Robinhood plans to launch its own blockchain, offers ‘Stock Tokens’ in EU

The online brokerage Robinhood is doubling down on its crypto ambitions. On Monday, the company announced that it was letting customers in the European Union trade U.S. stocks and ETFs on a blockchain. Dubbed Robinhood Stock Tokens, the assets—basically shares of popular companies in a crypto wrapper—will have zero commission fees, and holders will receive dividend payments within the brokerage’s app.

Customers will have access to stock tokens representing more than 200 different companies and be able to trade them 24 hours a day, five days a week. Vlad Tenev, Robinhood chairman and CEO, said during an event on Monday those tokens even include privately traded companies like OpenAI and SpaceX. The blockchain-based stocks will initially be issued on Arbitrum, a so-called layer 2 blockchain built on top of Ethereum.

Robinhood plans to eventually move the tokenized stocks over to its own layer 2 chain that uses Arbitrum’s software. Layer 2 chains are built atop primary blockchains like Ethereum, and are typically faster and more efficient to use.

The user experience is designed to be as easy for non-crypto traders as possible, said Steven Goldfeder, cofounder and CEO of Offchain Labs, a key Arbitrum developer. “For many European users that don’t want to engage with crypto for whatever reason, they don’t even have to know or care that it is crypto underneath,” he added.

Robinhood didn’t specify when it would launch its new blockchain, but it said the new chain plans to support trading 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Our latest offerings lay the groundwork for crypto to become the backbone of the global financial system,” Tenev said in a statement.

The company’s stock jumped 4% to a high of $91 after Robinhood publicized the announcement late Monday morning.

Crypto expansion

Robinhood’s tokenized stock offering and planned blockchain comes as part of a broader push by the firm to expand its crypto products offering under a newly friendly regulatory regime in Washington, D.C.

After President Donald Trump, who’s called himself a “pro-crypto president,” won reelection in November, Robinhood reinstated many of the cryptocurrencies, including Solana and XRP, that it had delisted from its platform. It took down the digital assets from its app after the Securities and Exchange Commission alleged in 2023 lawsuits the tokens were unregistered securities.

Once Trump assumed office in January, his administration issued a series of pro-crypto executive orders. The SEC also reconfigured its crypto enforcement arm as well as dropped a series of high-profile lawsuits and investigations against crypto companies, including a probe into Robinhood’s crypto arm.

In May, Robinhood made inroads into Canada when it acquired the Toronto-based WonderFi for nearly $180 million. The acquisition is expected to close in the second half of this year. And, in June, the publicly traded company based in Menlo Park, Calif., closed its $200 million acquisition of the crypto exchange Bitstamp after a year of regulatory review.

As part of Monday’s announcement, Robinhood also said it was letting its European users trade crypto perpetual futures, a type of crypto derivative that lets traders bet on the future price of a cryptocurrency.

And the online trading app said it will let U.S. customers stake cryptocurrencies—when crypto holders put their digital assets in escrow to support the security of a blockchain. Users will first be able to stake Ethereum and Solana. Robinhood did not say which other tokens it planned to allow users to stake.

Update, June 30, 2025: Added in how Robinhood’s stock responded to the announcement, examples of tokenized stocks on offer, and a quote from Steven Goldfeder

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com