Robinhood Is Building for a World Where Agents Trade Onchain
Crypto has spent much of the last decade trying to make financial assets programmable. I am increasingly coming to believe that the next phase may be about making them autonomous.
That was one of the more interesting takeaways from my conversation with Johann Kerbrat who leads Robinhood’s crypto efforts. His view of the current crypto landscape is less about whether the industry has finally “arrived” and more about what happens now that the underlying infrastructures are becoming mature enough to support entirely new ways of interacting with markets.
Ideas and Their Turnout
For Kerbrat, the frontier is increasingly agentic. The idea, is simple but potentially profound: instead of human having to constantly monitor markets, decide what to trade and execute every transaction themselves, software agents can increasingly act on their behalf. “Watching the markets even when you can’t.” Welcome to agentic trading. Crypto Is Moving Beyond Speculations. The crypto industry, has often been defined by its cycles new assets, new protocols new narratives, followed by periods of speculation and consolidation. But the more interesting development happening underneath all of that is the gradual construction of financial infrastructure that can operate natively onchain. That is where Robinhood Chain comes in, as, according to Robinhood, the chain is a permissionless, AI native Layer 2 built specifically for financial services and tokenized real world assets what are most . The idea is to give the developers infrastructures for building application around trading, lending, borrowing, yield and other financial services directly onchain and the list goes on. The significance isn’t simply that Robinhood has launched another blockchain. It is that the company, appears to be building around a particular thesis: the traditional financial system and the decentralized financial system don’t necessarily have to remain separate.
Instead, financial assets can increasingly become programmable, portable and available to software.
And once assets become available to software, agents become much
more interesting.
The Bridge Between Wall Street and Crypto
Robinhood has spent years sitting somewhere between traditional finance and crypto. Its appeal has always been largely about removing friction. Buy a stock. Buy crypto. Move money. Manage a portfolio. The interface makes financial products feel less like infrastructure and more like consumer software.Robinhood Chain takes that philosophy one layer deeper. The company’s stated thesis is that users want to bridge the gap between traditional finance and the decentralized future. That thesis is already showing up in the company’s push into tokenized stocks. Robinhood says it has launched more than 190 Stock Tokens, with billions of dollars in cumulative volume, allowing users to gain exposure to traditional equities through blockchain-based infrastructure. The numbers matter, but the larger idea is more interesting: What happens when assets that traditionally live inside closed financial systems start behaving more like software?They can potentially move between applications. They can interact with smart contracts. They can become components inside automated strategies. And, eventually, they can be acted upon by agents.
Why Agents Could Be the Next Frontier
This is where Kerbrat’s perspective gets particularly interesting. The promise of agentic finance isn’t simply that an AI can tell you what to buy. That’s already becoming commonplace. The more consequential possibility is that an agent can actually do something. It can monitor a portfolio. Look for an opportunity. Execute a trade. Swap assets. Lend capital. Rebalance positions. Respond to changing conditions. Robinhood says its Chain is being built with this possibility in mind, with AI agents able to trade, swap, lend and transact with tokenized real-world assets onchain. That distinction, between an AI that advises and an AI that acts, is enormous. The first is a smarter interface. The second is a new participant in the financial system. That is why the combination of AI and crypto infrastructure feels different from yet another crypto application. Blockchains provide programmable ownership and settlement; AI provides the ability to interpret information, make decisions and execute actions. Put the two together, and you get something closer to autonomous financial software.
Building the Infrastructure Before Everyone Knows What to Build
There is also something revealing about the way Robinhood is approaching this.
The company isn’t trying to predict every application that will emerge. Instead, Robinhood Chain is positioned as infrastructure that developers can build on.
According to Robinhood, the chain is permissionless and built using Arbitrum’s Layer 2 technology. The company highlights fast block times and Ethereum-level security as part of the infrastructure it is putting underneath this new financial ecosystem. That matters because the most interesting applications of agentic finance may not exist yet. We are still in the stage where people are figuring out what an autonomous financial agent should actually do. Maybe it is a portfolio manager. Maybe it is a treasury manager for a company. Maybe it watches dozens of markets simultaneously and executes strategies according to a user’s preferences.Maybe it negotiates liquidity across protocols. Or maybe, as is often the case in crypto, something completely unexpected emerges from a developer experimenting with infrastructure that wasn’t originally designed for it. The point is that the infrastructure has to exist first.
From Tokenized Stocks to Programmable Markets
Robinhood’s Stock Token push offers a useful glimpse of where this could go. The company says its Stock Tokens are designed to provide economic exposure to underlying securities through tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited. They are currently unavailable in the U.S. and subject to restrictions in other jurisdictions. The regulatory details are important, but so is the underlying experiment. A stock that exists in tokenized form can potentially participate in an entirely different set of financial applications than a stock sitting inside a traditional brokerage account. It can become part of an onchain ecosystem. Robinhood is effectively betting that this convergence, traditional assets meeting crypto infrastructure, will create a much larger design space for financial products. And agents could be the users of that design space.
The Strange Future of Finance
There is something almost funny about where this eventually leads. For years, crypto has been criticized for creating infrastructure before finding the applications that justify it.
Now the industry may be approaching the opposite problem: once the infrastructure exists, developers can build things that are difficult to imagine today. When I spoke with Kerbrat, he captured that emerging world in a way that was both serious and completely absurd.
“It’s incredibly interesting to experience what is happening on the Robinhood chain first hand, you’ll have someone developing the infrastructure for agents to act alongside humans on chain, and they’ll tokenize it and the token will be called ‘Stupid Agents Stimming or SAS’, ridiculous things like that, it’s amazing and we all laugh about it.”
It is an odd quote to end an article about financial infrastructure with. But perhaps that is precisely why it works. Crypto has always had an unusual relationship with seriousness and absurdity. The same ecosystem can produce sophisticated financial infrastructure and a token with a ridiculous name within the same afternoon.
Agentic finance could amplify that dynamic. Because once humans aren’t the only ones interacting with markets, the number of possible participants, and the number of things they can do, expands dramatically. Some of those agents will be useful. Some will be experimental. Some will be ridiculous. And some may become the foundations of entirely new financial businesses.
That is what makes the current moment in crypto interesting. The story is no longer just about putting assets onchain. It is about what happens when software can act onchain too. For Kerbrat, that is where the frontier is heading. And Robinhood is building the infrastructure for it now.
Sources
Robinhood, “Robinhood Chain”
Interview with Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood