Robinhood Chain: A Brokerage- Issued Blockchain for Global Reach

R Robinhood's latest move has shaken up the financial and crypto industries. The company launched its own blockchain, called Robinhood Chain, on July 1st. Initially, there was confusion about whether it was a new Ethereum layer-2 solution or something more significant. However, it turns out that Robinhood is not trying to compete with public blockchains but rather to create an infrastructure for its brokerage services.

The chain's mainnet launched on July 1st and has been processing transactions at around 100-millisecond block times. It's built on the Arbitrum stack with ETH as the gas token, and it supports full Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility. The core product, Stock Tokens, allows users to trade US equities and ETFs around the clock and can be used as DeFi collateral.

The real innovation here is not the blockchain itself but rather the way it's being used. Robinhood is sacrificing some of the completeness of shareholder rights in exchange for faster settlement speeds, global reach, and DeFi composability. The company has effectively assembled an offshore parallel business that's unconstrained by US brokerage rules.