Robinhood is building its own blockchain!

Written By Sushen

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. The race is on for who becomes the default financial chain.

Robinhood already tokenized ~2,000 US stocks and ETFs for European users last year. These are live on Arbitrum already, with dividend payments and extended market hours. The chain isn't a concept. They've been doing this.

Where things stand

This is a testnet, meaning it's a practice environment for developers. No real money yet. Robinhood is putting $1M toward developer programs to attract builders. Mainnet (the real launch) is planned for later in 2026.

  • A testnet is a practice version of a blockchain. It works exactly like the real thing, but none of the money or transactions are real. Developers use it to build and break things without consequences. Once everything works properly, the project moves to "mainnet," which is the live version where real money flows. Think of it like a flight simulator. Pilots train there before flying a real plane. A testnet is the same idea for a blockchain.

The future?

24/7 trading is an explicit goal. Robinhood wants users to trade tokenized assets around the clock. The press release didn't state this directly but that is the direction for tokenization!

Read more here:

What is Scratching the Surface with Soosh? Its a new mini project of mine to provide some context to the world of crypto, finance etc in bite sized written format. As the name suggests, everything here is at surface level (i.e. no deep dives or extremely details/heavy datasets), just enough to get your curiosity to tingle~ so you can learn!

Until next time on the next scratching the surface with soosh!

*this article is for curiosity only and nothing stated within should be taken as tax and financial advice. DYOR!

Sushen
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