The Rise of Robinhood Chain: Tokenized Stocks, Perps, and 27M Users | Johann Kerbrat

TRANSCRIPT

David:
[0:03] On Wednesday of last week, Robinhood held their The World is Flat event, where they launched the Robinhood chain, along with a huge collection of ecosystem

David:
[0:10] partners and integrations. The World is Flat name is a tip of the hat to the fact that Robinhood wants to democratize access, flatten the world to have access to financial products using blockchain technology. And after watching that event, you don't really have to squint your eyes very hard to see the future of finance being rebuilt right before our very eyes. Tokenized stocks issued by Robinhood are freely and permissionlessly transferable around the Robinhood chain and on and off the Robinhood chain to the Ethereum layer one and the rest of its layer twos. Morpho is integrated into the main Robinhood app, offering Robinhood customers, the 27 million Robinhood customers, 7% yield on USDG stablecoin deposits in a non-custodial section of the main Robinhood app.

David:
[1:00] They've expanded PERP offerings to EU and Canadian customers of Robinhood, and they have a full feature-complete integration of LiDAR, the ZKL2 PERP decks on Ethereum inside the Robinhood wallet. So we now have one-to-one backed tokenized stocks with dividends and investor governance rights, if you want to do that, trading on Uniswap, creating a 24-7, 365 marketplace for U.S. equities. And you can see the PERPification for these things just right around the corner. So today on the show, I talked to Johan Carbat. He is the general manager of crypto at Robinhood, who has been trying to build this ecosystem for the last five years to get more details of what's being released. And it's just nothing short of exactly what we imagined the future of finance looking like just a few short years ago. Johan, welcome back to Bankless. Bankless Nation, I'm here with Johan Kerrott. He is the VP of crypto at Robinhood. We just came out, a pretty hot event out of the Robinhood ecosystem, the launch of Robinhood Chain with Johan. You have been working on this as long as I've known you at Robinhood. But it's got to feel pretty good to get that out the door.

Johann:
[1:59] Yeah, it was pretty exciting. And, you know, we did an event in London in a very, very cool place with like painting on the wall and on the ceiling. So that was really cool to be there and see all our customers and hearing the

Johann:
[2:10] cheers when we finally announced the chain. So that was great.

David:
[2:13] The name of the event was The World is Flat. Why was it called that?

Johann:
[2:17] Well, you know, Vlad is an amazing inventor and thinking about a lot of things constantly. And his vision was like, how do we show that using blockchain and using crypto, we can actually remove all the inequalities in the world and actually make persons that are anywhere in the world able to access and get exposure to U.S. Stocks, to perps, to all of these products. So that was kind of the idea behind it.

David:
[2:40] One thing I noticed, the hood stock was up like 8%, 9%, 10% on just all of the announcements, the Robinhood chain, tokenized stocks, the perp decks, the wallet, the yield. From the crypto side of things, it feels good that the market is responding positively to crypto news. It's not usually what is normal in the case in the last 12 months or so. So it's just like you are the VP of crypto at Robinhood. So thanks for doing all the great stuff that the market likes. I'm sure that must feel pretty well.

Johann:
[3:13] Yeah, I think for us, what's been exciting with this event is really that we can show to our customer our product velocity. You know, last year we announced a lot of things and this year we actually delivered on a lot of these things that we pre-announced. And on top of that, we added way more announcement than we were expecting. Just yesterday we announced 15 products. So I think, you know, a lot of our customers like said about that, they see our product manager on stage with us and presenting all these new tools and features that they can access on Robinhood. And on top of that, I think it shows that, you know, Robinhood has been one of these companies that has uniquely been able to ship so many features at once and always with the customer at the center of making sure that, what we ship is what they actually care about and they like it, they know how to use it, they are interested by it.

Johann:
[4:00] So yeah, overall, pretty excited about yesterday.

David:
[4:03] I've got some questions about those products that you guys released. So I'll just start going one by one. Let's start with tokenized stocks. I think this is probably the one that people found the most interesting. It touches the most amount of things, I think, on the crypto side of things. But just the implementation details, the technical details. How does a stock on Robinhood, become a Robinhood tokenized stock on Robinhood chain. What is that process like?

Johann:
[4:27] Yeah, so currently the system is a little complex just because of the fact that the US is not part of it just yet. But we have our exchange, Bitstamp, that is basically our exchange that is connected to all the institutions. The institution can come to Bitstamp and buy the stock tokens and then bring them on chain to one of the different DEXs that are available from Uniswap to LiDAR, Arcus, and many more. So that's currently how it's happening. But in the future, we want to find ways to simplify all this process.

David:
[4:59] What about just like the basic investor governance and dividends that one would have if I own stock on the Robinhood brokerage? Do I still have that if I own the stock as a token on Robinhood chain?

Johann:
[5:11] Yeah, so dividends, we'll pay them. CorpAction will also support them, all this kind of stuff. So for us, that was pretty important. The stock tokens are also back one-to-one. So, you know, that's something that is very key, I think, for the trust of the product. And on top of that, you know, if anything happens to Robinhood, the position of the customer is secure as well. So that was something also important. And what's really cool, I don't know if you saw it yesterday, but we showed how it interacts in the wallet if you're in one of the eligible countries. And you're really able to look at all the stocks. You can see the price moving, and some information about the stock token on the page. You can buy it. Yesterday was the first time that we were really trying it live. So it was pretty cool that everything worked during the event.

Johann:
[5:58] And the other cool part is you can actually utilize the stock tokens for other things. You can use them on chain. You can use them as collateral. I'm sure we'll start to see like landing pull around it. So, you know, you can really do more than if you were just keeping them on the brokerage. And the other thing that we showed yesterday is how you can send them to somebody else, to another wallet, which I think is a pretty unique thing that shows really the power of the blockchain. When you try to move your brokerage account to another brokerage account, you have this process that you call ACAD, takes multiple days. Sometimes weeks, sometimes you lose the cost basis, you lose information. But here, everything is on the blockchain, right? So you have all the information available on blocks. And so I think that really shows how powerful this technology can be. And the more.

Johann:
[6:46] The regulation will come into place, the more we'll be able to expand it to more jurisdiction. And I think that's really going to change how we interact with exchanges.

David:
[6:55] One of your guys' launch partner was, of course, Uniswap, and it was pretty cool to see the Robinhood tokenized stocks inside of the Uniswap interface. It's just like when we saw Uniswap be launched in 2019 and 2020 and saw all these early primitive tokens, we all kind of imagined one day there will be stocks in here and now we're actually seeing that. But that's on the Robinhood chain, the Uniswap instance on the Robinhood chain. Are the Robinhood stock tokens able to be transferred to the Ethereum layer one?

Johann:
[7:25] Yeah, and we saw different bridges happening already on the chain.

David:
[7:31] It's freely transferable across the Ethereum ecosystem.

Johann:
[7:33] Right. And that's really the mint and redeem where you have to utilize one of our platform. But yeah, it's been really cool. You know, the chain is not even live for 24 hours. I mean, technically, it was live for a couple of days before, but like we really just announced the launch less than 24 hours ago and we saw a million transactions already. So I think that's what we're excited about is to your point, that connection between crypto-first platform like Uniswap and other, and then the more traditional side of the world like Robinhood connecting together and really merging and creating a world where you can see this enthusiasm from the community.

David:
[8:13] Did you say that in order to transfer a Robinhood tokenized stock to the Ethereum layer 1, you have to go through a Robinhood mint and redeem function, or is it more permissionless?

Johann:
[8:22] I meant like it's a permissionless chain. You can do all the things. The only thing where you will need to interact with Robinhood at this point is to mint and redeem your token for either the stock or the equivalent in cash.

David:
[8:36] Right. Okay. So if I hold like an Apple share as a Robinhood stock token, I can send it to Robinhood and redeem an Apple share inside my Robinhood brokerage?

Johann:
[8:43] So currently we're not offering it, but that's something that we're working on for institutions especially. We think it's going to be something pretty important. But right now you can sell to Robinhood.

David:
[8:52] And then the Robinhood tokenized stocks, those are freely transferable between parties. And does the receiving party need to be KYC'd with Robinhood or is that also a permissionless transfer function?

Johann:
[9:02] No, currently it's permissionless. So if you utilize a wallet, it's very well done. Like I showed a demo the other day where it's really like you're transferring any crypto asset. In the future, we also want to find ways to make it more easy to find between, you know, like you mentioned, your actual worker age account and all these kind

Johann:
[9:21] of things. But that will take a bit more time.

David:
[9:23] I want to ask about USDG, which is the stablecoin issued by Paxos. I think you guys are a partner with Paxos. And then depositors is depositors who deposit USDG inside of the Robinhood app. This gets sent into Morpho, but that gives 7% yield for those who deposit. How does 7% is above any competitor that I see in the market? How does Robinhood generate 7% for the depositors?

Johann:
[9:50] Yeah, you know, I think for us, what was really interesting with this product was the fact that it was in the main app. So it's not part of our wallet. It's really within the main Robinhood app that is used by tens of millions of customers in the US. And the really cool part about it is when you start entering this flow, we actually create a smart wallet for you. I mean, it's a self-custody wallet, so you can eventually export the key if you want to and import it in your wallet or do whatever you want with it.

Johann:
[10:16] And so that, I think, was really cool because, you know, for the first time, we are really starting to merge the two worlds together, even more than we were doing before. And then, you know, you can deposit as much as you want, obviously. You can start from just cash. Part of the flow, you will have to buy USDG and we made it super easy for you. You can also withdraw at any time. And yeah, on the yield, you know, I think for us, one of the big things that we were worried about is that some of our competitors, when they launched similar products, they started with a hero rate and then within a few hours the rate will drop. So we spend a lot of time working with all our partners to make sure that we could actually have a hero rate that will be stable for a while. So it's approximately 7% to your point. And the reason why we're able to do this higher rate is just the fact that you're just bringing a giant like Robinhood with all partners, market makers are creating new pools for all the products that we're launching. And so there is a bit more demand around the rates. But for us, you know, I think it's when I joined Robinhood like five years ago, a bit more than five years ago, my goal was really to find a way to bring crypto to the masses. And this is probably the biggest step we did to actually do that.

David:
[11:32] Talk about why USDG? Talk about that partnership or that integration with Paxos.

Johann:
[11:38] Yeah, so we are part of the global dollar network. we are one of the founder members. And what we like about USDG is that the name generated through the treasury that are held for backing the USDG token is actually shared with a member of the network. And I think that's a big difference from what you're seeing with some of the other stable coins where it's mostly kept by the issuer. And the reason why we want to, push the boundaries around this is that we want to encourage people to actually hold a stable coin right now if you're an institution and you use another stable coin you're kind of at a disadvantage like you're actually your interest will be to sell as soon as possible your stable coin and to buy cash to make name on you on your cash with a normal traditional bank which in that situation, remove a lot of the advantage of having a stable coin you can't move it as quickly you can't do all the stuff that you you should be doing with collateral, So with USDG, it's the opposite, right? You still get the name. So for you, it's not as important to go back to cash. You can keep the USDG on your account. You can use it for all the things that you want to do, from funding a pool, using it as collateral, or anything like that. And so that's why we want to support that stablecoin. And that's why we created earn, Robin Earn, through that stablecoin as well.

David:
[13:02] And I mentioned that you deposit USDG and it goes into Morpho. That part is correct, right? So Morpho is not just integrated into the Robinhood wallet, but the main Robinhood application. Is that true?

Johann:
[13:13] That's right. So Morpho created vaults on the Robinhood chain and both the wallet and the main Robinhood app will interact with it. Same thing, the Robinhood app utilizes a smart wallet that is a self-custody wallet for the customer and that's connected to Morpho. We're using Stakehouse as a curator and we also have other partners like eSena, for example, that are going to help with all these products. But technically, you don't need to use the Robium app. If you want to connect

Johann:
[13:41] to one of the vaults, you can directly go on the Robium chain and deposit there.

David:
[13:45] Let's talk about perps. So there's a handful of different integrations with perps. One of them was an expansion of non-crypto perps. So things like Gold, Silver, QQQ, WTI. And then there was the crypto-native perps directly in the Robinhood wallet. That one, the crypto-native perps in the Robinhood wallet, that was an integration with LIDR. Was the earlier stuff I was talking about, the non-crypto asset perps, was that with Bitstamp, the exchange that you guys bought? Okay, so there's a delineation there. Talk about both of those things and how you guys divide that up.

Johann:
[14:18] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we are one of Bitstamp and Robin Europe, one of the only marketplace or exchange where you can trade perpetuals, in a platform that is regulated. So we have a Mifid license for Bitstamp and we have a Mifid license for WebMD Europe. And we're offering this product there with up to 10x of leverage. And I think it's important because for a lot of customers, they still don't want to go on DeFi. They still don't want to use a wallet. They don't want to connect to a platform like Hyperliquid and other where you don't necessarily know exactly what's going to happen. And so we have a platform where you can reach out to customer support. You can buy stock tokens, crypto, and also the perpetual that are regulated.

Johann:
[15:03] And it's one of the most sticky products that we've launched in Europe. And we've seen a lot of demand for this other type of asset, from commodities to ETF. And especially during the weekends for the past few months, like you've seen, you know, oil, for example, moving quite a bit on some of these markets. So the demand was strong. We're excited to launch that.

Johann:
[15:26] It's seven new contracts from silver gold to QQQ as an ETF and other. And I think it really brings diversity and different products for our customers to try. And then, you know, one of our mission is to expand across the world, right? So we can't go to every single country and get a license and implement all the system because it just takes a while. And so we are doing it one by one. You know, we've done it with Europe. We also launched Robinhood in Canada yesterday. We're also live in the UK and in other countries. So, you know, we are going as fast as we can, but for the rest of the world, what we were thinking was really, how can we use crypto and blockchain to actually accelerate the expansion of Robinhood? And so we have this Robin wallet, it's available in 100 plus countries. And in the eligible places, you can see the perpetual experience. It's a separate tab. It's connected to LiDAR. You will see all the contracts that are available with leverage up to 20 to 50x, depending on the contracts. And basically, the interface is really, really proper to Robinhood. Like we made sure to implement all the things that work very well in the EU. You can decide on your margin using a slider. Same thing with leverage. And, you know, obviously, like, we'll see how it goes, but I think we'll see

Johann:
[16:49] a lot of people being really excited about having this simple UI and UX to trade with Spurps.

David:
[16:54] This lighter partnership inside of the Robinhood wall, I find pretty interesting. During your section of the presentation yesterday when you were talking about them, you ended it with, we will continue to deepen our collaboration with them, them being lighter. What does that mean?

Johann:
[17:09] Well, a ton of stuff. We, you know, we think this is just the beginning. I think Perpetual is a great way to trade differently from opening long shorts, different type of products. You don't have the same structure as some of those similar but not similar products as like CFDs, for example, that are pretty different. So I think we're just at the beginning. And I think it's one of this kind of crypto primitive that is actually going to make its way into more and more traditional finance systems. And so I think for us, we want to make sure that when we create partnership, we create this deep relationship. One thing that we announced, for example, is that LIDAR is committing about 11 million worth of lead token. And that will start in August 1st. When you start trading either directly on LIDAR using web, you will get one point. If you use the Robin wallet, you will get two points and we'll start splitting the pool of tokens through that. And, you know, that's the kind of stuff we want to do. But I think, you know, there is a lot more that we can do. And so we will show what's possible in the future. But I think this is just the beginning for us.

David:
[18:21] One thing I thought was pretty interesting was that LiDAR built their engineers. They have a bunch of forward deployed engineers. They built a custom instance of LiDAR on the Robinhood chain. So rather than the Robinhood wallet pointing to the LiDAR ZKL2, the LiDAR engineers just built you guys an instance of LiDAR on the Robinhood chain. Why did you guys want that? What does that do for you guys?

Johann:
[18:45] Yeah, it's a little more complicated. Like it's not fully an entire exchange that is on our chain, but basically it's settled using the Robium chain. I think for us, it's important because we want to make sure that everything that are connected to our products or the Robium products, we can control a lot of the UI, UX, all the rules that we put in place. And we want to make sure that it's also contributing to the ecosystem. So the Robinhood chain is brand new, and we want to make sure that we can have all the partners building on it and really develop on top of it.

David:
[19:18] So we have the non-crypto perps, which is serviced by Bitstamp, and that is in the main Robinhood wallet, like the normal Robinhood wallet, but only available. Oh, is that not right?

Johann:
[19:27] It's in the Robinhood Europe app.

David:
[19:30] Oh, that's a separate app.

Johann:
[19:31] Right. I see. It looks like Robinhood if you're in the US and you're used to it, but it's in Europe. That's a regulated platform. And then the Robin Wallet or DeFi self-custody platform that's connected to, LiDAR through the Robin chain, yeah.

David:
[19:45] Okay, and you guys are just waiting, like everyone else is, for clarity from the regulators, the CFTC, to put perps in the main Robinhood app?

Johann:
[19:53] I think, you know, we would be lying if we wouldn't say that we are interested in that. We have the technology, we build the UI, the UX, we know our customers love

Johann:
[20:02] it. So for sure, when we get clarity on these points, it's something that we'll be interested in.

David:
[20:07] What is the long-term balance between the Robinhood wallet and main Robinhood core? Because if you want to put perps, which is a, it's not only a, it's just a neutral instrument, but, you know, crypto kind of created it. We have the backend for it. If you wanted to put perps inside of the main Robinhood wallet, you already have a stable coin getting 7% yield in Morpho in the main Robinhood wallet. How do you think about the long-term equilibrium between the main Robinhood app, which is the dominant source of your guys' users and AUM and all the activity, versus the Robinhood wallet? Like, eventually, might these things be the same? Or do you think they'll converge or divert?

Johann:
[20:46] No, I think, you know, our vision is really that the traditional systems are going to slowly replace our technology with blockchain technology. It's just faster. It's broad proof in terms of like verification. You can see the history. You have decentralization, fractionalization by default. And so I think slowly we are going to start seeing more and more features where, you know, instead of using the classic clearing system that we have for stocks, It will be a blockchain powered system. And same thing with the yield or the earned system that we put in place. You know, right now, It's using a smart wallet, but this smart wallet can do a lot more things. So I think it's just a function of like, what is the regulation in the different countries? What are the proper systems to put in place to make sure that customers understand what's going on? But based on that, I think the two worlds are going to converge more and more. And, you know, if you start using a Robin wallet that is like fully DeFi, fully self-custodial.

Johann:
[21:49] The experience to buy perps or to even find your wallet is becoming more and more easy you don't necessarily need to send crypto to find your wallet, you can actually use Fiat Rails, either Apple Pay or Google Pay to start finding your wallet, You can open the perps, like I said, in a very simple way. You don't have like 20 things to approve where you're never really sure what's going on. So we spend a lot of time making this UX simple. And I think in a lot of countries where we are not live as a licensed platform, we will actually be able to start seeing the wallet for a lot of our customer being a good solution for them.

David:
[22:27] Would you say that if and where it makes sense, if Robinhood can put some of its business logic on chain, again, just like USDG on Morpho, for example, and, you know, the Perps on Lighter, if it can put its business logic on chain, it will?

Johann:
[22:42] I think if there is a benefit for the customer, for sure. And that's what happened, with, you know, Robinhood Earth program. We felt like this was a much better solution for our customer than what's out there currently. And so, you know, there was not even a question of should we do it or not. It was more like, how do we do it? And I think if tomorrow we have a product that we think can benefit from blockchain, can reduce the cost to the customer, for example, you know, why not doing it? As long as it can fit the requirement that we have from our regulation, you know, it's in the advantage of the customer. So let's do it.

David:
[23:17] One thing that I think is cool about this is that blockchains are just fantastic business models. They're pretty low overhead to run and chain fees can turn

David:
[23:25] into something pretty substantial. One of your guys' partners is Arbitrum, of course. The Robinhood chain is an Arbitrum orbit chain. How has your experience working with Arbitrum been? Would you recommend Arbitrum to other institutions building chains on Ethereum?

Johann:
[23:42] Yeah, absolutely. So we partner with Offchain. They are helping us put the chain in place. They've been awesome to work with, honestly. And I think the, What we like about Arbitrum is multifold. There is stylus. You can use any kind of language or multiple languages like Rust, for example, to write instead of just being stuck to the one language based on Ethereum. You can also have a priority system that is a bit different. We think the gas fees are pretty low. So far, we've been very happy with the latency. So I think for us, Arbitrum was a great choice and we're happy to be part of the family now. And, you know, being part of EVM where we can easily bridge between all the, big chain was also big elements that we were excited about. And we still rely on Ethereum for the overall security and decentralization. So I think that's, so far, we've been pretty happy with our choice.

David:
[24:36] Well, the Robinhood is one of the few companies that I actually do look at the S1s every quarter when Robinhood submits its S1s. And so I'm going to be pretty excited to see a new line item in the Robinhood S1, which is the Robinhood chain. And everything that has benefited from that. Yeah, Johan, there is another Robinhood event coming up in about, I think, like Q3 in Texas. I've signed up to be a moderator at that event to talk about the Robinhood wallet with somebody from your guys' team.

Johann:
[25:02] Oh, that's awesome.

David:
[25:04] Any advice for me? Any questions I should ask? What would you think that I should talk about in a few months when it comes to the Robinhood wall at this event?

Johann:
[25:11] Well, you know, hopefully by then we'll have a few more announcements. So hopefully you will talk about them. But I think seeing, you know, talking a bit about the ecosystem around it, I think is interesting. You know, I've been in the space for a long time and a lot of time I've seen chain going after developers to find ways to get them excited to build on the chain. Here, the situation is a bit reversed. People are really excited about having the distribution coming from Robinhood and having all these customers that are not necessarily crypto first, but actually excited about using crypto if it's better for them. And so that's what I think we should talk about a bit more. How do we continue to bring more of this non-crypto person into the space and maybe speak a bit less about protocols and all the technical stuff? That we can leave it for the engineer, but actually shows a benefit to the customers.

David:
[26:02] Are you building and designing the Robinhood wallet to penetrate into the crypto market and compete with things like Phantom, MetaMask, you know, the base app? Or are you building Robinhood wallet to target a new audience that has never really been on chain before, but perhaps they'll like it because of all the cool tools that you guys have?

Johann:
[26:22] Yeah, I think the latter, you know, we are pretty much more focused on easy to use, simple UX, simple UI, educational tool. We really think that blockchain is a better solution for a lot of the financial system. And so we want to find a way to get people to use it. But the reality is that blockchain was made by engineer for engineer. You know, the first time you have to enter all these worlds to create a passphrase and you have to create bridges and transaction to just find your wallet for the first time. Every time you have to pay fees, you have to connect to DEXs and all this stuff, like all of that is so complicated. We are losing like 99% of the population. Even though they could benefit the most from having like the blockchain technology, lower fee, lower cost. So I think for us, the idea is that, you know, there is multiple billion of people on the planet that are not using crypto. How do we bring them into that space?

David:
[27:19] Johan, thanks for coming on the show today.

Johann:
[27:21] Thank you. See you soon.

David:
[27:22] If one more question, actually, before if somebody wanted to get started on Robinhood Chain, what activity would you recommend? Where should they go first? What can they do there that you would do if you were coming onto Robinhood Chain first?

Johann:
[27:32] Yeah, we have all the docs on our platform if you want to develop on it. But also, you can use our wallet. You will see a tab for perps. You can search tokens and all the stock tokens that we launched recently. And yeah, give us feedback. Honestly, I think that's the most exciting part. We want to build with customers. We want to build with you. So if we are missing anything, let us know and we'll try to prioritize it.

David:
[27:53] John, thanks for coming on the job.

Johann:
[27:55] Thank you.

David:
[27:55] Bankless Station, another gargantuan blockchain added to the Ethereum ecosystem. That's really exciting for all of us. but nonetheless, crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. This is Frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you were with us on the bankless journey.