Johann Kerbrat: Inside Robinhood's Crypto Strategy (Full Explanation)

**Robbie** (0:00)
Alrighty, guys, welcome back to Tokenization Tower. We've got Johann Kerbrat, the head of crypto at Robinhood, following their wildly successful Robinhood Chain mainnet launch and the World is Flat event.
Johann, great to have you here. Nice day in the city. Beautiful weather, beautiful view. Good to have you here. I'm sure you're busy in the city after the launch and all of the crypto happenings at Robinhood. Early momentum, $3 billion in weekly DEX volume. That stack came in this morning, over 50 million transactions, over a million addresses, over $300 million in TVL. Ton of new developers coming over as well.
What a launch. Congrats. Give us a kind of lay of the land internally. How you feel about it? What your kind of reflections are? Did it surpass what you thought? Was it less than what you thought? How do you feel?

**Johann Kerbrat** (0:48)
Yeah, we feel really good. Super excited. I think, you know, for us, the idea was really to have an ecosystem that was ready to build for all the developers that want to bring things on chain.
And actually, like a lot of the stats that you just said are already outpaced. And so we passed 105 million transactions this morning. And I think you just showed like how many excitement there is on the space right now.

**Robbie** (1:10)
Yeah, yeah, there is. And you know, I think notably what people find to be quite interesting is this kind of barbell of memes and RWAs as your CEO, Vlad, kind of tweets, there's two wolves inside of you.
From the bootstrapping strategy perspective, how was it thought about internally to differentiate this from other blockchains? Obviously, Robinhood's got quite the distribution on the front end side from the consumer perspective. But thinking about specifically the strategy for on chain, how did you guys think about this kind of dual wielded strategy and your edge and kind of being able to really bring a lot of the tokenized equities and products that you guys have, these relationships, these licenses on chain, kind of talk to us about how you thought about the strategy going into it.

**Johann Kerbrat** (1:54)
For us, it's pretty important that we make that chain permissionless and available for everything. So that includes memes, that includes RWAs, that includes so many more products. We are integrating deeply with the chain. So we launched a product called Robinhood Earn, where you can get yield on your stable coin. That is on the main app, but it's using the chain at the same time. So that's bringing a lot of liquidity.
The memes also bring market makers, that bring DeFi customers, and then the RWAs are more for customer across the world that can't access easily US stocks and ETF. And so everything is going to co-exist, and the fact that we had partnership from the get-go with multiple DEXs, Uniswap, Arcus, Leiter, really helped make sure that we had the infrastructure to support this trading activity on day one.

**Robbie** (2:44)
Yeah, and we keep saying that these three large trends have emerged as exports of this industry. Perps, tokenization and stable coins. Really, these three exports of the industry have become not only superior products to the alternative in the traditional space, whether it be ACH wire transfer, commission fee brokerages that only operate, you know, 930 to 4, or options or futures contracts that expire. There's kind of alternatives that are, just from a pure product perspective, we feel are inferior to the kind of blockchain version. When you're thinking about Robinhood Chain and the strategy from this perspective of these three megatrends, you're just trying to get behind them and kind of floor it. How do you think about capturing that market share kind of broadly, like these three are going to continue to grow.
What makes Robinhood especially positioned or wanting to really get involved in this more than kind of other endeavors or just kind of how you guys see this playing out?

**Johann Kerbrat** (3:43)
Yeah, so Robinhood has 27 million funded accounts. That means that for a lot of these customers, right now they don't necessarily have the access to some of these DeFi products because DeFi is still complicated. DeFi is still something that requires a lot of technical understanding. And so for us, the idea was, how do we bring these better products that you mentioned through DeFi, but also make it easy to use, easy to access, not having to create a wallet, private key and all these things. And so that's what we've done, for example, with Robinhood Earn. It's, we think, the best of the two worlds. You get the high yield from the DeFi space, but you also get the simple UX and UI and the kind of security that you're getting with a Robinhood platform. And I think that's where we see the world moving. Convergence between TradFi and DeFi, and basically you get the good of the technology, of the blockchain technology, of the global accessibility from crypto. To help make better product for the centralized platform like Ours.