Robinhood opens testnet for Arbitrum-based “Robinhood Chain”
Robinhood has opened a public testnet for “Robinhood Chain,” an Ethereum layer-2 network built on Arbitrum. The company says the network is meant to support tokenized real-world assets and serve as infrastructure for round-the-clock markets as it expands beyond crypto trading.
Robinhood has launched a public testnet for Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum layer-2 network built using Arbitrum’s technology, giving developers a live environment to experiment and provide technical feedback as the company prepares a broader rollout.
Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, said the goal is not simply to scale Ethereum, but to use the chain as a foundation to rebuild parts of Robinhood’s market infrastructure. He said the testnet phase is aimed at developers building products such as lending platforms and perpetual futures exchanges, as well as institutions that may eventually want to use the network for their own offerings.
The project sits inside Robinhood’s broader push into tokenization, including “stock tokens” introduced for European customers last year that provide synthetic exposure to U.S. equities and some private companies. Kerbrat said the company wants to expand tokenized products into additional jurisdictions, while being cautious about the pace of rollouts.
Robinhood’s chain is built on Arbitrum, a layer-2 framework developed by Offchain Labs. Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder said in a statement that Arbitrum’s tooling should help Robinhood advance tokenization efforts. Robinhood’s approach differs from rivals that have leaned on the Optimism ecosystem for their layer-2 deployments.
The company has said the chain will ultimately support activity across both its self-custody wallet and the main Robinhood app, with the blockchain largely abstracted away from end users. Robinhood announced the testnet around the Consensus conference in Hong Kong and has indicated that a mainnet launch is planned in the months ahead.
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