Robinhood (HOOD) starts testing its own blockchain as crypto push deepens

HONG KONG — Robinhood launched its public testnet for its own Ethereum layer-2 blockchain on Wednesday with plans for broader launch later this year as the brokerage app aims to move more trading activity onchain.

The new network, called Robinhood Chain, is built on Arbitrum and is designed to support tokenized real-world assets, including equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and other assets. Developers will be able to publicly build on the network for the first time after six months of private testing, ahead of a future mainnet launch, the company announced at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference.

With the chain, Robinhood aims to allow users to trade 24/7 and self-custody their assets in Robinhood’s own crypto wallet. Users will also be able to bridge across different chains and to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on Ethereum ETH$2,016.66, the company said in a press release.

The timing comes as Ethereum’s core roadmap shifts more attention back to the base layer. Certain upgrades have already lowered transaction costs, and further improvements are expected to continue easing congestion, a development that weakens the case for layer-2s as a pure scaling necessity.

Robinhood’s approach suggests it is already operating under that assumption.

“I think Vitalik [Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum] was always pretty clear on this, that L2s were not just here to scale Ethereum,” said Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, in an interview with CoinDesk.

“For us, it was never really about scaling Ethereum or doing faster transactions,” Kerbrat added.

The move builds on Robinhood’s earlier steps into tokenization. Last year, the company rolled out token versions of U.S. stocks and ETFs for European users with dividend payments and extended market hours.

Those assets — almost 2,000 stocks and ETFs, according to data by Entropy Advisors on Dune Analytics — were initially issued on Arbitrum. However, the $15 million in total value of the equity tokens Robinhood minted is lagging behind leading issuers xStocks and Ondo Global Markets.

When rollups — ways of processing transactions on layer-2 networks to ease congestion on the base network — first gained traction, they were widely framed as Ethereum’s answer to high fees and limited throughput. As Ethereum’s layer-1 capacity improves, that narrative is giving way to a different one: layer-2s as customizable, application-specific environments that can embed features difficult to implement on Ethereum itself.

“What we wanted was the security of Ethereum, the liquidity that is available on EVM chains and the Ethereum ecosystem,” Kerbrat said. “But we were also wanting to have a way to customize the chain and to make it really optimized for traditional assets being tokenized.”

Rather than competing with other high-speed trading-focused rollups, Robinhood Chain is being designed around tokenized equities and other regulated financial products, where compliance requirements vary by jurisdiction.

“The complexity to recreate the entire financial system, and on top of that to bring more things on it, makes it that I think chains are going to specialize,” Kerbrat said. “You’ll see chains that are more specialized for payments, and you’ll see chains like ours that are going to be more specialized around tokenized equity.”

Buterin has recently argued that some rollups may need to accept different decentralization trade-offs, particularly when compliance or real-world assets are involved, a view that has stirred debate across the ecosystem.

For Robinhood, Kerbrat said, that shift does not materially change its strategy.

“It doesn’t really change anything for us,” he said. “We’ve always been building with the idea that there are different compliance requirements based on the jurisdiction, and all these things can be embedded into the chain.”

Robinhood first announced plans for its own blockchain in June 2025, positioning the project as part of a broader push into tokenization and onchain finance. Since then, development has largely taken place out of public view.

With the testnet now live, developers can access network entry points, documentation, and standard Ethereum development tools. Ahead of mainnet, Robinhood plans to expand testnet functionality to include test-only assets, including stock tokens, along with deeper integrations with its wallet and other onchain financial tooling.

Read more: Robinhood explains building an Ethereum layer-2: ‘We wanted the security from Ethereum’