Robinhood just launched a test version of "Robinhood Chain" on Feb 10, 2026.
What is it, simply?
Imagine Robinhood built its own private highway for moving money and financial products around. Instead of using someone else's road (like Ethereum directly), they built a faster lane on top of it. That's what a "Layer 2" is. Their highway uses Arbitrum's technology, which sits on top of Ethereum.
Why build their own chain?
Same reason a restaurant might build its own kitchen instead of sharing one. They want to control the rules. Robinhood deals with regulated financial products like stocks. They need a chain where they set the compliance rules, the speed, and the security standards. You can't do that as easily on someone else's chain.
What can people build on it?
Tokenized stocks (digital versions of real stocks that live on a blockchain), lending apps, and trading platforms. Developers can start testing now. Big crypto infrastructure companies like Chainlink and Alchemy are already plugging in.
What does this mean for traditional finance?
Robinhood has tens of millions of users who buy stocks through a normal brokerage app. If those same users can eventually access tokenized versions of financial products onchain, it creates a direct on-ramp from traditional investing into DeFi. A regulated US broker doing this is a big deal.
The competitive angle
Robinhood isn't the first to do this. Coinbase launched Base (its own L2) back in 2023. Now Robinhood is following the same playbook. Large brokerages are no longer content to just list crypto — they want to own the infrastructure. Expect more companies to do the same.
Robinhood already tokenized ~2,000 US stocks and ETFs for European users. The chain isn't a concept. They've been doing this. This is a testnet — a practice environment for developers. Mainnet (the real launch) is planned for later in 2026.