carrier, same premium service, but Kape rotates the identifier on Your Sim every 24 hours, deletes your call and text metadata after a day and protects against SIM swaps with a 24 word recovery phrase that only you control. You also get two middle to end encrypted secondary numbers for banking and signups, so you stop handing your real number to every app that asks. Go to Cape Co unchained and use code unchained for 33% off your first six months. Back to my conversation with Johan. So Robinhood has long been synonymous with stock trading. So I'm sure you're not planning on giving up, you know, on the RWA activity on Robinhood chain, but I wondered, now that you're seeing how the chain is being used, has that changed your strategy for pushing more RWA activity and if so, how?
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A
I wouldn't say change our strategy. I think for us we are still really excited about the opportunity in front of us. I think the stock tokens are overall a product that allows to do things that are not possible in the traditional system from 24. 7 to instant settlement in the future, lending and being able to access any type of exchange across the world. So, you know, I think the opportunity is still here and I think that's where we want to focus on for, for the next few months in terms of our roadmap for real world assets. But I think it's also exciting to see that the tokenization engine that we build can work for any type of asset. Right now it's US stocks and etf, but in the future you could use it for any exchange across the globe, for private equity, for real estate and more. So I think the world where you can trade anything through DEXS24. 7 is pretty close. And so we are, we are still
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B
focusing on that and I was curious because the stock tokens have to be rolled out. Jurisdiction. Jurisdiction. But the chain is permissionless. How do you actually enforce those rules on those types of products?
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A
Well, so there are different roles that are either embedded within the contracts or there are some that are embedded on the wallet like I was explaining before. So I think it depends case by case on which roles. And my hope is also that at some point we can reduce the amount of jurisdiction limitation. You know, I think in the U.S. for example, we're waiting on this Clarity act that we've been discussing. The SEC has also been vocal that they do believe that tokenization of securities will be helpful for the markets. I think in a lot of region across the world they could actually benefit from tokenization because right now it's very hard to interact with some of these exchanges. And so liquidity is therefore limited. But in a world where you can access all these exchanges and all these assets across all the countries, you can actually largely increase the liquidity and therefore largely increase the economic economical benefits for, for the local region. So I, you know, I think right now we are kind of at the beginning of the tokenization world. And I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years everything is tokenized and you can access any exchange 247 because the benefits kind of outgrew the, the old regulation that are in place.
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B
And just a quick question, because we're seeing that, yes, Tokenized stocks and ETFs are now available in 120 countries, but not in the US or UK. When do you think it might come to those jurisdictions?
- [15:15]
A
I think the US is actively working on it between the Clarity act, between some of the sandbox initiative and the crypto task force initiative that there is at the sec. So I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing some of these changes and we spend a lot of time with all these regulators. We are always happy to discuss, happy to comment on some jurisdiction initiatives. And I think at, at some point we will see that opening more and more. The, the eu, for example, had a DLT program very early on, like multiple years ago that they started. Obviously not permissionless and everything that the crypto community would like, but they see the value and the benefit of the 247 aspect and instant settlement aspect. So I think it's a question of time that we will see more and more jurisdiction open to tokenized assets.
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B
So one other part of the announcement was that Robinhood now has perps via a defi mullet partnership with lighter. However, that was built with a separate instance of lighter for Robinhood chain, so it doesn't share liquidity with the main instance of Lighter. And I wondered first of all, why you chose to build a separate instance instead of Tapping into the liquidity on the main app. But then. Well, actually, we'll start with that question.
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A
I think for us, the value that we see is that a lot of these systems that we're partnering with and a lot of these projects that we're really trying to connect to, we want to create a very unique experience for our customers. So if you use a wallet, the Robin Wallet, and you try to interact with the perps products that we build through LiDAR, you will see that the experience is very unique. You don't have a table where you have to enter numbers manually like you have on most of the other platform or competitors. You have a very sleek, easy to use UI where you can change your margin. Basically, you can follow the contracts and change and replace them as well very easily. So I think that type of unique interaction that we are focusing on requires some of the changes that we ask some of our partners. So, for example, in that situation with lidar, but for us, we think it's the most important part. We've always believed that crypto was a better technology than most of the traditional systems, but we were missing a very good getaway to get into this world where right now you have to focus on creating a wallet with private keys. You have to bridge, you have to transact. It takes a lot of tabs and clicks and we're losing most of the customers because it's too complicated. So our goal is to make sure that we can make it easy to use, that it's a very simple and sleek interface and that we can give you all the education that you need to understand what's going on in the network. And then I think it's only then that we will see massive adoption of blockchain and crypto in the world. And so that's really what we want to focus on. And so sometimes we'll ask some of our partners to make some of the changes that we're asking them to do.
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B
And one other thing, because I would imagine that building something like that would also really fall in Robinhood's weird wheelhouse. So I was curious why you went with an external partner as opposed to trying to, you know, build it on your own.
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A
I think that kind of depends on, you know, what aspect we're looking at. So, for example, if you think about our Robin, a crypto product that we have in the US that has millions of customers that are using it, we've been really focusing on the interface and hard showing how people can use it, bringing more people into that world, basically. But at the End of the day, we route orders to multiple market makers and exchanges. And so here it's a bit the same concept for the Robin Wallet. What we feel like the Robin platform was really good at was to create this interface that was simple and easy to use and we were less feeling the necessity to also own the back end of the exchange where people were transacting. And so, you know, that's really where we focus on. We love to build product, we love to build systems, but we want to make sure that when we do that we have something unique to bring on the table. And I think that's where we think we can really change how people are interacting with perps in general. And I think perps is something that is really exciting in general. It's a primitive that was kind of created by the crypto world, right. It didn't exist really before and now we are starting to see it more and more integrated into traditional exchanges and centralized exchanges. So it is something that I think is unique and requires a lot of education to our customers so that they understand the difference between the perps and options, for example. And so that's what we want to focus on.
- [20:20]
B
Something else I've noticed is you made USDG the backbone of the chain for margin lending liquidity and that's instead of USDC or Tether which obviously have much deeper liquidity. And I wondered why you chose to build the plumbing of Robinhood chain on this newer, smaller stablecoin. And I also wondered when you made that choice, does that potentially create a single point of failure?
- [20:47]
A
Well, so we do plan to support multiple assets including USDC and other on the chain. I think for the question of point of failure is something that we always care about. So most of our system are built with redundancies and sometimes when the redundancy doesn't exist on day one, it will be a bit after. But it's something that we care about for USDG in particular. We do think it's an interesting stable. We worked on it since last year and we made the announcement that we are joining the group, the consortium that the global network created. I think for us, what we like about USDG is this idea that they are sharing the economics with the participants and therefore it allows us to bring more value to the customer. I think some of the issues we're seeing with the other two that you mentioned is the way that they are sharing the economics that necessarily align with the network and benefit just the issuer. And so I think that's where we really want to focus on so anyone that is kind of building on the chain using USDG can benefit from it instead of just having the main issuer benefiting from it.
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B
Okay, but I guess so that leads me to then wonder because since Robinhood is a founding member of the global dollar network and I think the founders of that do share the yield reserve. The reserve yields. Um, so how much of the push for USDG comes from Robinhood being able to capture that float? Like I, I don't know, you know, really what, what percentage you, you even can because of the number of partners with that. But yeah, I was curious how much of a factor that was.
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A
Well, so it's not just the founders. Anyone who's participant in the network can benefit from getting the name on the, the assets. And I think the push wasn't necessarily the main like the fact that we're founder was not necessarily the main reason we decided to join the network. I do think we want to see a world where the stable coins meme and yield from the stable coins are shared with all the participants, not just the founders, to be clear, like anyone that is part of the network. And I think it's just a better system that we can build on and, and create more interesting products from that.
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B
Okay, so I did also want to ask because obviously, you know, when Robin Hood's earnings come out and it's like this for any company, I think that's in a similar position. Crypto is usually the most volatile line. Crypto, you know, was about $358 million of the transaction revenue at the peak in Q4, 2024 and Q1 of this year, it was at about 134 million. So it's a drop of roughly like 63%. And I wondered like now with the introduction of Robinhood chain, is that an attempt to make this, you know, volatile crypto trading revenue something more stable or could it potentially also just, you know, push the push more crypto beta to your earnings?
- [24:09]
A
I don't think we really build any of our products thinking about the, the earning, especially in the head. But I think the, the strength of Robinhood is that it has more than one business line that is actually generating revenue. So in fact we have about 11 different business line that are making nine figures or more in, in revenue. And so the beauty of this company that basically one of the business line goes down on the revenue side. Usually you have other businesses lines that are able to kind of balance the fact. So that works very well with the market. For example, when the, the credit rays change, it also Works with cycles like this where we see a bit of a pivot from the volume coming out of crypto and going into equities, especially all the. The cheap equities and everything like that that we've seen in Q1 and Q2. And you know, let's say that the cycle turn around in. In crypto again, we will probably see another obvious shift happening where the crypto business line will do a bit more and some of the other business line will do a bit less. But I think for us, the main focus has been to make sure that wood is heavily diversified. I think we've done very well with that and you know, we keep growing new business lines. So for example, we recently launched our banking business line and we had the credit card that we launched a few years ago. So that's kind of the strategy Less about we wanted to launch the chain for changing the revenue. I think for us, launching the chain was really about how do we create this infrastructure that we can use to offer better products using blockchain technology. The first product that we launched was Earn, which was really this idea of how do we launch a better landing product where people can still get the higher rates that you can get on Defi, but also at the same time get a bit more security and an easier access and if you were using the previous DEFI protocol. So we think that chain will be used for all of this new kind of system that we are trying to build. Tokenized stocks being another one that we obviously spend a lot of time on. We already talk about that, but we really see that as a foundation layer basically that we can start building on top of it.
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B
Okay, well, last question before we head out is you've just had this fabulous launch and now you have two weeks worth of sort of history to see how things have played out. And at the same time, we're in this just enormous sort of like adoption race more broadly in crypto. So what's your focus now and what's ahead for Robinhood chain?
- [26:54]
A
I think more of the same. So making sure that rwas perps memes as well, to be clear. And all the products that we are building on top of the chain gets the right product launch and the right traction. There's a lot more that we want to do. We talked about it at the event. I think for us this is really just the beginning and it's time to build on top of it. I know people are really excited by the metrics and obviously there's a lot of discussion that we can have on specific part of those metrics. But we think this is really just the beginning. This is just two weeks in. There's a lot more that we are planning on building on top of it. And also we really hope that the community will build on top of it. And so we are also trying to engage and spend time with all the developers that want to build on chain. You mentioned that at the beginning. But Vlad, our CEO also did an open invitation that if anyone wants to build on the chain, they should reach out. And we are spending a lot of time looking at our Twitters and X accounts to make sure that we see what people are excited about and making sure that we can give access to that.
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B
All right, well, thank you so much, Johan, for sharing your thoughts and coming on Unchained.
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A
Thank you. See you soon.
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B
Nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and my guest and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit Unchained Crypto.com.