Robinhood is officially anchoring its blockchain future to Ethereum. In a statement Saturday, Johann Kerbrat, General Manager of Robinhood Crypto, clarified the brokerage’s decision to build its proprietary network as a Layer-2 (L2) rather than a standalone blockchain, citing the need to inherit Ethereum’s battle-tested validator set.
The announcement cements a growing trend of fintech giants opting for settlement guarantees over sovereign control. Ethereum (ETH) held steady at $3,090 (-0.4%) following the news, while Arbitrum (ARB), the tech stack powering the new chain, traded at $0.21 (+2.8%).
Buying Security, Not Building It
Kerbrat explicitly rejected the “app-chain” thesis that drives many protocols to launch independent Layer-1s. Instead of bootstrapping a new consensus mechanism, a costly and risky endeavor requiring thousands of independent validators, Robinhood will pay gas fees to Ethereum for finality.
“We wanted the security from Ethereum. We didn’t want to rebuild the security part,” Kerbrat noted, emphasizing the operational risk of managing a novel validator set.
The new chain utilizes the Arbitrum Orbit stack, a customizable framework that allows entities to launch dedicated chains that settle to Arbitrum One or Ethereum directly. This architecture allows Robinhood to subsidize gas fees for users (account abstraction) while relying on Ethereum’s $370 billion economic shield against reorgs or attacks.
The Target: Real-World Assets (RWAs)
The infrastructure play is designed to support Robinhood’s aggressive expansion into tokenized assets. The firm has already quietly launched tokenized versions of U.S. stocks (like NVDA and SPY) for European Union customers.
These assets currently live on the public Arbitrum One mainnet. However, the roadmap signals a migration to the proprietary Robinhood L2, likely to enforce stricter KYC compliance and allow for 24/7 trading cycles that bypass traditional market hours. By controlling the sequencer (the mechanism that orders transactions), Robinhood can offer a “gasless” experience familiar to its Web2 user base, masking the blockchain complexity entirely.
Institutional Validation
For the broader market, this is a signal that Ethereum remains the premier settlement layer for institutional finance, despite scalability pressure from Solana and other high-throughput chains. Robinhood’s choice suggests that for regulated entities handling billions in user assets, validator decentralization and liveness guarantees outweigh raw transaction speed.
