HONG KONG — Robinhood launched its public testnet for its personal Ethereum layer-2 blockchain on Wednesday with plans for broader launch later this 12 months because the brokerage app goals to maneuver extra buying and selling exercise onchain.
The brand new community, known as Robinhood Chain, is constructed on Arbitrum and is designed to assist tokenized real-world property, together with equities, exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and different property. Builders will be capable to publicly construct on the community for the primary time after six months of personal testing, forward of a future mainnet launch, the corporate introduced at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong convention.
With the chain, Robinhood goals to permit customers to commerce 24/7 and self-custody their property in Robinhood’s personal crypto pockets. Customers will even be capable to bridge throughout completely different chains and to decentralized finance (DeFi) purposes on Ethereum , the corporate stated in a press launch.
The timing comes as Ethereum’s core roadmap shifts extra consideration again to the bottom layer. Sure upgrades have already lowered transaction prices, and additional enhancements are anticipated to proceed easing congestion, a growth that weakens the case for layer-2s as a pure scaling necessity.
Robinhood’s method suggests it’s already working beneath that assumption.
“I feel Vitalik [Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum] was at all times fairly clear on this, that L2s weren’t simply right here to scale Ethereum,” stated Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vp and basic supervisor of crypto, in an interview with CoinDesk.
“For us, it was by no means actually about scaling Ethereum or doing sooner transactions,” Kerbrat added.
The transfer builds on Robinhood’s earlier steps into tokenization. Final 12 months, the corporate rolled out token variations of U.S. shares and ETFs for European customers with dividend funds and prolonged market hours.
These property — virtually 2,000 shares and ETFs, in line with information by Entropy Advisors on Dune Analytics — had been initially issued on Arbitrum. Nevertheless, the $15 million in complete worth of the fairness tokens Robinhood minted is lagging behind main issuers xStocks and Ondo International Markets.
When rollups — methods of processing transactions on layer-2 networks to ease congestion on the bottom community — first gained traction, they had been broadly framed as Ethereum’s reply to excessive charges and restricted throughput. As Ethereum’s layer-1 capability improves, that narrative is giving method to a distinct one: layer-2s as customizable, application-specific environments that may embed options tough to implement on Ethereum itself.
“What we wished was the safety of Ethereum, the liquidity that’s obtainable on EVM chains and the Ethereum ecosystem,” Kerbrat stated. “However we had been additionally eager to have a method to customise the chain and to make it actually optimized for conventional property being tokenized.”
Moderately than competing with different high-speed trading-focused rollups, Robinhood Chain is being designed round tokenized equities and different regulated monetary merchandise, the place compliance necessities differ by jurisdiction.
“The complexity to recreate your complete monetary system, and on prime of that to carry extra issues on it, makes it that I feel chains are going to specialize,” Kerbrat stated. “You’ll see chains which are extra specialised for funds, and also you’ll see chains like ours which are going to be extra specialised round tokenized fairness.”
Buterin has not too long ago argued that some rollups might have to just accept completely different decentralization trade-offs, notably when compliance or real-world property are concerned, a view that has stirred debate throughout the ecosystem.
For Robinhood, Kerbrat stated, that shift doesn’t materially change its technique.
“It doesn’t actually change something for us,” he stated. “We’ve at all times been constructing with the concept that there are completely different compliance necessities based mostly on the jurisdiction, and all this stuff may be embedded into the chain.”
Robinhood first introduced plans for its personal blockchain in June 2025, positioning the mission as a part of a broader push into tokenization and onchain finance. Since then, growth has largely taken place out of public view.
With the testnet now reside, builders can entry community entry factors, documentation, and normal Ethereum growth instruments. Forward of mainnet, Robinhood plans to develop testnet performance to incorporate test-only property, together with inventory tokens, together with deeper integrations with its pockets and different onchain monetary tooling.
Learn extra: Robinhood explains constructing an Ethereum layer-2: ‘We wished the safety from Ethereum’
