Robinhood CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev has spent a year turning the trading app into a major player in the cryptocurrency industry.
This feature is part of CoinDesk The Most Influential List of 2025.
The company, once known for commission-free stock trading, is now building its own blockchain, offering staking services and expanding in Europe by tokenizing shares.
The biggest move was Robinhood completing its $200 million acquisition of Bitstamp, one of the longest-running cryptocurrency exchanges. The exchange secured over 50 global licenses and opened the door to institutional trading and crypto ecosystem expansion.
Robinhood has since launched Ethereum and Solana staking, enabled perpetual futures in the EU, and added more tokens for U.S. users, including XRP, SOL, and BNB. In Europe, users can now trade more than 200 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs on Arbitrum-based infrastructure.
This infrastructure is a critical part of the company’s future. In July, Tenev revealed that Robinhood was building its own layer 2 blockchain, called Robinhood Chain, to support tokenized asset trading with lower fees and faster settlement.
Tenev’s focus on the crypto ecosystem may reflect his confidence in the industry’s future. At the Token2049 conference in Singapore, he compared the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies to a freight train that cannot be stopped, noting that “tokenization will eat up the entire financial system.”
As Robinhood expands its presence in the crypto ecosystem, it is also expanding its prediction market offerings.
