Vlad Tenev: Trillions Of Assets Are Coming On Robinhood Chain (Tokenize The World)

Andy (0:00)

Quick hit, why are you so bullish on tokenization? Why does it actually matter to you deep down?

Vlad Tenev (0:04)

I think it matters because it allows you to give exposure and ownership of high quality US assets to everyone around the world. So a lot of people ask about it in the US, but what gets me most excited is getting like the person that's in Ecuador or in Africa or somewhere in like...

Andy (0:26)

Eastern Europe.

Vlad Tenev (0:27)

Eastern Europe, yeah, making it super easy for them just with an internet connection and a smartphone to get access to equities and then later private markets and everything you can get on Robinhood in the US should be accessible.

Andy (0:41)

Anything for our audience on stock tokens, stock token lending, anything that you can share about your kind of broader view plans here?

Vlad Tenev (0:49)

I mean, I think the first thing is just expanding the selection. We have about 200 stock tokens now. We've got to get that up into the thousands.

I've been talking about private stock tokens for a while. So we figured out how to do that. You should expect that at large scale. And actually with our work in Robinhood Ventures, we're building great relationships with private companies here.

With our work as an underwriter, we're helping them as they think through retail strategy for going public. So now we have like unique access and opportunity. And a lot of them have reached out about how can they be a part of tokenization.

Andy (1:28)

Sure.

Vlad Tenev (1:28)

And then, yeah, we should just... There's a lot of things that we don't have, right? Yeah. Look at the Robinhood app in the US and imagine on-chain versions of all those products.

Andy (1:37)

That's what I wanted to talk about. You guys had this perps launch, right? Obviously, you went to high school with Vlad from the lighter team. You guys announced the perps on the Robinhood wallet, which I thought was great.

What's your thoughts on the strategy here? You start off-chain with perps, then you move on-chain. Is that the broader product strategy for perps, for tokenized assets? How do you think about that in relation to Robinhood Chain, lighter and other perps platforms like Hyperliquid, etc.?

Vlad Tenev (2:04)

Well, perps on Robinhood Chain have been having a moment. I think for the last couple of days, we've been doing over a billion in perps volume, in addition to a billion in DEX volume. We also have perps through Bitstamp, which is more C-Fi centralized. You acquired them? Yeah, we acquired them. We launched perps in Europe last year. Actually, with the perps offering in the US, we announced last night, we're tapping into Bitstamp. It's one shared global liquidity pool.

We're supportive of on-chain perps, off-chain perps. It's really what product we offer first depends on regulatory structure and what's permissible.

I think we're also open to offering multiple products. We don't necessarily want to have one way.

Andy (2:51)

Okay, so kind of open-minded. Sorry, open-minded on the strategy as far as what type of products, what type of protocols because there's so many of these Lindy protocols in DeFi now, right? The AVEs and the Uniswap is doing extremely well.

More foe, right? You've got these Lindy battle-tested protocols that have been yearning for you being the main character now, Vlad, whether you want that or not. And also for the front end of this industry, right? We've been looking for this front end. We've got all this technology. How do you think about Robinhood kind of coming in and being the user experience layer for all these Lindy battle-tested protocols on Chain?

Vlad Tenev (3:27)

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the reasons Robinhood Chain has been so successful is we haven't really been picking winners. I mean, we want to help developers out, but we really want to stay a neutral platform and lower the fees as much as possible, which we've done. The on-chain fees.

Andy (3:45)

Things got crazy there first session.

Vlad Tenev (3:46)

A lot of times people were like, oh, Robinhood Chain's revenue decrease, but volume has been really, really high. And that's just because the team has done.

Our main priority is can we make it so that everyone just comes on Robinhood Chain and makes it as great as possible. So, I think we're number one in developer activity too. So, we rapidly became the number one chain for developers. So, and it's only been two months.

Andy (4:15)

I know. It's crazy.

Vlad Tenev (4:16)

Yeah. I think the thing that's resonating the most is that we're giving people these new financial Legos with real world assets.