HONG KONG — Robinhood launched its public testnet for its own Ethereum layer-2 blockchain on Wednesday, with plans for a wider launch later this year as the brokerage app aims to move more trading activity onto the chain.
The new network, called Robinhood Chain, is built on Arbitrum and is designed to support real-world tokenized assets, including stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and other assets. Developers will be able to publicly build on the network for the first time after six months of private testing ahead of a future mainnet launch, the company announced at CoinDesk’s Consensus Hong Kong conference.
With the chain, Robinhood aims to allow users to trade 24/7 and manage their assets themselves in Robinhood’s own crypto wallet. Users will also be able to bridge across different chains and to decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on Ethereum informs the company in a press release.
The timing comes as Ethereum’s core plan shifts more attention back to the base layer. Certain upgrades have already lowered transaction costs, and further improvements are expected to continue to ease congestion, a development that weakens the case for layer-2 as a pure scaling necessity.
Robinhood’s approach suggests it is already operating under this assumption.
“I think, Vitalik [Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum] was always pretty clear on this, that L2s weren’t just here to scale Ethereum,” Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, said in an interview with CoinDesk.
“For us, it was never really about scaling Ethereum or doing faster transactions,” added Kerbrat.
The move builds on Robinhood’s earlier steps into tokenization. Last year, the company rolled out tokenized versions of US stocks and ETFs to European users with dividend payments and extended market hours.
Those assets — nearly 2,000 stocks and ETFs, according to data from Entropy Advisors at Dune Analytics — were originally issued on Arbitrum. However, the combined $15 million value of the equity tokens minted by Robinhood lags behind leading issuers xStocks and Ondo Global Markets.
When rollups—ways to process transactions on layer-2 networks to ease congestion on the base network—first caught on, they were widely framed as Ethereum’s answer to high fees and limited throughput. As Ethereum’s layer-1 capabilities improve, this narrative is giving way to another: layer-2 as customizable, application-specific environments that can integrate features that are difficult to implement on Ethereum itself.
“What we wanted was the security of Ethereum, the liquidity available on EVM chains and the Ethereum ecosystem,” Kerbrat said. “But we also wanted to have a way to adapt the chain and make it really optimized for traditional assets that were being tokenized.”
Rather than competing with other high-speed trading-focused rollups, Robinhood Chain is designed around tokenized stocks and other regulated financial products, where compliance requirements vary by jurisdiction.
“The complexity of recreating the entire financial system, and on top of that bringing more things onto it, makes me think that chains will specialize,” Kerbrat said. “You’re going to see chains that are more specialized in payments, and you’re going to see chains like ours that are going to be more specialized around tokenized equity.”
Buterin has recently argued that some rollups may have to accept different decentralization tradeoffs, especially when compliance or real assets are involved, a view that has sparked debate across the ecosystem.
For Robinhood, Kerbrat said, that shift doesn’t significantly change its strategy.
“It doesn’t really change anything for us,” he said. “We’ve always built with the idea that there are different compliance requirements based on the jurisdiction, and all of those things can be integrated into the chain.”
Robinhood first announced plans for its own blockchain in June 2025, positioning the project as part of a broader push into tokenization and onchain funding. Since then, developments have largely taken place outside the public eye.
With the testnet now live, developers can access network access points, documentation, and standard Ethereum development tools. Ahead of the mainnet, Robinhood plans to expand testnet functionality to include test-only assets, including equity tokens, along with deeper integrations with its wallet and other onchain financial tools.
Read more: Robinhood explains the construction of an Ethereum layer-2: ‘We wanted the security of Ethereum’
