Robinhood opened a big game late at night, kicking out the imagination of exchanges throughout the summer

원본 | Odaily Planet Daily ( @오데일리차이나 )

Author: CryptoLeo ( @레오앤크립토 )

In the early hours of this morning Beijing time, Robinhood dropped multiple bombshells, announcing that it will launch stock tokenization, RWA L2, perpetual contract functions and staking services .

The weak interaction between traditional funds and 암호화폐currencies and the lack of liquidity have always been the heart knot of crypto practitioners. In early 2024, the situation began to improve. The approval of the BTC spot ETF promoted traditional funds to contact cryptocurrencies. Later, other relatively mainstream crypto assets also caught up in the ETF application approval. This year, the GENIUS Act ignited the compliance bull from the perspective of stablecoins, and traditional finance once again stepped into the market. But in my opinion, this is not enough. The most important link in the linkage – stock tokenization – has not yet fully released its potential.

At present, among the institutions that have deployed stock tokenization, there are three that are highly compliant and relatively familiar to everyone. The first is Kraken, which has already started . It launched the stock tokenization platform xStocks last month and now supports 60 US stocks for 24-hour trading; the second is Coinbase, which is currently seeking SEC approval to issue blockchain-based stocks in the United States. If approved, Coinbase will also be allowed to provide on-chain traditional stock trading; the third is todays protagonist Robinhood. While announcing its L2 (based on Arbitrum Orbit) and stock tokenization, it also launched a number of new products, including perpetual futures for EU customers and staking for US users. In addition, Robinhood will also give OpenAI and SpaceX stock tokens to EU users .

In response to the news, Robinhood stock HOOD rose more than 12 points to $93.15 (at the time of writing).

Three major moves – Robinhoods announcement is finalized

As early as May this year, Robinhood submitted a proposal to the US SEC to tokenize the US securities market. Its proposal shows that the scope of tokenization may include traditional assets such as bonds and stocks.

Yesterday morning, Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev posted on X that Robinhood will release an important announcement related to the crypto business in a day, and this release will reveal exciting news from Robinhood Crypto. A few hours before the official announcement of stock tokenization, there was also news in the market that Robinhood EU may launch a tokenized stock trading service.

Below, Odaily Planet Daily will give you a detailed introduction to the three major news announced by Robinhood today:

Stock 토큰ization and Its L2

Its official website shows that Robinhood users can currently purchase more than 200 U.S. stock tokens on its app, including tokenized stocks of NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, etc. Specifically:

• Stock tokens are displayed, bought and sold in US dollars. When users place an order, Robinhood will automatically convert it to euros based on the current exchange rate and charge a small foreign exchange fee of 0.1%. In addition, there are no hidden fees;

• The transaction volume threshold is extremely low: Start trading with as little as 1 EUR;

• Trading is available almost 24 hours a day: tokenized shares can be bought and sold 24 hours a day, Monday to Friday.

Robinhood has also launched a related event. As of July 7, eligible EU users can get 5 euros worth of SpaceX and OpenAI stock tokens for free through Robinhood EU. Robinhood will reward a total of 500,000 US dollars in SpaceX tokens and 1 million US dollars in OpenAI stock tokens for this event.

It should be noted that after the stock is tokenized, its stock code is not the same as the token name (for example, Facebooks stock code changed from FB to META), and the stock token will also change with the actions of its company. For example, if a companys stock splits (1 share is converted into 2 shares), the token on Robinhood will also change accordingly (1 token becomes 2), and vice versa.

Speaking at Cannes (where ETHCC was recently held), its CEO Vladimir Tenev explained the three stages of stock tokenization:

Phase 1: Tokenize stocks into receipt tokens, and transactions are still settled in existing traditional financial markets;

Phase 2: Integrate Bitstamp to increase liquidity and enable 24/7 trading;

Phase 3: Integrate blockchain to gain composability advantages.

Stock tokenization will initially be issued on Arbitrum. In the future, it will be issued and traded on the Robinhood L2 chain based on Arbitrum Orbit. Robinhood Chain is currently under development and will be optimized for stock tokenization and support 24/7 trading, seamless bridging, and autonomous custody.

Perpetual Futures for European Users

In addition to tokenized stocks, Robinhood also announced today the launch of perpetual futures for European users, which will be launched later this summer. Users can open up to 3 times long/short contracts, but more options will be expanded for advanced customers in the future. In addition, in order to help users reduce the complex process of trading perpetual contracts, Robinhood has built an intuitive interface to facilitate users to set position size and margin management, and orders will be routed through the Bitstamp perpetual contract exchange.

Crypto staking with a suite of benefits

• The cryptocurrency staking service is launched for eligible US users , with ETH and SOL being the first to be opened. In addition, Robinhood has set no limit on the amount of user staking, and launched a deposit activity. Within a limited time (after July 7), US and European users can deposit cryptocurrencies into Robinhood and receive a 1% deposit reward – if the total deposit reaches the target of US$500 million, there is a chance to double it to 2%. Users who deposit before July 7 can directly receive a 2% reward;

• Crypto Credit Card Rewards : The Robinhood Gold Card offers cash back on all spending categories to U.S. customers. Until this fall, customers can use these rewards to automatically buy cryptocurrencies;

• Cortex for Crypto (AI investment platform) : Coming later this year, Robinhood Gold members can view insights, trends, and event-based market analysis directly on each token鈥檚 detail page. The product is designed to help customers quickly understand price and market changes in real time.

• Smart exchange routing : Evaluate multiple partner exchanges and route user orders to get the best price. The more volume a user has traded in the past 30 days, the lower the rate. API support will be launched soon.

• Tax Batches: US customers can now also view and sell specific tax batches for cryptocurrency transactions, allowing users to strategically select batches to sell ;

• Advanced Charting: Advanced charting on the Robinhood Legend app will be available on mobile and expanded to crypto in August.

With listed companies announcing new crypto reserve moves every week, Robinhoods series of services and suites are in a better time than ever . Its CEO Vladimir Tenev said in his speech: We have the opportunity to prove to the world what we have always believed, that cryptocurrency is far more than a speculative asset. It has the potential to become the backbone of the global financial community.

Over the past few years, Robinhood has experienced many ups and downs in its transformation from a retail broker to a crypto star. Now, everything above makes sense.

Robinhoods efforts in encryption in the past 7 years

In terms of the timeline, Robinhoods crypto moves started in 2018. In February of that year, Robinhood took the first step in crypto, announcing that it would allow users to trade BTC and ETH on its platform. It was initially launched in some U.S. states, and then gradually expanded to more cryptocurrencies in more regions. Since then, Robinhood has suspended crypto trading for a short period of time several times due to excessive cryptocurrency price fluctuations and other issues, and has also experienced SEC scrutiny and fines. Fortunately, Robinhood has never stopped exploring crypto business:

Timeline of crypto-related companies acquired by Robinhood

Since 2021, Robinhood has begun acquiring crypto and crypto-related companies, including:

• In 2021, Robinhood acquired Cove 시장s, a cross-exchange trading platform. This was Robinhood鈥檚 first crypto acquisition, intended to strengthen Robinhood鈥檚 core crypto trading products. Because Cove Markets allows customers to manage accounts across multiple exchange platforms and aggregate large amounts of data, this acquisition is intended to make it easier for Robinhood customers to manage their crypto accounts;

• In 2022, Robinhood announced that it would acquire the British crypto platform Ziglu, which allows retail investors to buy cryptocurrencies and has obtained the license of the Electronic Money Institution (EMI) of the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Ziglus European compliance and large number of European users is also an effort by Robinhood to expand its business (but due to the heavy losses in the crypto market at the end of the year, Robinhood lowered its offer for Ziglu and ultimately did not complete the acquisition);

• In May this year, Robinhood announced the acquisition of Canadian crypto platform WonderFi, which owns two regulated trading platforms, Bitbuy and Coinsquare. Some analysts said the acquisition was a key first step for Robinhood to enter the Canadian market and expected the deal to bring Robinhood approximately $250 million in annual revenue or nearly 10% growth space;

• In June this year, Robinhood agreed to acquire Bitstamp for $200 million, and the transaction is expected to be completed in the first half of 2025. In addition to adding 4 million to 5 million new cryptocurrency customers to Robinhood, another important reason for the acquisition is that it will allow it to take over more than 50 licenses that Bitstamp has in Europe and around the world, which also lays the foundation for its announcement today that it will launch crypto perpetual contracts in Europe;

• Today, Robinhood acquired Pluto, an AI investment advice platform. Pluto is known for its AI-driven personalized investment advice and real-time analysis, which can bring tailored investment strategies and analysis to its users. The acquisition of Pluto is also a prelude to its announcement of the launch of Robinhood Cortex, an AI assistant. Cortex can not only develop strategies for stocks and ETFs, but also cover news and token price updates related to the crypto market. Cortex will provide all relevant recent developments on the detailed information page of the token that the user clicks on, so that the reasons for the token fluctuations can be better understood.

Robinhood鈥檚 Crypto Product History

While Robinhood is acquiring companies, it is also working hard to improve its products:

상술 한 바와 같이, when it first promoted its crypto business, it stopped instant deposits for crypto trading due to the large volatility of BTC and DOGE, which was also the first hurdle for it to accept crypto trading as a broker. Since then, Robinhood has experienced multiple investigations and fines from regulators.

Robinhood CEO Vladimir Tenev said at a roadshow in 2021 that the company will go all-in on encryption and focus on expanding its encryption products. Users can expect new encryption features at some point. This also kicked off Robinhoods promotion of its encryption products.

Tenev kept his promise. When DOGE was popular, Robinhood took the opportunity to test and launch the DOGE transfer function, which can transfer DOGE to external wallets. Crypto gift cards were also launched at the same time.

Since then, with the rise of DeFi, NFT, etc., Robinhood announced the launch of a new Web3 wallet application Robinhood Wallet (currently supporting dApps of Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism and Base networks), allowing users to access NFT markets, DeFi, DEX and Swap token functions, similar to other non-custodial wallets such as MetaMask, but it is an application independent of existing stock and crypto platforms. After its launch, Robinhood Wallet is also expanding its supported chains, tokens and IOS versions. (For a period of time last year , the tokens transferred by Robinhood could be used as a reference for the short-term rise of tokens)

At the end of 2024, Robinhood released its crypto data, with crypto assets under custody valued at $38 billion as of November 2024, and Robinhoods notional cryptocurrency trading volume reaching $119 billion (past 1 year) as of November 2024. In 2024, its product updates included:

• It has achieved full coverage of all 50 U.S. states and territories, and supported new currencies including SOL, PEPE, ADA, XRP and WIF, bringing the total number of cryptocurrencies available to U.S. users to 20.

• Robinhood launched its cryptocurrency trading API, which provides tools to view cryptocurrency market data, manage portfolios, and place orders programmatically. Advanced order types including stop loss and limit orders are also available on iOS and Android.

• At the end of the year, it announced the launch of ETH and SOL staking for European customers. Since its launch in the second quarter, more than two-thirds of SOL holdings in the region have been staked.

• In addition to the existing support for Ethereum and Polygon, its wallet Robinhood Wallet has also added the Swap function for Solana, Base, Arbitrum and Optimism. It has also launched cross-chain and zero-gas swaps on Ethereum and some of its L2 (see above).

So far, Robinhoods full set of crypto facilities has been gradually improved, covering spot, contracts, pledge, AI and its own stock tokenization public chain . Back then, Robinhood certainly could not have imagined that the first step of opening cryptocurrency trading would have such a big impact. Now its products are close to becoming a unicorn in the crypto industry.

Seven years ago in the spring, Robinhood picked up a real gun and pulled the trigger, but it had no effect at the time. Until today, Robinhood looked back and found that the bullet hit the cryptocurrency market.

Influenced by: Spring of the stock market, the end of copycats?

At present, Robinhood is superior to other crypto products in some aspects, such as unlimited ETH staking. And following its retail-friendly style, it may be more relaxed than other exchanges in terms of trading restrictions on some currencies. However, it currently supports only a few types of tokens, and altcoins that have not yet landed may need to consider how to get on Robinhood; and for the stock market, Robinhoods launch of SpaceX and OpenAI stock tokens in Europe marks the democratization of its private equity , and retail investors can now access stocks that were once untradable.

Although coin shares are not a new idea, multiple crypto trading platforms have such products, and there are also many crypto platforms specializing in this direction, but Robinood鈥檚 fate is of different significance .

The significance of crypto platforms making coin-stock products is to provide native users of the coin circle with convenient opportunities to trade other stock assets, while the compliance brokerage platform makes coin-stocks. Chain and coin are a set of solutions for them to achieve more efficient settlement, better liquidity, lower transaction friction, and link cross-regional and cross-time zone trading scenarios and users. In short, it allows all ordinary investors to enter the market smoothly. In the future, for the same stock, will you look at Nasdaq or Robinhood in the pre-market?

Practitioners in the narrow cryptocurrency circle actually have nothing to be happy about. The liquidity of altcoins will be further squeezed, and there will be less and less need for incremental traffic to enter the cryptocurrency market. In the future, except for coins that have passed ETFs and coins that can be linked to traditional finance and provide underlying infrastructure, other altcoins may not escape the fate of extinction.

Although Robinhood is a relatively young alternative brokerage firm, with a gap in scale compared to large traditional brokerage firms and has been criticized for having multiple operational problems, its move this time will surely trigger further thinking and planning among the traditional giants who are already gearing up for action.

Many product forms are not new, and who makes them is the key to life and death.

This article is sourced from the internet: Robinhood opened a big game late at night, kicking out the imagination of exchanges throughout the summer

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