Why Robinhood Is Tokenizing Stocks on Arbitrum, with Co-founder Steven Goldfeder

When Robinhood announced it was launching tokenized stocks on-chain, it wasn’t just another fintech headline. It was the moment Arbitrum — and by extension, Ethereum — landed what Offchain Labs co-founder Steven Goldfeder calls “a 0 to 1 moment for crypto.”

“What Robinhood is doing on the blockchain is so much deeper than what we’ve seen before from, I think, really, just about any other fintech or financial institution of its size,” Goldfeder told Coinage. “It’s really a 0 to 1 moment for crypto. Like, this is the crypto dream that I got excited about a decade plus ago.”

As Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev explained at a luxurious event next to Ethereum's conference in Cannes, Robinhood is launching tokenized stock trading for users in Europe. It's also building out its own Layer-2 using Arbitrum's technology and offering trading on private companies as well — like OpenAI and SpaceX.

The move also signals something deeper for Ethereum’s Layer-2 scaling ambitions: validation. Not just in terms of throughput and performance, but in the growing appetite among mainstream institutions to opt into public blockchain infrastructure — without compromising user experience. It also comes at a time where Solana had been stacking its own wins, with Kraken's xStocks opting to tokenize securities on that blockchain. This win challenges the notion that it's all Solana's game to lose.

Just weeks before the Robinhood news, early Solana investor Kyle Samani was predicting almost all institutions would opt to build on Solana. "The reality is that [the] Ethereum guys just totally missed the mark," he told us. "They didn't scale, gas fees spiked through the roof, people got really pissed and they said, 'OK, these guys don't care about my user experience. I'm going to go elsewhere.'"

That suddenly seems less true.

At its core, the Robinhood deal was years in the making. “This is not the first partnership between the Arbitrum ecosystem and Robinhood,” Goldfeder explained, noting a product launch at ETHDenver two years ago.

But building towards something of this scale wasn’t simply a matter of patience. It required infrastructure that worked. “The first thing that goes in is building a really good product,” he said. “Our technology has been in production, battle tested for years and is ready for this new phase of its maturity.” That maturity is now carrying Robinhood’s international tokenized equities product, running on Arbitrum's tech.

To Goldfeder, the partnership firmly swings momentum back in Ethereum's favor. “Ethereum and Arbitrum are very attractive to teams that want to build on a robust and secure system,” Goldfeder said. “We did scale Ethereum. In fact, we followed the exact roadmap ... that Vitalik set out… Robinhood is a perfect example of a massive fintech that’s reaping the benefits of that roadmap.”

That roadmap now includes Arbitrum’s unique barbell strategy: a highly liquid public chain in Arbitrum One, and a modular, customizable framework through Arbitrum Orbit for institutions like Robinhood to spin up their own chains when ready.

The strategy appears to be working. Beyond Robinhood, Arbitrum’s Orbit framework now powers chains from Securitize, Athena, Yuga Labs, and more than 100 others. “It’s adaptable to really any use case,” he said. “You have teams with very different goals that are all uniting around the Arbitrum stack.”

But for all the momentum, Goldfeder is quick to shift focus from hype to execution.

“The announcement is great. But that’s day zero,” he said. “Day one and day 100 is: how do we make sure that this remains a success? That it is a success? That’s the ultimate goal.”

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