How Arbitrum Is Building on Ethereum to Court Robinhood and Other Giants

For years, crypto promised to remake finance. This year, according to Arbitrum's Steven Goldfeder, that promise finally stops being theoretical.

“[2025] was a very big year for us,” Goldfeder said, reflecting on what he describes as a turning point not just for Arbitrum, but for the industry as a whole. “I think it was the year as an industry where we really saw… the proof point in institutional adoption finally come on chain.”

The shift, he argues, wasn’t that institutions suddenly discovered crypto. It was that they stopped treating it like an experiment.

“For the first time this year, what we began to see was institutions not viewing crypto as, hey, we have our main business, and then we have this like fund that represents a really small percentage of our assets that we’re putting on chain,” Goldfeder said. “But we see institutions that were going all in on crypto and understood blockchain was not this kind of side quest, but actually the main event.”

No partnership captured that mindset better than Robinhood.

Goldfeder, who co-founded Offchain Labs (the company that developed Arbitrum) called Robinhood’s expansion one of the defining moments for Arbitrum. Instead of launching a separate crypto-native app, Robinhood embedded blockchain directly into its core product. When the company rolled out its app to new countries, the infrastructure behind those markets wasn’t traditional brokerage plumbing.

For users in Europe buying U.S. equities, that meant something radical was happening invisibly. “When you buy a share of Apple, if you’re a Robinhood user in Europe, you’re actually getting a tokenized share that lives on the Arbitrum blockchain,” he said. “For the user perspective, they don’t even know that they’re using crypto. And that, to me, is a massive unlock.”

That abstraction is the point. Arbitrum’s pitch to institutions isn’t ideological — it’s infrastructural. Built as a Layer 2 secured by Ethereum, Arbitrum positions itself as a neutral, highly liquid environment where traditional finance can quietly migrate on-chain without forcing users to learn wallets, gas fees, or new behaviors.

“As I like to say, Arbitrum is the Ethereum of Layer-2s,” Goldfeder said. “It’s an incredibly neutral environment that’s highly liquid and everyone feels they’ll get a fair chance.”

The numbers back up the claim. Goldfeder pointed to Arbitrum’s dominance across decentralized finance, noting that it is the largest deployment of Aave outside Ethereum mainnet and the number one deployment of Uniswap among Layer 2s. Stablecoins on Arbitrum grew about 87% in 2025 to more than $8 billion in market capitalization, making it not just the leading Layer 2 for stablecoins, but a top five blockchain overall by that metric.

“So Arbitrum is, in a very real sense, leading the charge as an Ethereum Layer-2 in DeFi and RWA institutionalized assets,” he said, “but actually just a top blockchain that’s leading there as well.”

Goldfeder is also excited about seeing that progress continue with institutions turning to Arbitrum Orbit. Beyond Arbitrum One — the highly liquid public chain — Orbit allows companies to launch their own blockchains using Arbitrum’s technology, customized to their needs and still secured by Ethereum.

“That’s the key: your chain, your rules,” Goldfeder said. “They can basically have a chain that’s secured by Ethereum that still has the exact feature set that they’ll need.”

That flexibility matters most around compliance and privacy — two topics that Goldfeder says have matured alongside institutional interest. Early crypto debates swung between full transparency and total privacy. Neither extreme, he argues, matches how real users expect finance to work.

“When I use my banking app, I know that my bank knows everything about me,” he said. “But I also expect that my neighbor, even if I send them a Zelle payment, my neighbor will not learn anything about me.”

Arbitrum is now building toward that middle ground. Goldfeder revealed that the team is “working on adding a privacy option to the Arbitrum Orbit stack,” allowing institutions to bake in compliance, KYC, and privacy controls at the chain level. For companies like Robinhood, that customization is what makes on-chain finance viable at scale.

All of this feeds into what Goldfeder sees as the broader endgame. The labels that once separated crypto from traditional finance are already eroding.

“We’re really only beginning to see a lot of these institutional relationships blossom,” he said. “And understand that this is not just this strange side technology anymore. This is core to the world financial system.”

His bold prediction for 2026 reflects that conviction. “I think we will see another major financial institution or maybe even a large bank… go all in on crypto,” Goldfeder said. And when that happens, the language will change too. “We’ll begin to lose some of our adjectives. DeFi will just become Fi.”

If 2025 was the year institutions proved they were serious about blockchain, Arbitrum is betting that 2026 will be the year no one notices the difference at all.

Arbitrum is a featured contender in Coinage's Crypto Project of the Year celebration. Vote to crown the best project in crypto today!