Robinhood Chain Is Live: Tokenized Stocks and 28M Users Already on the App

The new core for the next era of finance.

Philip here. To you again. Fi. We Fi. We're not we don't even need to ask. We we got it now. We don't even need to ask. Settled. Overturned guest. Thanks for coming on the show today, Philip. It's fine having me as usual. Thanks. Good to see you again. So I'm sure it's been a busy time. I mean, launch of Robinhood chain, absolutely massive news, huge for the space right now. We're excited to see your you know, get a get a inquiry from your team that says, hey.

You wanna come out, talk about some some big product announcements today. So tell us what's going on with LeFi,

what's been going on with Robinhood chain, and your partnership with with Bangsa. Yeah. There is so much happening. We have a live in the lobby of Robinhood, also Bangsa, and Paribu, the Turkish exchange, and many other large ones out in the pipeline. So the team is drowning in work as usual since we have been for in five years. I think what makes Bangsa so exciting is that, you know, Bangsa is feared in, feared out, like the entry point and b to b with over 400 partners.

And we simply own anything that happens on chain. And on chain today means in in so many places, so many different types of assets of the RWAs especially, right, it's getting even more complex. But now thanks to the banks of partnership, we can simply tap into another 400 clients. LeFi itself is serving a 200 business partners. With BankZelle, we have another multiplicative partnership going on, and that's really exciting.

And then the two hardest steps, you know, going in and out of crypto combined with acting on crypto, acting on chain, this just collapses into one, and that's that's

what makes this partnership so exciting. Do you wanna talk about Robinhood right away? Or Yeah. Let's go. Do wanna talk about Robinhood, but I I was even thought thinking through, like, you know, what is the life cycle for apps that are going through? Like, what is the impact for okay. Banks has turned on. You can easily go from fiat to crypto, and how does that work going downstream to starting to trade on Robinhood chain and, you know, like I said, with the stocks.

So maybe help us even give us the TLDR of what's going on with Robinhood, but what does this look like for the life cycle of, you know, assets and how we are we're building these financial applications. I mean, what is happening is that crypto is really maturing. Right? Like, it's and it happens in so many visible ways. So we see, for example, that Bitcoin

has lots of inflows and outflows these days. But by now, it's just happening. We are regulated wrappers. We are the ETFs. We have, like, historic outflows in June, but then the past five, six days, we had over 700,000,000 of inflows again. But we are regulated wrappers, and bit Bitcoin itself is just, like, going away from being a speculative asset. It was much more like a portfolio thing, which reacts to macro and Iran and and so on.

And, for example, the beginning of this year, bitcoin was outperforming US tech stocks when The US Iran flare up happened. Right? And as aside from that, there is just blockchain as rails. And what we see on the rails happening is tokenization, and that essentially allows to react to the very same market events independently of any trading hours. We can settle twenty four seven. We can access RWAs globally. And sometimes we don't even need, like, all the all the privileges that are tied to owning a stock.

Sometimes all we want is the upside in trade. Right? So, so making all of this more permissionless and on at a global, scale, that's just very exciting. And, obviously, banks are who has been providing in and outflows now makes this available, and you can on ramp and get directly stock access. Let's say you are outside trading hours. You wanna have access to something right away that is not possible for all their b two b clients. And they have b two b clients of all kinds and of all sizes. So, that's exciting here.

When it comes to Robinhood, we are we are on the other side. So for BENSA, we are essentially we we serve the buy side. We allow them to access any RWA across 60 chains, 70 chains almost. So so here, we we we we help out the buy side and make the go to market for anything much easier. On the other side, with Robinhood, we are serving the supply side because Robinhood has been tokenizing stocks, and what they need day one is figuring out the buy side, like how do they get distribution.

And LeFi has a 200 applications as clients, arguably with banks I know way more. But here we essentially come in as a distribution partner, and we are one of two distributors for Robinhood assets.

Well, only one of two. That's a huge deal. Who who's the other one in that position? Can't name them. I can't remember. Tell us a little bit about the dynamic of like, you guys sit in the middle of buy and sell or demand and supply. Break that down a little bit, like, simply put. Like, might be a helpful way for people to wrap their heads around LiFi,

especially for those who are still getting to know it, like the business in terms of what you power and the perspective you have sitting on both? So Leafa used to be a meta level aggregator. By meta level, I mean, it's been an aggregator across everything. We have been aggregating trend trading venues manually, DEXDES, DEXD aggregators, cross chain bridges, and all of that, and down the line also perps and yield opportunities.

And that's that's typically what you do when you execute a marketplace, which is what NIFA is today. Marketplace execution always means you have a two sided market, and getting both sides of the market at the same time is difficult, so you have to proxy the supply side. You have to pretend it's already there. And, typically, you do that by manually doing things. So Airbnb was using their fence apartments. Uber was using their own employees to drive. We have been aggregating trading menus mainly ourselves.

That's how people know us. However, in May, we opened up that supply side as an open intent and solver marketplace. So here, market makers and solvers can plug themselves in and simply provide the assets and take part in all these auctions we are driving. So each each order that comes in, each intent that comes in is auctionized within that marketplace, and market makers and solving systems can simply come in and say, hey. I have these assets in my inventory. I can I can provide them and thereby charge a fee?

And that's essentially the marketplace side of it. And that's why we are talking from demand and supply side. Banks are arguably has been on the demand side of things, while Robinhood is on the supply side of things with their tokenized stocks. And that's how you can think of it. Like, a simplified way would be to think of Amazon. So there's the supply side, all these merchants with their products, and then there is the demand side, which is you ordering something because you need something for your household.

Right? And so now you can order the stock. You go to LeFi as a marketplace, and then there is that supply side available, which is all these companies that tokenize stocks. And here, we're we're working with everyone you can think of from from Krakenstocks to to Ondo to Robinhood and many, many other companies that have been tokenizing stocks, equities, commodities. So there's a lot coming for us. The pipeline is filled. And this marketplace execution

for five years now, and we are super excited to keep on keep on growing this. So how how should we've we've talked about this on the show a bit. How should people think about Robinhood chain? You mentioned, you know, thinking about them on the supply side. You wanna I think we have this tendency to say, okay. They have distribution. They're just bringing users onto their chain to capture the unit economics. But we see this other side playing out where Robinhood's positioned themselves around developers community.

Come build on top of Robinhood chain. Come access the supply side, you know, liquidity that we have for tokenized stock. So what what what's your your viewpoint, obviously, as building LeFi, but how would you also talk to other developers and say, hey. Come build, you know, with us, and what should we build on top of Robinhood? Yes. I believe that all these very big corporations

that have a huge user base, they are strongly incentivized to have their own blockchain as they are incentivized to have their own stablecoin. However, at the same time, it's not only about accruing as much value as possible themselves. It's also really about being able to have control of and about everything. Control controlled and permissioned environment because they are, at the end of the day, still regulated, and we don't know how Clarity Act will shape out. So you wanna be in control.

You don't wanna miss the market momentum when the market is is shaping. And it's not about it's not only about missing market momentum. You also have to build up internal knowledge. Right? You have to build up you have to build up company knowledge in terms of the technology, the opportunity, the market, which is so different and so much more global than it used before. And we will end up with a with an equally fragmented market, but what will be gone is the isolation.

So while all these banks on broker and gas apps might have their own apps, they might have their own blockchains. The isolation is gone because suddenly, these chains are programmable, and we have to have standards. And that is so exciting. So now there's a Robinhood with how much? 28,000,000 26 to 28,000,000 users on their app.

So much buying power that is right there, and that's a great opportunity for builders to come and build on Robinhood chain and really tap into that as Robinhood is slowly onboarding these these customers. So great opportunity, unique opportunity compared to so many other l ones, l twos that had had to build that that ecosystem from scratch. If you think about it, any marketplace kind of any blockchain kind of is a marketplace itself. Right? You have builders. Yeah. Builders want users.

But if there are no users, there are no builders. So it's it's tricky. Robinhood has has the demand set already installed here, and now it provides that platform to build on. I think that's crazy opportunity. So and also because it's a slightly different user group than we are used to in crypto.

I think there's room for creativity, and I'm very excited to see what's coming. I did have to laugh a little bit where you look at, you know, few days post launch, and it's like, community couldn't help but several meme coins start popping up on Robinhood chain, and and you see a few come and go. It's like, okay.

Even though this feels like something new in a, you know, a a large large organization like Robinhoods, like, still can't get away from some of those those those root, you know, trading activities with with DeFi.

It's cool to see them position themselves so strongly with stock tokens. Like, this seems to be really the the hero of the story of, like, what they're trying to push. Obviously, that that makes a lot of sense. Like, Robinhood, you've been able to trade digital assets for many years on the on that platform, but the emphasis not for this chain on just digital assets or crypto trading, but, like, really pushing the entire business into this new frontier of bringing Yeah. Bringing stocks on chain.

It's really interesting. And like you said, the idea of they already have distribution. They already have users. It's so it's, in some ways, so refreshing. What what has that been like from your perspective to actually have a partnership like this that's not like you know, we're kinda like starting this from zero. We're both kind of young and growing together, but, like, here's an established player. There's already a 100% to Yeah. It's like zero to one. Yeah.

It's kinda what's the acceleration like kind of on day one with the partnership like that? It is so for Backbone, we have been working with Robin Hood for years. Robinhood has been sitting on the buy side of DeFi. So Robinhood has been using us for bridging assets across chains in the past.

That obviously was very exciting back then when we started. It took a very long time for them to be able to actually cross promote things and onboard the existing user base. So I don't know if you know, but they had two apps in the App Store or still have it's like the normal Robinhood app, and then there is the non custodial wallet, the Robinhood wallet. And those are two separate things.

So they have been on the buy side, I think, on the demand side we have been serving, and now they are also on the they are also on the supply side. So it is a deep partnership we have with them and very proud to have that. And, yeah, they are obviously one of our biggest clients, and we are very busy keeping them happy because they have quite high standards. So it has been shaping for our organization, for our tech team as well, and that's very good. That's very healthy. Anything you wanna call out here

on these three air or these, it looks like, four areas on the support side that we've missed before we move on? Like flopping, being intense.

Yeah. We we we are able so we are we are powering something and bridging on Robinhood chains. So if you're implementing LiFi as a b to b solution here, we give you access to everything, bridge in, swap into anything, and get out of this again if you want to. So this is like the full circle provided b to b to end consumers. And then with LeFi Intense, we are able to support other market makers that get access to these assets or wanna wanna engage on that chain in any capacity just like as.

With DeFi Composer, we are even able to to to build onboarding experiences that are pretty seamless. So Composer allows you to collapse complex DeFi workflows into one transaction. So you might come from Solana, you want to swap break swap into assets on Robinhood, where you think of Robinhood chain as your second chain to support or whatever. Here, we can really, like, make sure this whole user experience feels like one and feels like totally chain abstracted.

And if you're just a retail user and you want to play around on Robinhood chain and with their assets, their meme coins, their stocks, simply go on jumper.xyz, and you can buy into it from there no matter where your assets are at. And what is Jumper for a solution? I don't I jumper.xyz is our b two c interface. So essentially, an inter front end for our API, for LiFi's API, and it allows you to really navigate this very complex multi chain environment. It's nothing new. It's very established.

It's actually the most used bridging interface in the industry. We've been around for almost four years. And, yes, we also have missions. We have huge opportunities, and there's so much more to come in the next two weeks. So it's exciting times. I will recommend to check-in every day now. So there's a lot more coming in terms of the trading experience side of things. So very excited to see this going live. It's been a lot of work over the past year. It's awesome, man.

You've been you've definitely been putting in the work, and it it's showing with all of this.

Zach, just my last question on this is I'll take it. Yeah. We tokenized stocks, so just the the broader opportunity around markets and trading seems to me to be such an interesting there's such an interesting moment and feeling of momentum around this. I'm sure you're feeling this too. Kind of two part question. Like, why are we starting to feel this momentum right now? Like, what's happening to allow companies like Robinhood to be doing this? And why is this superior in your mind

to to what was possible before these things were just off chain? Like, why is bringing stocks on chain so powerful? So why so first of all, what changed is probably the sentiment around The US where the largest financial institutions we are aware of are based. And from here on, like, the Genius Act was the first, like, the Sabre coin enabler.

And now with the Clarity Act having been, you know, and and lots of SEC rulings in between, you know, there were, like, little baby steps be before Clarity Act became a thing that have made things more possible and have opened up The US to making all these moves. And then, of course, it is exciting because having the ability to trade stocks twenty four seven allows you to react to macro events at any time.

And then, again, on a global scale, you can simply engage with with stocks you haven't had access to before because maybe you couldn't KYC for it. It's still the Wild West, to be to be honest. Right? It's still it's a very open how how things are being shaped out, and the Clarity Act has yet to come. But, yeah, it's just the regulatory environment has changed, and the excitement is simply because we are creating much more efficient systems.

And, obviously, again, programmable systems, having a programmable foundation that you can simply be creative, build money markets of any kind, this is this is very exciting. And that allows us to play around and figure things out what what this on a global scale even means. And I think there's an exploration phase not only for TradFi, also for DeFi again. You know?

It'll be interesting to see you you mentioned, like, trading, like, live events. My my my mind immediately goes to prediction markets. But how do prediction markets evolve to also in a programmable fashion working, you know, with trading stock tokens with Drew, what was the other one we were talking about with trading the American economy? American spend. I I don't know if you dug into that at all, Philip, but I think it does really beg the question of, like, what what does the future look of trading look like?

You know, what does it look like to actually, like, react to news, react to this economic data? Is it just stock tokens? Now it's we're adding on the prediction markets. Now we're adding on, you know, more newer newer markets. And how do they all work together?

Man, I am so excited about this. This is So listen. Like, I started programming, like, around 2002, 2003. You know? You know? And digitization was, like, the big term. And when we digitize things, we take analog information, and then we store that information in flat data items and isolated databases closed away. That had that has been digitization. Tokenization is the natural successor. Now we have that information, but we are adding state to it. What I mean by that is it can have it can have properties.

It can have a status. It can you know, it's it becomes an object. And it's essentially similar to what we do with this digital information. So what we do in programming. Right? We have digitized information, and we take this, and we put it into objects. It's called object oriented programming after all. Right? And this is where it's coming from because suddenly, we're adding state through that information we have.

And now tokenization does that in a public fashion and in in a in a fashion that we can essentially trust trust whatever we see and on a shared ledger at global scale. So so the future is literally limitless. I think that we're looking at decades of moving things on chain. And I give you an an example of what we will see over time. Over time, we will see a T shirt manufacturer tokenizing its T shirts production. So you see the T shirts. You see how many of them have been produced.

You also see that they have been sold because the payments went on chain. So you see the past twenty four months of revenues. And that might be hidden in a private corridor, but it could be opened up a money market. And then that T shirt manufacturer who needs a loan to build this next facility could borrow against that provable revenue from the past. So so now that traditional finance is coming on chain, we now can add.

Now we have solved the chicken egg problem for any other industry and value creation chain or supply chain, essentially. So it's it's it's crazy to me. Like, this whole industry has been a multilevel chicken and egg problem. And with Tratify, with the financial market coming on chain, we are unlocking so much more. And we saw all these industries coming already. We saw the supply chain narrative. We saw the gaming narrative.

But none of that works if there's a financial market to to to to trade against, to exchange value, actually. But now

we are we are unlocking so much. So, like, my excitement is through the roof, but it's gonna be So fully decked out of let's keep on talking about that over the next month. Let's go. Say, Drew Drew had a little teaser tweet of, like, our next segment around modern markets, and I already can tell his smile on his face that he's like, yes. This is validating this. Yeah. There's something really powerful that I should know. Should've Something really powerful.

Yeah, man. Bill, thanks to the energy, man. It's great to be around it and to watch what you're doing. Let's stay in touch with all the new stuff that you're continuing to come out there just come out with. So lots to learn from you. It's always a gift to have you on the show. We'll we'll see you soon. Thank you, Scott. Good to see you. Congrats on all the progress. See you. Bye bye.