Robinhood targets new investors with tokenized assets and crypto perpetuals

Robinhood isn’t trying to steal traders from Binance or dYdX. It wants the people who haven’t shown up yet.

The retail brokerage platform is making an aggressive push into tokenized assets and crypto perpetual futures, positioning itself as the on-ramp for a wave of investors who might otherwise never touch a blockchain product. Most crypto platforms are built by crypto people, for crypto people. Robinhood is betting there’s a much larger market of traditional investors who want exposure to tokenized real-world assets and DeFi without needing to understand gas fees or seed phrases. Given that 55% of EU investors have expressed strong interest in stock tokens, particularly those already familiar with cryptographic technologies, that bet doesn’t look unreasonable.

What Robinhood is actually building

Robinhood launched Classic Stock Tokens for US equities and ETFs in the EU starting in June 2025. These are blockchain-based representations of traditional stocks: you get the economic exposure, including dividend payments, but the assets live on-chain. Zero commissions. Available for trading around the clock, not just during market hours.

Robinhood expanded its perpetuals offering in the EU to cover crypto, commodities, ETFs, and foreign exchange, with leverage options up to 10x. Perpetual futures are derivative contracts that let you bet on an asset’s price without ever owning the underlying asset, and unlike traditional futures, they never expire.

Robinhood Chain, the company’s own Arbitrum-based Layer 2 blockchain, went live on July 1, 2026, designed to support tokenized assets and DeFi integrations.

Self-custody features are also part of the package, meaning users can hold their own tokens rather than trusting Robinhood to safeguard them.

US users are getting staking options for ETH and SOL, letting them earn yield on their holdings without leaving the platform.

The Europe-first playbook

There’s a reason much of this is launching in Europe first. The EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework has created something the US still lacks: regulatory clarity. Robinhood can offer tokenized stocks, perpetual futures with leverage, and DeFi integrations in Europe without the constant threat of an SEC enforcement action hanging over every product decision.

CEO Vlad Tenev has described tokenization as a “freight train” for global asset access. The rollout of tokenized stocks quickly gained momentum in the EU market, driven in part by that 55% interest figure among surveyed investors.

What this means for investors

The risks are real. Offering 10x leverage on perpetual futures to an investor base that skews younger and less experienced is the kind of thing that attracts regulatory scrutiny, even in the relatively permissive EU environment. Leverage amplifies gains and losses equally, and Robinhood’s history with the GameStop saga showed how quickly a platform can become a political lightning rod when retail traders take outsized risks.

There’s also execution risk with Robinhood Chain itself. Running a Layer 2 blockchain is operationally complex, and any security incident or downtime could undermine trust in the tokenized assets built on top of it.

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