Interview: Tong, PANews
Compilation: Nancy, PANews
No one expected that Robinhood Chain, carrying traditional finance DNA, could become a dark horse in the L2 track in such a short time, even crushing a host of competitors. However, as market enthusiasm has recently cooled, this emerging public chain has also begun to face a liquidity test. In particular, the Meme coin track has clearly cooled, raising concerns about whether the on-chain ecosystem can continue to grow.
At the same time, at the recently held HOOD Summit 2026, Robinhood announced multiple new products in one go, covering AI, perpetual contracts, and weekend trading, further signaling its intention to expand the boundaries of its crypto business.
During the TOKEN2049 Singapore conference, PANews conducted an exclusive interview with Johann Kerbrat, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Crypto at Robinhood, focusing on Robinhood Chain's strategic positioning and market competition, international market expansion, and the integration of AI and the crypto industry.
In his view, Robinhood Chain is not just an independent blockchain, but also important infrastructure for Robinhood's future financial services, allowing users to enjoy the advantages of DeFi through centralized applications. Rather than competing for market share among public chains, Robinhood hopes to use blockchain to reduce the cost of financial services, promote asset tokenization, and attract more traditional finance users into the crypto world. As AI Agents gradually gain capabilities such as trade execution, wallet operations, and portfolio management, blockchain is also expected to become important underlying infrastructure for automated financial activities.
The following is the interview content:
Integrating crypto into daily life and expanding global markets through blockchain
PANews: Johann, thank you very much for accepting our interview today. We are delighted to have you. Today we will focus on Robinhood Crypto, Robinhood Chain, and your vision for global financial markets. Let's start with the first question.
Johann Kerbrat: Glad to be here.
PANews: Before joining Robinhood, you had already been deeply involved in the crypto industry for many years and even worked as a Bitcoin miner. What initially attracted you to this industry? Which early experiences still influence the way you build products today?
Johann Kerbrat: For me personally, the concept of decentralization is very appealing. I hope that people's financial activities, as well as the ways they buy and transfer assets, should not be controlled by only one entity. That is exactly what attracts me most to crypto technology.
But I also found that for a long time, crypto products were mainly built by technical people for technical people, which excluded many users who needed a lower barrier to use.
When I joined Robinhood, I was very eager to make crypto technology easier to access, so that people could truly use it in their daily lives.
PANews: Currently, you are responsible for both Robinhood's crypto business and international business. How do these two parts work together in daily operations? Are there differences in their priorities?
Johann Kerbrat: I believe that using blockchain technology is an important way for us to expand internationally. For example, tokenized stocks are a very good entry point that can help us expand markets and reach more users. Robinhood has already launched stock tokens in more than 120 countries and regions, and users can access these assets through Robinhood Wallet and other wallets connected to Robinhood Chain. I think this is one of the major advances we have made in international expansion.
Our user base itself is global, so we will not focus only on the U.S. market. Since then, we have also expanded our business to more regions, including launching crypto and brokerage businesses in the UK, conducting crypto business in the EU, and planning further expansion into markets such as Singapore in the future. This requires a lot of work, but we look forward to continuing to expand the coverage of our products.
Bringing DeFi to mainstream users, Robinhood Chain will become new financial infrastructure
PANews: Now Robinhood Chain seems to have become the core of Robinhood's crypto business. What is your strategic positioning for this chain? Is it just one product within the broader crypto and international business strategy, or is it the center of the entire strategy?
Johann Kerbrat: I think Robinhood Chain means far more than that. It will become the underlying infrastructure for many new types of financial services, enabling us to bring the advantages of DeFi to customers who use financial services through centralized applications.
A good example is the Robinhood Earn product, which can provide users with about 7% yield on their cash. Specifically, we convert users' cash into stablecoins, create smart wallets, and then deposit the funds into a lending protocol on the platform.
We believe it is very important to merge the two worlds. Because blockchain can bring a lot of innovation and enable 24/7 instant settlement. By adopting a more modern, blockchain-based technology architecture, we can also significantly reduce costs for customers.
In the future, you will see more and more such services appear on the Robinhood platform. As long as blockchain can create value for customers, we will consider integrating it.
PANews: After Robinhood Chain launched, its popularity has continued to rise, and it has also attracted considerable attention in Chinese communities. Are there any community data or user behaviors that surprised you?
Johann Kerbrat: What makes us happy is that the community is actively building various applications on this chain. Our goal is not just to launch our own products, but to create an ecosystem where developers can freely build and develop new applications.
We have also made stock tokens a foundational component, allowing developers to innovate composably based on it and thereby create new types of applications that even we ourselves had not thought of before.
This is also one of the most interesting parts of the whole process. Every morning, I check my X (Twitter) account to see which new projects have been deployed on this chain. We see community members from different regions actively participating, and we have also met many people who proactively talk to me about Robinhood Chain. We are very excited to see this momentum.
Expanding crypto users is the top priority; not pursuing independent development for now
PANews: However, on-chain activity seems to have cooled recently, especially Meme coin-related activity. In the future, what measures will you take to attract developers and users to continue building on this chain?
Johann Kerbrat: I think we are still at a very early stage. In a few days, this chain will be only 100 days old (note: it had already passed 100 days when the article was published), so the whole journey has just begun.
At present, we have not completed all planned integrations. For example, we plan to further connect with Robinhood's main app, which has about 27.9 million funded accounts. In addition, there are many products under development on Robinhood Wallet, which is the primary wallet for Robinhood Chain. At the same time, we are also in discussions with different service providers for cooperation.
Therefore, we believe we are still at a very early stage, and there is still a lot to do in the future. We will not worry excessively about fluctuations in daily trading volume, but will focus more on development over the next five and ten years: how Robinhood Chain can gradually become the underlying infrastructure of many of our financial systems.
PANews: I am curious, which blockchains do you regard as competitors to Robinhood Chain? For example, Solana, BNB Chain, Base, or do you hope to develop it into a relatively independent ecosystem?
Johann Kerbrat: Frankly speaking, we have not paid much attention to competition for market share among different blockchains.
I think that currently, the people actually using blockchain technology still account for only a very small portion of the global population. Therefore, we are more focused on how to bring more users into the blockchain world and get them to start using tokenized assets, rather than fighting for market share from other blockchains such as Base.In the long run, we believe users will increasingly use blockchains, because different blockchains may specialize in specific areas of financial services. What the industry as a whole needs to do is ensure users can easily switch between different blockchains. That is also why Robinhood Wallet does not only support Robinhood Chain; it also supports many of the other blockchains you just mentioned.
Overall, we want more users to be able to use our services.
PANews: Robinhood Chain is currently deployed in the Arbitrum ecosystem. In the future, would you consider making it more independent?
Johann Kerbrat: I think we always have the option to become more independent, but that mainly depends on how we allocate resources.
At present, we are more interested in introducing new foundational components to the blockchain, such as the stock tokens mentioned earlier, and using that to drive industry innovation.
In terms of blockchain technology, we are also quite satisfied with the current performance. One of our goals is to achieve very low latency, such as sub-microsecond block times. Performance metrics like these are very important for building a truly effective financial system.
But we do not think we must now devote resources to building decentralization and security mechanisms from scratch, because we can benefit from Ethereum Layer 1 and the tech stack built by Arbitrum Stack. I think this is a good approach: we can focus on what we do best, which is building new types of financial systems, while leveraging the advantages of existing blockchain architecture.
The blockchain itself is permissionless. If in the future we want to become more independent, of course we can do so. But for now, our product roadmap is already full, and there are still many new products that need our development efforts.
Bringing new users to the blockchain, Robinhood accelerates its multi-line crypto push
PANews: Of the crypto activity on Robinhood Chain, how much comes from Robinhood's existing traditional finance users, and how much comes from native crypto users?
Johann Kerbrat: That question is hard to answer accurately, because we do not specifically track the source of this on-chain activity, nor do we determine whether each activity is associated with a particular customer.
However, I expect that at present we can still see quite a few crypto-native users participating in trading, for example some meme coins launched on the trading platform. As for the Earn product, it is open to all customers on our platform.
So we do see quite a few new users beginning to engage with the blockchain, and some of them may be encountering blockchain technology for the first time. I think this is one of the most exciting things right now.
PANews: That is to say, you are bringing quite a few new users to the blockchain. Looking ahead to the next quarter and the coming year, what will be the next major growth focus for Robinhood Crypto: US perpetual contracts, tokenized assets, Robinhood Chain, or international market expansion?
Johann Kerbrat: I think all of these directions will be our focus. We just launched US perpetual contract products last week and are gradually opening them to more customers, and we are very excited about that. The product uses the crypto exchange Bitstamp (owned by Robinhood) in the backend. We believe that integrating global liquidity is crucial for building an excellent perpetual contract product.
As for tokenized assets, as I just mentioned, we are only just getting started. At present, we have launched tokens for 190 US stocks and ETFs, but in the future we hope to expand the range of assets to more types. This includes not only US assets, but also assets from other exchanges around the world, as well as assets such as private equity.
On international expansion, we are also actively pushing forward. Recently, we just launched crypto asset trading services in Canada.
We believe there are still many products and services that can be brought to the platform in the future.
AI Agents integrating with crypto technology, automated finance will see more opportunities
PANews: At the end of September, at the HOOD Summit, Robinhood announced the launch of several new products, including AI Agent. How do you think AI will affect the future of the crypto industry?
Johann Kerbrat: I think there is a lot of intersection between AI and crypto technology. Creating wallets through software, transferring assets, and buying and selling various assets are all operations very suitable for automated execution, and AI Agents are very good at performing these kinds of tasks.
We are making sure that the various Agent systems we launch are compatible with different types of trading, such as stocks, options, and crypto assets. We are also providing multiple skills and tool support for the blockchain, so that AI Agents can easily interact with the blockchain.
I think there is still a lot of room to explore in this direction. As the world increasingly moves toward a digital financial system that runs around the clock, it will become increasingly important to let AI Agents continuously monitor portfolios and investment conditions on behalf of users.
Looking forward to hearing the voices of the Chinese community, welcoming community participation in co-building
PANews: For the Chinese community, if they want to participate in Robinhood Chain, what would you like to say to them, or what suggestions do you have?
Johann Kerbrat: We very much want to hear the voices of the Chinese community.
We are building more tools, and we have always been communicating with customers to understand which features work well, where there are still shortcomings, and what users want to see on this chain.
So please actively give us feedback and clearly tell us what is currently missing, what else is worth developing, and which directions we should focus on next. We hope this chain will become easier and easier to use, and we also hope it can better serve different communities.
PANews: There are still many developers in China. I am not sure whether you have already established contact with China's developer community?
Johann Kerbrat: There are certainly already some developers involved, although I have not specifically confirmed the details. But we do hope this chain can be open to all developers and communities, so that anyone can build applications on it.