The Rise of Robinhood Chain: Tokenized Stocks, Perps, and 27M Users | Johann Kerbrat

**David** (0:03)
On Wednesday of last week, Robinhood held their The World is Flat event, where they launched the Robinhood chain, along with a huge collection of ecosystem partners and integrations. The World is Flat name is a tip of the hat to the fact that Robinhood wants to democratize access, flatten the world to have access to financial products using blockchain technology. And after watching that event, you don't really have to squint your eyes very hard to see the future of finance being rebuilt right before our very eyes. Tokenized stocks issued by Robinhood are freely and permissionlessly transferable around the Robinhood chain and on and off the Robinhood chain to the Ethereum layer one and the rest of its layer twos.
Morpho is integrated into the main Robinhood app offering Robinhood customers the 27 million Robinhood customers 7% yield on USDG stablecoin deposits in a non-custodial section of the main Robinhood app.
They've expanded perp offerings to EU and Canadian customers of Robinhood and they have a full feature complete integration of lighter, the ZKL2 perp decks on Ethereum inside the Robinhood wallet. So we now have one to one backed tokenized stocks with dividends and investor governance rights, if you want to do that, trading on Uniswap, creating a 24 7 365 marketplace for US equities. And you can see the perpification for these things just right around the corner. So today on the show, I talked to Johann Kerbrat. He is the general manager of crypto at Robinhood, who has been trying to build this ecosystem for the last five years to get more details of what's being released. And it's just nothing short of exactly what we imagined the future of finance looking like just a few short years ago. Johann, welcome back to Bankless. Bankless Station, I'm here with Johann Kerbrat. He is the VP of crypto at Robinhood. We just came out, pretty hot event out of the Robinhood ecosystem. The launch of Robinhood Chain with Johann. You have been working on this, as long as I've known you at Robinhood. It's gotta feel pretty good to get that out the door.

**Johann Kerbrat** (1:59)
Yeah, it was pretty exciting. And we did an event in London in a very, very cool place with like painting on the wall and on the ceiling. So that was really cool to be there and see all our customer and hearing the cheers when we finally announced the chain. So that was great.

**David** (2:13)
The name of the event was The World is Flat. Why was it called that?

**Johann Kerbrat** (2:17)
Well, Vlad is an amazing inventor and thinking about a lot of things constantly. And his vision was like, how do we show that using blockchain and using crypto, we can actually remove all the inequalities in the world and actually make person that are anywhere in the world able to access and get exposure to US stocks, to perps, to all these products. So that was kind of the idea behind it.

**David** (2:40)
One thing I noticed, the hood stock was up like 8, 9, 10% on the, on the, just all of the announcements, the Robinhood chain, tokenized stocks, the perp decks, the wallet, the yield. It feels, from the crypto side of things, it feels good that the market is responding positively to crypto news is not usually what is normal in the case in the last like 12 months or so. So it's just like you are the VP of crypto at Robinhood.
Thanks for doing all the right stuff that the market likes. I'm sure that must feel pretty well.

**Johann Kerbrat** (3:13)
Yeah, I think for us, what's been exciting with this event is really that we can show to our customer our product velocity.
Last year, we announced a lot of things and this year we actually deliver a lot of this thing that we had pre-announced. And on top of that, we added way more announcement that we were expecting. Just yesterday, we announced 15 products. So I think a lot of our customers are excited about that. They see our product manager on stage with us and presenting all these new tools and features that they can access on Robinhood. And on top of that, I think it shows that Robinhood has been one of these companies that has uniquely been able to ship so many features at once and always with the customer at the center, making sure that what we ship is what they actually care about and they like it, they know how to use it, they are interested by it. So yeah, overall, pretty excited about yesterday.

**David** (4:03)
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