Robinhood to Allow AI Agents for Crypto Trading

Robinhood said eligible US-based customers will soon be able to connect third-party AI agents to make crypto trades on their behalf, marking the latest expansion in autonomous trading after the company rolled out a similar product to equities and options traders in May.

“You can work with an agent to create a strategy with specific guardrails and not need to be constantly monitoring your account,” a Robinhood executive said during a presentation on Friday.

Robinhood didn’t set a date for when it would roll out the product to eligible US crypto traders but noted that its UK customers would be next in line to access the offering.

Equities traders can already ask AI agents to invest in crypto mining stocks on their behalf. Source: Robinhood

The push for autonomous crypto trading adds to Robinhood’s broader crypto strategy, which has primarily focused on real-world asset tokenization and the company’s Ethereum layer 2 Robinhood Chain, which launched earlier this month.

Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, said the new blockchain processed 17 million transactions from nearly 350,000 wallet addresses in its first week.

Meanwhile, over 70,000 agentic accounts have already been created by Robinhood equities and options traders since late May, when the platform launched a beta version of the product.

AI agents serve to even the playing field

During the presentation, the Robinhood executive said the AI agents would enable retail users to base trades on data that they would have otherwise missed, putting them on a more equal playing field with institutions:

“This is another big step towards giving retail investors every advantage that institutions have enjoyed for decades.”

Robinhood offers the agentic accounts through several third-party AI companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX’s Grok.

Robinhood is also enabling eligible users to have credit card purchases made on their behalf by AI agents.

It comes as crypto industry executives like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire have tipped that AI agents will become the dominant users of blockchain payments in the next few years.

AI agent crypto payment integrations are also taking place

Several notable integrations advancing AI agent-driven stablecoin spending have emerged in recent months, including one by Amazon Web Services in May when it integrated Coinbase’s x402 payments protocol into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, allowing agents to transact in the USDC (USDC) stablecoin.

Related: Robinhood Venture Fund invests $75M in OpenAI

In April, crypto wallet startup Oobit launched a Visa-supported virtual card for AI agents to make online purchases in USDt (USDT) on behalf of businesses.

AI agent payments adoption lagging

Despite the integrations, data shows that AI-agent transaction activity on the blockchain remains relatively small, with Artemis data showing that only $2 million in transaction volume was facilitated through the AI agent-supported x402 protocol in June.