Robinhood's General Manager of Crypto, Johann Kerbrat, discusses the launch of Robinhood Chain, which aims to democratize finance by tokenizing stocks, offering perpetuals, and integrating DeFi protocols like Morpho. The episode highlights how Robinhood is merging traditional and decentralized finance to attract millions of new users.
Summarized by Podsumo
Robinhood launched its own blockchain, Robinhood Chain, to tokenize stocks and enable permissionless transfers across the Ethereum ecosystem.
The integration of Morpho offers Robinhood's 27 million users a 7% yield on USDG stablecoin deposits, generated through DeFi vaults.
Perpetual trading (perps) was expanded to EU and Canadian customers via Bitstamp, with a separate DeFi perp integration using Lighter in the Robinhood Wallet.
Tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain are one-to-one backed and support dividends and governance, with plans for future collateral use.
Robinhood's wallet focuses on simplifying crypto access for non-crypto natives, aiming to onboard billions of new users by reducing complexity.
"The vision was how do we show that using blockchain and crypto, we can actually remove all the inequalities in the world and make persons that are anywhere in the world able to access US stocks and all these products."
"Blockchain was made by engineers for engineers... We are losing like 99% of the population, even though they could benefit the most from having blockchain technology."
"We want to build with customers... If we're missing anything, let us know and we'll try to prioritize it."