Robinhood announced Tuesday evening that a developer version of its custom blockchain, known as Robinhood Chain, is now live. The move, announced at the Consensus event in Hong Kong, comes as the company accelerates its push into crypto-based financial services, including tokenized versions of popular stocks.
Robinhood Chain, which the company teased last June, is currently in the so-called testnet phase. This means that it is publicly visible but limited to a limited number of partners and participants who can test its infrastructure and introduce experimental features. In the coming months, the mainnet version of Robinhood Chain will go live and will be used to process customer transactions.
“We now have Alchemy, LayerZero, Chainlink and other big crypto players. But in the future, when the mainnet is online, customers will be able to interact with it directly,” said Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president of crypto. Fortune.
Kerbrat added that Robinhood Chain would support trading both in its standalone crypto wallet and also in the main Robinhood app. He noted that at the customer level, blockchain will be a seamless experience and many people will not even know they are using it.
Robinhood Chain itself is built on a technology called Arbitrum, a so-called layer 2 blockchain that sits on top of Ethereum, and is designed to process transactions in batches to make them cheaper and more efficient. Arbitrum is one of the two dominant layer 2 technologies in the Ethereum world. The other is called Optimism and is used by Robinhood rival Coinbase, which adapted it for its own popular Base blockchain.
The launch of Robinhood Chain comes as the company works to embrace tokenization, which CEO Vlad Tenev described last year as a freight train arriving in financial markets. The term describes the transformation of various assets into digital tokens, including stocks, which can be traded on a blockchain in a similar way to Ethereum.
Robinhood’s blockchain announcement came on the same day the company reported its fourth-quarter 2025 results. The results showed a profit of $605 million for the fourth quarter, or 66 cents per share, which beat analysts’ estimate of 63 cents. Robinhood, however, reported weaker-than-expected revenue, sending shares lower after hours.
