How Robinhood Built a $450M Blockchain in Three Weeks
Robinhood GM Johann Kerbrat explains Robinhood's multi-pronged approach to launching their chain.
By: Zack Guzman
July 28, 2026
Most new blockchains launch with plenty of promises and very little activity.
Robinhood’s arrived with both.
Just three weeks after launching Robinhood Chain on July 1, the company’s new blockchain had already attracted $450 million in total value locked and processed more than 95 million transactions, according to Robinhood Crypto GM Johann Kerbrat.
“We were not really sure about the excitement from the community,” Kerbrat told Coinage at The Tie's Out East conference, noting that the chain debuted during what he described as a low point for crypto markets this year. “But it’s been really good to see how many people have been bringing their assets.”
The early surge reflects more than crypto traders chasing another new network. Robinhood is attempting to turn its existing base of 26 million funded accounts into a distribution engine for onchain finance — one capable of funneling users, liquidity and market makers directly into products ranging from stablecoin lending to tokenized stocks.
That may be the clearest difference between Robinhood Chain and the dozens of other Layer 2 networks launched in recent years. Robinhood does not need to build an audience from scratch. It can put blockchain products directly inside an app already used by millions of retail investors, and it's already proving fruitful.
“What we are really good at at Robinhood is making complicated problems very simple and easy to use,” Kerbrat said.
The company’s lending product, for example, allows customers to convert U.S. dollars into stablecoins and deposit them into an onchain lending pool in only a few taps. Robinhood handles the conversion and wallet infrastructure behind the scenes, removing steps that have historically made decentralized finance inaccessible to mainstream users.
That product has already attracted roughly $100 million from retail customers and was offering an annual yield of approximately 7% at the time of the interview, Kerbrat said.
The company is also leaning into something many more buttoned-up financial firms would rather avoid: memecoins.
Read More from Coinage:
Kerbrat argued that speculative trading activity has helped bring assets, customers and market makers onto the chain at a critical early stage. It has also encouraged wallets and other crypto applications to support Robinhood Chain before the company rolls out the full suite of products it announced.
“The memecoin activity is also beneficial for the chain,” he said. “That brings value, that brings TVL on the chain, that brings market makers, that brings excitement.”
But unlike other chains that only led with memecoins, Robinhood is hoping to continue leveraging the momentum as a foundation for products with potentially much broader appeal, including perpetual futures, lending and tokenized equities.
The company’s stock tokens are already available through Robinhood Wallet in more than 120 countries, opening access to U.S. equities for users who may otherwise face commissions, inconvenient market hours or limited access to American exchanges.
Traditional stocks still trade around fixed exchange hours and settle through financial infrastructure that can take days to fully clear. Robinhood sees blockchains as a way to offer round-the-clock trading and near-instant settlement instead.
“What we think that TradFi doesn’t have is this 24/7 and instant settlement element,” Kerbrat said. But U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds are only the opening act.
“In the future, the tokenization engine that we built can work for anything,” Kerbrat said. “That can be exchanges across the world. It can be real estate. It can be private equity.”
That vision puts Robinhood into increasingly direct competition with Coinbase, which has used its Base blockchain to build one of the largest consumer-focused ecosystems in crypto. But Kerbrat stressed that Robinhood took a different approach by building alongside Arbitrum rather than attempting to control every part of the underlying technology.
The partnership gives Robinhood access to fast transactions, low fees and compatibility with Ethereum-based applications, while allowing its team to focus on building products people might actually use.
Robinhood is also beginning to connect artificial intelligence to that financial infrastructure.
The company recently introduced an interface that allows customers to connect outside AI agents to their Robinhood accounts. Users can decide how much capital an agent can access and what types of trades it is allowed to execute.
Kerbrat said the feature was one of the most requested capabilities from customers interested in building their own trading agents.
The result is a blockchain strategy that looks less like a standalone crypto experiment and more like a new foundation for Robinhood’s entire platform.
The chain could eventually sit underneath stock trading, stablecoin yield, tokenized assets, AI-powered investing and other financial products — all while remaining largely invisible to users who do not want to manage wallets, private keys or bridges.
“For us, the big question was how do we create that as an infrastructure for us?” Kerbrat said. “We wanted to really create a foundational layer that we can connect all our different products to the chain if it brings value to our product.”
One month is far too early to know whether Robinhood Chain can sustain its initial momentum. Memecoin activity can disappear quickly, incentives can temporarily inflate blockchain metrics, and many networks that opened with impressive numbers have struggled to retain users.
But Robinhood begins with an advantage most chains never had: Millions of customers already inside the front door.
Now it is trying to move the financial system underneath them onchain.
Subscribe to the free Coinage newsletter to stay up-to-date on all things crypto and finance.
