Why Robinhood Chain Saw Memecoins Take Off Before Real World Assets

**Johann Kerbrat** (0:00)
And I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years, everything is tokenized and you can access any exchange 24-7 because the benefits kind of outgrew the old regulations that are in place.

**Laura Shin** (0:11)
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Today's guest is Johann Kerbrat, SVP and GM of Crypto and International at Robinhood. Welcome, Johann.

**Johann Kerbrat** (0:52)
Hey, how are you doing?

**Laura Shin** (0:54)
Good. You must be doing good. Congratulations.
Thank you.

**Johann Kerbrat** (0:59)
We are excited.

**Laura Shin** (1:01)
Yeah. I mean, the last couple of weeks just must have been pretty wild for you guys.
You launched Robinhood Chain. It's already got about $200 million in TBL and DeFi.
But what was interesting is on July 2nd on CNBC, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said that he felt that RWAs were the future of crypto and meme coins were not very beneficial. But then, of course, we've seen trading of meme coins just really take off on Robinhood Chain. CashCat, which is affiliated with Robinhood's early days, has been taking up a lot of the air in the room. Of course, after that happened, he tweeted that Robinhood Chain also works great for meme coins. But looking at the numbers I saw, RWAs are still just about $17 million of the market cap of Robinhood Chain, and these numbers are changing a lot. But according to some rough calculations I did a few hours ago, it looks like maybe about 85% or more of the daily DEX trading activity on Robinhood Chain is actually meme coins and only about 1% RWAs. So why do you think the numbers have ended up in this way?

**Johann Kerbrat** (2:14)
Well, I think for us, what's exciting to begin with is the traction and the early activities of browsing on the chain.
I think it's great to see developer building that you see user engaging and you see the chain performing very well, like what we were designing. So not only it's super fast, but also the gas are also pretty low. And so so far we are seeing a ton of excitement from the customer about just that and the fact that the chain is really working like we attended. We just launched Super recently, so it's only two weeks ago that we announced some of these changes. And we're seeing the TVL actually increasing quite a bit. It's past 370 million. A lot of that is stable coin because we are connecting directly the Robinhood app to the chain for earned product where you can get approximately 7% on your stable coin.
And I think that was kind of the main euro moment that we are trying to push on when we announce all these new products in London.
That being said, I think we build this chain in a permissionless way. And the reason for that is that we wanted to create an open and accessible infrastructure so that anyone can build on top of it. And obviously, mincoin is a bit easier to build in some of the larger product like RWA and everything. But I still see benefit from other chain. It's going to bring user to the chain. It's going to bring liquidity. You have market maker engaging more and more with the chain because they're trying to make market on some of these coins. And at some point, we will be able to cross this customer and these market makers and everyone building on it, to also start using more and more of our RWA asset products. So I think there is an ecosystem basically that we are building. And we are just at the beginning, just a couple of weeks in the launch. And so far, we're pretty excited to see where things went.

**Laura Shin** (4:13)
Yeah, I mean, it makes a lot of sense because obviously for the RWAs, there's just so many more hurdles. But out of curiosity, was it a surprise to you how things played out the first couple of weeks?

**Johann Kerbrat** (4:29)
I wouldn't say it was a surprise. I will say that we launched probably at one of the lowest moment in terms of crypto market in the past couple of years or so. And so far, it was a bit hard to predict exactly how people will react to the launch.