Robinhood Chain Balance Between Serious Finance and Meme Coins

Robinhood Chain wants to be a financial hub for the suits just as much as for the degens.

That’s essentially the meaning behind Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s “two wolves” post on X, which the company’s head of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, says sums up what Robinhood is going for with the launch of its own Ethereum layer-2 network: a balance between serious products—tokenized equities and derivatives contracts—and the memes that bring in attention, fun, and users.

“We want to show customers that we care about what they care about,” Kerbrat told Decrypt. “We want to make sure the chain works for what people care about.”

And it’s off to a roaring start.

In just over a month online, Robinhood Chain has reached nearly $800 million in total value locked and has since processed more than 200 million transactions, Kerbrat said.

In an exclusive interview with FOMO Hour on Friday, Kerbrat, who leads Robinhood’s crypto and international businesses, said the company chose an Ethereum layer-2 over a layer-1 blockchain so it could rely on existing security and decentralization while focusing its resources on products.

He pointed to the chain’s deposits and transaction count as early measures of its adoption.

“We also look a lot at developer activity, that’s something that is very important for me,” he said. “I want the chain to not just be the chain for Robinhood, but also be the chain that anyone can use and interact with our product, like our stock tokens, but also everything else that we are building.”

The Robinhood Chain network is part of Robinhood’s effort to move brokerage products on-chain. Customers can use it to buy and sell real-world assets, roughly 200 tokenized stocks, lend stablecoins, and trade perpetual futures.

Kerbrat said the freedom to trade when traditional markets are closed gives retail investors a way to respond to market-moving news after traditional exchanges close.

“The world doesn't stop on weekends,” he said. “News is happening on Fridays after market close, and people want to be able to hedge their position, which was something that was not really available to retail until recently.”

Alongside tokenized stocks, lending, and other financial products, Kerbrat said Robinhood is making room for meme coins, which he described as an important source of liquidity and user interest for the new network.

“We think memes are an important part of crypto. We think that for a new chain, like Robinhood Chain, these tokens have value. They bring liquidity, they bring interest from customers, especially the DeFi-type of customer that are pretty hard to move,” said Kerbrat.

“If meme coins are something that they are extremely interested in, we want to make sure that the chain is supported for that,” he said.

Ultimately, Kerbrat said Robinhood wants to reach people who have never used crypto rather than compete with rival blockchains for existing users.

“If we see tens of millions of customers trying to use a chain, I think that will be a good win for us,” he said. “We want to bring more customers on-chain and show them the benefit of the technology.”