Robinhood announced a major expansion in London, moving well beyond its traditional retail brokerage roots. At the launch, the company unveiled Robinhood Chain, a new permissionless Layer-Two blockchain built for financial services and tokenized real-world assets. That’s a direct move into infrastructure, rather than just relying on existing blockchains.
At the same time, Robinhood widened access for eligible European customers to tokenized US stocks, meaning customers outside the US can get on-chain exposure to American equities. It’s also rolling out perpetual futures trading in Europe: customers can trade contracts tied to commodities, ETFs, and forex pairs like gold, silver, and the euro-dollar, with up to 10 times leverage. Finally, Robinhood is adding AI-assisted trading tools to give customers a new interface layer on top of execution.
The story here is not any one feature, but the bundle. Robinhood is trying to own more of the crypto stack, building blockchain infrastructure for tokenized assets, expanding the trading products customers use, and adding new decision-support tools. Europe is acting as the launch pad, since these offerings face more hurdles in the US. Taken together, this marks a strategy shift: Robinhood is no longer presenting itself only as a retail brokerage that routes orders through an app. It is trying to own more of the underlying rails across the retail trading experience.