Robinhood & Lighter: Why Wall Street Is Moving Onchain

Felix (0:00)

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All right, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the first Digital Asset Summit Asia edition. We are excited to be here live in Singapore on the first day of here, and very excited to be talking about bringing on-chain markets into the mainstream, which I think is one of the most dominant trends of 2026 So it's really exciting, really excited to be joined today by both of you. We'd love to just have you both introduce yourselves and a bit of what you do and what your focus is on within the context of bringing on-chain markets into the mainstream. Johann, maybe we can start with you.

Johann Kerbrat (0:41)

Yeah, so I'm Johann. I lead the crypto business at Robinhood. I've been at the company for about six years and really trying to push the company to expand also on-chain. And that's why we launched the Robinhood Chain about three months ago.

Vlad Novakovski (0:54)

I'm Vlad, founder and CEO of LIDAR. I started my career in TradFi many years ago at Citadel. And I've been working on startups for the last little while. We've been building LIDAR for four years now.

And from the beginning, the mission was always that the future of finance is going to be on-chain and we want to build the infrastructure for that.

Felix (1:14)

Amazing.

I feel like right now, this idea of traditional assets coming on-chain is really just a moment of convergence in many ways. On one side of the equation, you have a lot of the traditional finance world that is starting to be more interested in what we've been developing within the digital asset space. And on the other side of things, you're seeing digital native products start to explore more RWAs and the traditional asset side of things. Vlad, we'd love to hear, you spent the early parts of your career. You worked at Citadel, you're in the traditional finance world. Now you're building this lighter product. We'd love to just hear your perspective on this idea of convergence and why do you think right now it's really that time where it's happening and what do you think is that key unlock that's making people so excited right now?

Vlad Novakovski (2:03)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a couple of things. One, the industry has really matured, I think like probably four or five years ago, a lot of the institutions and TradFi as well as policymakers would have thought that this technology was more like a toy or something they don't quite understand. I think it's very, very different now. I think when we're meeting with some of the biggest institutions in the world, whether it's trading firms or asset managers spending time with regulators and policymakers in DC, they really get it at a deep level. I think that that's a very important unlock. So the technology has really caught up where you can do, on chain finance can now happen at the low latency that traditional finance expects while still maintaining the security and verifiability.

And then I think the regulatory climate, especially in the US with CFTC and SEC and others has really adopted a lot. So I think those are the two big unlocks that I see.

Johann Kerbrat (3:03)

Awesome.

Felix (3:04)

Johann, how do you see that convergence?

Johann Kerbrat (3:06)

I absolutely agree with Vlad. I think people are starting to understand the value of blockchain technology. The 24-7 element, the instance elements are big reasons for institutions to start adopting this type of products.

We are seeing on our stock tokens, for example, that the trading activity is happening outside of the exchange open hours. So mostly on weekends and overnight, more than 70 percent of the volume is then. And that really shows to you that the world is global. The time zone will start to merge between each other, and it's important for us to have the technology to support this type of products.

Vlad Novakovski (3:45)

Yeah, you know, to the 24-7 point, I remember when I started my career at Citadel, like friends outside of finances used to tell me, oh, you know, like, thank God it's Friday. I was like, no, like, I hate the weekend. We can't trade. We can't make any money. Like, now we finally can.

Felix (4:00)

Yeah, Vladimir, I know you're a diehard financial lever. You'll always be excited about being able to trade at 24-7. But, you know, it's funny when I hear that same proposition from others, like, oh, man, you know, now suddenly we got to re-work in 24-7.

There's also the liquidity aspect.

Vlad Novakovski (4:15)