How Robinhood is using the SEC's New Innovation Exemption | Johann Kerbrat

Robinhood is trying to erase the line between crypto markets and traditional finance. David sits down with Johann from Robinhood to unpack the rise of tokenized stocks, why so much activity is already happening outside normal trading hours, and what changes when equities become programmable, composable and available across DeFi. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔓NEAR | TRADE CONFIDENTIALLY, GET 20% BACK https://bankless.cc/near2026 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless 👑BANKLESS CONTENT MCP https://www.bankless.com/premium --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Bringing Tokenization to the U. S. 2:17 How Robinhood Stock Tokens Actually Work 5:19 TradFi Pushback and Demand for Tokenized Stocks 7:59 Voting Rights, Redemption and DeFi Utility 10:29 What Happens When Stocks Trade on Weekends 13:42 Will Blockchain Become the Primary Market? 18:46 Robinhood Chain’s Early Traction 21:22 Beyond Stocks: Real Estate, Gold and More 24:22 How Robinhood Chooses What to Build 26:36 What U. S. Users Still Can’t Access 29:49 Combining Tokenized Stocks With Perps 32:51 Why Robinhood Chose Ethereum 35:32 AI Agents and the Next Robinhood Products --- RESOURCES Johann Kerbrat https://x.com/JohannKerbrat --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03David Hoffman?

  Thankless Nation, I am once again joined by Johan from Robinhood. Johan, good to see you, my man.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Good to see you. How have you been?

• 0:09David Hoffman?

  Good. It is a fantastic time to be in crypto. It's a fantastic time to have one foot in crypto and one foot in TradFi, which is why I wanted to bring you back onto the show today. Also, Robinhood and Robinhood Chain definitely seems to be the center of attention in the crypto industry. First question, Johan, as we get started, how busy are you these days?

• 0:29Speaker 01

  It's been busy, but I think it's good to be busy when you're in crypto. It means that, you know, the market is up or that there's things going on and that people are excited to build. So it's been a lot of fun, to be honest.

• 0:40David Hoffman?

  Today, we are recording the morning of the innovation exemption out of the SEC. This is on the backs of the failure of the Clarity Act to proceed forward. And then the next day, we get this innovation exemption from the SEC about the tokenized stock movement happening on chain. How does the innovation exemption impact you guys, what you guys are doing at Robinhood? Is this for you? Is this for what you guys are building or is this for somebody else?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Well, two things. One is, you know, pretty sad that the Clarity Act was kind of killed a few days ago. I think we still need to have this federal level regulation so that things are not constantly changing and so that more and more institutions can feel confident about building in crypto for the long term. Obviously, super excited about the innovation exemption. I think it really means that tokenization is also ready for the US, not just something that we should keep doing overseas. So for us, it means that we can bring a lot of the products that we've been building for a long time onshore. And that's really where we're going to see companies like Robinhood

• 1:52Speaker 01

  being able to have their traditional offering and also crypto and merging things together. So really excited overall. There is still a lot of details to kind of understand from the exemption, but so far it seems like it's fairly open to really create this tokenization world that we've been talking about for so long now. So I'm pretty happy about the tech so far.

• 2:17David Hoffman?

  So the Robinhood tokenized stock product is not like a one-to-one representation of an equity. There's some lossiness because it is a debt security, not a, it's not actually the stock. And as I understand it with the innovation exemption from the SEC, they're trying to make a lane, a pathway, guidance for people to make actual tokenized securities that have a very high fidelity relationship. And what that includes is permissioning and KYC for the ability to trade, which is not exactly what the Robinhood tokenized stock product is.

• 2:58David Hoffman?

  And so if, if Robinhood does lean into the innovation exemption, is it going, you guys are going to have to build a new set of products that do comply with this innovation exemption in addition to the pre-existing Robinhood chain stock tokens? Is that, is that the path forward that you guys see or what, how does this proceed?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a little too early for us to shake exactly our plan there, but I think it's right that we want to adapt to the regulation of whatever country or products I like to. And a lot of the reason why we built our own chain and our own stock tokens and our own wallet is to actually be able to control this type of compliance requirements that we have depending on the region. And unfortunately, you know, we don't have a regulation framework for the entire world. So every country has different compliance and so we have to adapt to that. To your point on the stock tokens, so it is a representation one-to-one.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  So every time someone buys a stock token, we mint the token and at the same time we buy the stock. So, you know, on that front, there is no concern to have when there's a lot of tokens being minted. It means that we're buying a lot of the stock of whatever company that people are acquiring the tokens of.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  That being said, I think what the exemption is talking about is a little different from the debt security token that we created. And we are going to see how we can adapt exactly to support that use case. But I think for us, what's important is making sure that people will be able to get the right token at the right place. You know, we already have this issue currently on stock tokens where you have many issuers. You have the X stocks, you have the under stocks and et cetera, et cetera. And so a lot of that require better UX and UI so that people can understand how to acquire the right token and how. And I think we are going to be able to do a lot of that for the customer.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  We know if the customer is in the US, for example, so we can show what token is appropriate for them. And then we'll have the right market making pools and system in place to make sure that we can adapt to the region.

• 5:19David Hoffman?

  The activity on Robinhood Chain with the tokenized stocks has attracted some of the attention of TradFi CEOs. Some good, some bad. The AMC CEO came out loudly spinning upsetities, calling it contemptible and vile. The Hims CEO, on the other hand, said it, hey, what you guys are doing is pretty cool. They liked it. Are you guys having like conversations with CEOs about tokenized stock, your guys' tokenized stock products? And what have people been saying beyond the two CEOs that we know about on Twitter?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Outside of the two big public discussion, I think, you know, they were trying to attract a lot of eyes on their company. But so far, what I've received is a lot of emails of people asking to tokenize their stocks from a lot of these traded companies. I think a lot of people are seeing the advantage of it. And again, like, we are buying the actual stocks under. It's not like we were making it off in there. So for a lot of people, it's actually a good thing that we are making it more accessible and that we have these stocks available in 120-plus countries where a lot of people cannot actually easily get exposure to these stocks otherwise.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, overall, it was a bit of drama on Twitter, but we haven't really seen any complaint in person or we haven't received anything on the mail or anything like that. I think our, our goal is to make sure that people understand exactly what's going on. If you, if you look at the metrics on the chain, we had a day with more than 1.2 billion in, in stock tokens volume. We have many days where it's over 500 million. 70% of the trading happen on weekends or outside of the exchange hours. That is really what are the, the signal showing that tokenization is bringing something on the table,

• 7:16Speaker 01

  which is 24/7 trading, instant settlement, global access. And I think that's what people need to focus on and a bit less about the, the technicality between, we should use this version or this version, as long as it's backed one-to-one. I think that's what matters. The thing that makes me laugh the most, to be honest, is some companies that are talking about this are also behind some of the stable coins that are actually, it's the same concept, right? You have a one stable coin, it's not backed by one dollar bill, it's backed by treasuries and equivalents. That's exactly what we're doing here, where we have one token that is backed by the stock. And I think that's what matters.

• 7:59David Hoffman?

  Vlad tweeted out that the stock tokens are going to get an upgrade with the ability to have voting rights and in-kind redemption. And I think this was in feedback to some of the concerns of the AMC CEO. Would you say that this upgrade to the stock tokens, the ability to vote in shareholder governance or do in-kind redemption, is this, is this more about just kind of appeasing the concerns of some TradFi CEOs? Or is this more like an actual product upgrade that unlocks new possibilities in the stock tokens?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  No, it's always been on the roadmap. So the in-kind redemption, for example, we announced it during our event in London.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  You know, I was on stage and I mentioned it that it was coming. First for us was in-kind redemption for market makers so that they can more easily move between TradFi and DeFi. And then to make it available to more to retail customers. It's a bit more complicated because of the structure of different brokerage accounts across the world.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Voting rights is also something that is always going to be interesting, right? Like, the reason why you want to own a stock is not just for the appreciation, it's also the capacity of being able to vote. The, the reason why it was lower in the, in the roadmap is just because we need to have adoption. You know, we have 175 or 170 million of stock tokens issued right now. And we prioritize all the major market cap. So the amount of votes that are going to come from these tokens don't have a ton of impact on the company at this level of adoption.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  And that's why for us, the real focus has been to make sure that we bring all the use cases of DeFi. You can use your stock token as a creator or you can use them in different places. You get tight pricing no matter the time of the day. Like, that's the kind of stuff that I think we need to, to really nail before focusing on these lower priorities. But overall, we know how to do voting rights. We have actually a company, it's called Say by Robinhood. Where you have this connection with shareholders and you can ask questions about the companies, you can see the different documents, you can vote. So all of that, we know very well how to do it. It's just a question of timing, basically.

• 10:29David Hoffman?

  You talked about the pretty cool metric that 72% of Robinhood stock token volume is happening after hours and on the weekends. Pretty cool unlock. I think everyone in crypto is very ready for the 24/7/365 market world that's coming. We're actually recording on the day that the SEC is having their 24/7 trading roundtable. So we're going to be able to see this, some of the discussion after that. But there are some mechanical questions that I have about this. And so one thing that we've seen so far is that there are some Robinhood stock tokens that dislocate in price over the weekends because activities happening on the weekends in crypto, that's we like trading on the weekends, and then price gets dislocated. So can you talk about how

• 11:12David Hoffman?

  that price gets relocated when trading hours open up? Are market makers involved with this? Is this what in-kind redemptions is for? How does that kind of settle out when the activity on the weekend dislocates from the normal stock market? Can you kind of like walk us through the flow here?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there are two types of pricing divergence that you will see. You have the one that are going to be because it's earlier than what you're going to see when the market opens. That's going to happen, especially when there are news hitting on weekends, on Friday night when the markets are closed. Potentially, the price will change. And then on Monday, the price of the token will stay the same, but the price on the exchange is actually going to adapt and merge with the price of the token. And then you have the opposite issue, the one that you've seen a few weeks ago, where it's more about the fact that we didn't mint enough of the token. So there is a bit of a crunch in terms of

• 12:15Speaker 01

  how many tokens are available and how many people are trying to buy the tokens. And so when the market opens again, we are able to mint again because we're able to buy the actual stock again. And so therefore, the price converge. On the second point for us, it's something that we're working actively on. We've been onboarding a lot of market makers. You know, that was a three days weekend, what was it, like 10 days ago, where it was also something we were very concerned about because we knew that this type of issues could be even exacerbated because of the fact that it's three days, not just a two days weekend. And so we spent a lot of time to make sure that there was enough liquidity on the market and we didn't see that divergence happening. And so that's

• 12:59Speaker 01

  basically what needs to happen. It's just like making sure that we have more and more market makers, more and more pools available for people to actually use. You already see a lot of pools on Uniswap, for example, where you can land your stock tokens. And so we need to make that more accessible and more open to everybody so that this type of pricing action will converge correctly. It's something that you see in also traditional markets. For example, you know, the prices on ATS sometimes diverge a bit from the prices on exchanges. That's kind of just the financial market in overall. And so we just need to make sure that we can build correctly around it to avoid as much as possible.

• 13:42David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this is a mechanic that has been solved before in other venues because there are different places that liquidity happens. And so you guys are just with Robinhood Chain adding a new one, but the fundamental problem of relocating price across different venues has been solved before. And this is really just a matter of bootstrapping the systems to build that out on Robinhood Chain. That's what I heard from you.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And you know, the more pools available, the more market makers are going to be interested in the arbitrage opportunities and therefore the pricing issue will be solved. But you already saw it in the past few weeks, the price have been pretty competitive. Sometimes it's even better than on traditional exchanges, which I think is also the exciting part here is that we are going to unlock different type of market makers from different regions and it's going to be able to really create this price competition and improvements because of that.

• 14:37David Hoffman?

  Do you think there will ever be like an inversion in which the after-hours off-market liquidity and price discovery is actually so incredibly competitive and strong that it actually becomes the dominant venue simply because of all the properties that crypto people believe to have in blockchains, you know, the 24/7, the mutability, the permissionlessness, the access. There are all these strong properties that benefit blockchain-based trading. Do you think that we could actually get to a world where there's an inversion and the normal trad market is kind of the afterthought and the blockchain market is the primary?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  I think so. I think in a few years, we are not even going to talk about, you know, this new markets versus traditional markets. I think it's just going to be one market and it's going to be based on blockchain. That's why you're seeing a lot of the current exchanges adapting this type of technology, right? And they are making sure that they can compete because the current setup where you have to shut down after specific hours, you have to do maintenance, where you have to reboot everything every once a week, like can't compete with something like a blockchain that is made for 24/7 and high frequency as well. So I think it's definitely going to happen. When exactly will depend a bit.

• 15:58David Hoffman?

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• 16:39David Hoffman?

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• 17:59Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 18:41Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 18:46David Hoffman?

  We're coming up on two months on Robinhood Chain. Robinhood Chain is approaching two months old. I want to just spit out some quick metrics here. $2.1 billion in tokenized assets, over a billion of that is stable coins, $165 million of tokenized real-world assets, $1.5 billion of value deposited into apps. That's 500 million into Morpho, 330 million into Athena, and 300 million into Uniswap. 750 million cumulative transactions across 14 million unique wallets. And Robinhood is about to pass $50 million in gross fee revenue and $44 million in profit for Robinhood. All of these metrics has to be at least somewhat

• 19:30David Hoffman?

  of a surprise to the upside. Is that, am I right, Johan?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's a surprise. You know, we worked so hard on this chain for many years now. So I think we're just really, really happy about the metrics. I think what we've been more surprised was the developer activity, one metric that you haven't mentioned, but we've seen the chain being one of the top three, if it's not top one, I think currently, where there is development being done or active there, where you see a lot of teams developing on it. And I initially thought it would be a bit harder to convince people to build on the Robinhood Chain. So we spent a lot of time creating an ecosystem from the beginning to make sure that the chain will be ready for whatever you need

• 20:18Speaker 01

  to use. You have the right custody protocol, you have the right, you know, taxes and all this stuff. So that's been really surprising. I think we, what's the most exciting for me that prior to just at the beginning, you know, the integration with the Robin ecosystem is just started. We have the earned products that you mentioned, that is from the main app, but we haven't done much more than that. We have the Robin Wallet that is available for the Robin Chain that is also doing well. So I think, you know, what's the most exciting is to think about all the new stuff that are yet to be built or that are built, but we haven't really seen them yet. And I think that's what's really cool. We spent a lot

• 20:59Speaker 01

  of time to build our tokens in a way that is composable so that you can actually create things on top of it. So some of this like meme coin that are pegged on the stock tokens, for example, is something that I find pretty cool. And that was not something that we're expecting, but you know, people thought about it. And so I think that's just the beginning to see what are the new stuff that people will come up with.

• 21:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think the paired meme coin stock tokens has been just a source of a ton of attention and virality in the crypto space. What's it been like on the Robinhood side? Have you guys been talking about sharing in your guys' Slack about the meme coin paired stocks? I want to see what it's like on your guys' side of the aisle here.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think the first time was really just that they were created and there was a lot of excitement where we were trying to look at the smart contract and make sure that it was working the way we were thinking. I think some of the more fun stuff are all the memes created with either Vlad or sometimes even me, where like he's fighting with wolf or bears or whatever. So that's been also really fun. It's a big part of our Slack sheet posting. So yeah, we have a lot of that.

• 22:19David Hoffman?

  There's a growing amount of non-tokenized stocks, but tokenized real world assets. So you guys have tokenized gold on there, but there are some people asking about tokenized commodities beyond just gold. Is the plan to also add on things like tokenized copper and tokenized, you know, real estate if the time comes? What about just beyond tokenized stocks?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, we think the tokenization framework works for almost everything from private equities at something that, you know, we've been pretty vocal that we want to work on and that we're working actively on, real estates, arts, more commodities. We have perpetual that are available already on silver and more. Copper is something that I receive a lot of message on.

• 23:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's a meme coin out there that for some reason really wants and needs tokenized copper. I haven't figured that one out.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  But, you know, overall for us, the idea is that if we can't tokenize or if we can partner with somebody that has tokenized assets, we want to do it. So for example, tokenized gold. I think this one is a bit easier because gold doesn't take as much space. So there's a lot of options there. Silver is also something that I think we are starting to see more and more issuer doing. Copper, I don't think I have seen too many yet. So we'll have to keep looking.

• 23:41David Hoffman?

  What's your favorite tokenized stock on Robinhood chain?

• 23:44Speaker 01

  You know, it's hard to say because Robinhood is not on it. So I can't say Robinhood yet, but.

• 23:50David Hoffman?

  Wait, Robinhood, it hasn't tokenized its own stock on Robinhood chain?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Not yet. Mostly for the way that our system is done with the fact that the issuer is part of Robinhood and that we're a public company is a little complicated.

• 24:06David Hoffman?

  You like trip a regulatory wire or something?

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Right, but we are working actively on it. And at some point, we absolutely want Robinhood to be part of the tokenized system that we have.

• 24:17David Hoffman?

  That's a nice little treat to keep in your guys' pocket. I'm sure that's going to be fun when that gets released. What about the core app? And so there's a lot of crypto companies out there clamoring to get in front of more people. Robinhood has the distribution. What goes into like the Robinhood selection process or criteria for choosing partners for on-chain products?

• 24:41Speaker 01

  It really depends on what we are trying to build. I think the starting point for us is what are we exactly trying to solve? Usually, we don't want to just launch a product that somebody else already offers. We want to make it better. So for example, when we launch our own product, we wanted to make sure that the rate will be way more stable for a longer period of time. We also wanted to make sure that the rate will be higher. And we also wanted to have some insurance to cover a lot of funds in case of a small hack or something like this. So usually that's how we start kind of the product decision.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  We want to make sure that we find good angles. And then we start going down the rabbit hole of like, what do we want to build ourselves? What is like the thing that we really think needs to be done by our team and be verified and audited by our team? What are the things that we could actually move faster by partnering with somebody? And so based on that, you will see sometimes we partner with a lot of people, sometimes with nobody. So for example, the own product, we partnered with Morpho as the lending protocol instead of trying to build our own. We also partnered with, for the chain, we partnered with OCL, who's kind of the company that is also maintaining Arbitrum to make sure that they could maintain

• 26:05Speaker 01

  a lot of architecture so that we don't just like try to do things that we are not the most expert on. But for example, the stock tokens, something that we really, really cared about, that is all done in-house. We brought our own smart contracts. We got audited from a firm to make sure that everything will be done correctly at multiple levels. So, you know, it kind of depends on the product, but usually we try to do a lot of things in-house when we can make a differentiated product.

• 26:36David Hoffman?

  So do US citizens, US residents are still some of the most restricted people, ironically enough, in the world of just blockchain and crypto, just because of just the regulations that are, like Robinhood stock tokens, for example, aren't available to US traders? What clarity or regulation are you really looking for from the SEC? I know we just got the innovation exemption about stock tokens today, so maybe it's that. But even beyond that, I'm sure there's even more things that you guys could use guidance or clarity on to unlock access to US citizens who are using the main Robinhood app. What would, if you had like a wish, a genie came out of a bottle and you guys had like, you had

• 27:21David Hoffman?

  a few wishes to make, what would unlock you guys the most in terms of providing cool new products and services in the main Robinhood app to US citizens?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing, to be honest, is innovation exemption that just got published about tokenization is huge. You know, it really means that the train of tokenization that has been going everywhere and has been taking a lot of people by surprise on how big the movement is, can actually also now be in the US and that's the next stop for products for sure. So that part is huge. I think the one caveat on this is that it's an exemption for five years. So, you know, there's a lot of question around that. And you also have limits on how much you can trade the assets. So there's a limit on the

• 28:09Speaker 01

  number of assets and there's also a limit on the volume of the asset. So it's not fully, you can go all in or something like that. We also still have a state by state jurisdiction currently. So you have the, we have a New York pit license, for example. We have different licenses across the US. There's a new license regime in California. And so what it means is that there are differences for customers based on where they live. For example, you can stake asset on Robinhood almost everywhere in the US except four states. So that's the kind of thing that can really be helpful for us is to have one regulation that we

• 28:54Speaker 01

  can look into and offer a product at the, for everybody, basically. There are still a lot of question around staking, like I just mentioned, but also around lending protocols. There are also question around DeFi activity, what you do on DeFi and how does it get reported, taxed and all this kind of things. And then you also see a lot of question happening currently at a kind of Dex slash Perps Dex level where can a company like a Dex that is outside of the US, can they operate in the US and how? And all this kind of question

• 29:35Speaker 01

  are being kind of discussed. So the more we get clarity from both the SEC and the CFTC, the better we'll be able to offer products that are available outside of the US to the US customer and at the same time still offer the production that the US customer need.

• 29:49David Hoffman?

  You talked about offering experiences, offering products that no one else is able to offer or just hasn't really been built yet. There's a race going on with the perpetual in combination with real tokenized stocks. And so there is a loop that's created when you have both the actual underlying, not just a synthetic, being traded on a perpetual along with a spot market. And so say, for example, you have tokenized Apple on a spot market, but then Apple is also traded on the perpetual 5X, 3X, 10X, whatever. Having that both in the same venue unlocks so much permutations of possibilities. You can create

• 30:29David Hoffman?

  strategies, you can combine things, really just like the innovation space explodes. Is that something that Robinhood is like gunning for? Or are you kind of like still letting that be up to the pert platforms to build that out? And then, and then if you guys want, you guys can integrate it. So like, are you guys in this race too? Or are you leaving this up to the actual perpetual platforms?

• 30:52Speaker 01

  No, we've been in the race for a long time. So you can do exactly what you just mentioned on Lider, for example. We're an investor and a partner where you can use our stock tokens on both the spot and the perps market and create strategies. You can also do a lot of things on Arcus. And we have integrated with Lider, for example, on our private wallet. So you can do a lot of things that you just mentioned pretty easily using the same kind of UI UX that we have. We also have a perps platform outside of the US currently. In the EU, it's a license platform. We have crypto asset, but we also have commodities

• 31:32Speaker 01

  on it and we also have ETFs. And so, you know, a lot of the things that you're discussing is things that we're also looking into. The main question for us is how do we do it in a compliant way within the US and how do we offer it with the best UI and UX? But perps is something that we've been doing for a long time. So we know the product well and we know our customer love it. So it's something that we are definitely into.

• 31:58David Hoffman?

  Given the pathway, having clarity on the pathway, would you, would we be able to expect perps to appear in the main Robinhood core app?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  If we get the right regulatory structure, we will absolutely have perps in one shape or form in the app. If you are an EU customer, if you're somewhere in Europe, you can already trade crypto stock tokens and access perps within the same app. There are different criterias to make sure that the customers are eligible, but it's something that is already within the same app. And we really build a cool UX and UI experience where you can set your take profit and stop loss with a slider. So it's very simple and you can see the charts moving at the same time. So definitely something that we will want to do here.

• 32:52David Hoffman?

  I want to ask you about your guys' relationship to ETH. So Robinhood Chain uses Ether, the asset, as gas. Not all big Layer 2s do that. Sometimes they use their native token. How does Robinhood Crypto and the Robinhood team just view Ethereum and Ether specifically? And would Robinhood ever buy ETH and put it on the balance sheet?

• 33:15Speaker 01

  We don't have a plan right now to buy ETH and to put it on the balance sheet. We do have a lot of ETH right now generated with a chain. So that's one thing that we are working on.

• 33:27David Hoffman?

  When you generate the ETH with the chain fees, do you just hold it? You hold the ETH?

• 33:33Speaker 01

  It depends. Sometimes we sell, sometimes we hold. It kind of depends of the amounts and the time of the year and a lot of things that

• 33:43Speaker 01

  our financial team could tell you a bit more than me. But at the end of the day, for us, one of the reasons we wanted to build an L2 was to be able to rely on the decentralization and the securities that Ethereum has built. And there's a lot of things going on, right? You have the rise of AI that is going to change and find new bugs and vulnerabilities. And so a lot of work will need to happen on every type of software that is running on our computer. You have Quantum, that is also something that is coming. And we need to make sure that all the crypto chains are going to be safe in the future for it. So there is a lot of work to be done.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  And the other reason we really liked it was to have this way to be able to bridge between all the EVM chain very easily and reduce the cost and all these kind of things. That is kind of the reason we did this L2. And so for us, it's part of that also that we want to, you know, generate some of the fees that are going back to the L2. I know it's a smaller portion of what we generate, but that's kind of the structure of Ethereum and rollups. But we want to be very active with the foundation. We are regularly meeting with them. We also regularly meeting with different groups that I've created recently, like Eath Lab and others.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  And so for us, it's really important to keep this coordination well. We think that we are becoming a bigger part of Ethereum. You know, if you look at the usage of the Ethereum chain through stuff like Robinhood Chain, we are taking a larger and larger part. And so we want to make sure that we are contributing to the chain as well.

• 35:32David Hoffman?

  Johanna, now is a very, very busy time over in Robinhood. What are you excited about when it comes to Robinhood Crypto and Robinhood Chain that I haven't asked about yet? Is there anything else on the future roadmap or just things that you guys are working on that I wouldn't know to ask or are things that you're excited about?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Right now, we're doing a lot of cool stuff on a Robin wallet to, for example, not have to pay gases as a customer or not have to worry about bridging between chains. So we do the cross-chain for you. We're also helping the discoverability of assets to be a lot better. Another thing that is really cool is around our combination of AI and crypto. So we launched recently Agentic Trading through AI. You can connect your agent to our NCP and you can do a lot of new strategies that frankly I didn't know I could do because I didn't have the knowledge, but my agent could find a lot of ways. And at the same time, we have all these carburetors to make sure that, you know,

• 36:34Speaker 01

  it's a separate pool of money. You have different checks that you can put in place to make sure that the agents act like you want to. But I think that's going to be more and more interesting, especially in the world of the chain, of the wrapping chain and the tokenization. You will see more and more of this arbitrage opportunities and pairs of things that we haven't thought about doing before in traditional markets. So pretty excited to see how people are going to start using it.

• 37:02David Hoffman?

  Johanna, I know you're a busy guy. There's a lot of things to build. I'll let you get back to it. Thanks for coming on the show and talk to me about all things Robinhood Chain. And I think everyone in crypto really appreciates what you guys are doing out there.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me. See you soon.

• 37:13David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but it's not risky enough. The institutions have landed, so we are going even further west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. We are glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.