Buenos Aires — Fintech giant Robinhood ( HOOD ) is laying the groundwork to push the traditional financial system into a permissionless ecosystem, according to the head of strategy at blockchain development company Offchain Labs.
The brokerage app’s recently launched tokenized equity offering in Europe, which already includes nearly 800 listed securities and is set to add private equity, is the first step in a longer, three-phase roadmap to create a permissionless financial ecosystem, AJ Warner, Chief Strategy Officer at Offchain Labs, said in an interview with CoinDesk from De Airconnect in BuenDesk.
Offchain Labs is the company behind Arbitrum, the layer-2 network that Robinhood built its tokenized equity offering on top of.
The final phase of Robinhood’s plan ends up with equity tokens becoming fully permissionless assets that users can withdraw to external wallets and spend across decentralized applications, Warner continued.
Today, in phase 1, users can buy these tokenized shares through the Robinhood applications within the EU, but they cannot move them outside of it. Tokens are limited to Robinhood’s app, with no access to external platforms or protocols.
Phase 2 focuses on infrastructure, Warner said. Using Bitstamp, which Robinhood acquired for $200 million earlier this year, the company will work towards enabling 24/7 trading of equity tokens, reflecting the always-on nature of crypto markets and breaking away from traditional market windows.
The most consequential change will come in Phase 3, where Warner says the tokens will become permissionless, meaning users and decentralized finance protocols will be able to freely use them. This means that a user can buy tokenized Apple shares on Robinhood, withdraw them and pledge it as collateral in a decentralized lending app like Aave.
That would mark a fundamental shift in how retail investors interact with stocks. Instead of being locked into brokerage platforms and routed through clearinghouses, stocks would become programmable building blocks of a global, open financial system.
Warner framed it as a long-term play. “The way they describe Phase 3,” he said, “is that assets are permissionless and have the user’s ability to interact with DeFi applications.”
A major technical hurdle to making that happen is compatibility. Most financial infrastructure, like Robinhood’s matching engine and ledger systems, is built in C++ or Rust. These languages do not work natively on Ethereum, where smart contracts are written in Solidity. Rewriting these systems would be slow and risky.
Offchain Labs, Warner added, has developed the Arbitrum Stylus to allow developers to write smart contracts in traditional programming languages like C++, Rust and Python while remaining compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
