On 1 July, Robinhood launched its own blockchain, stock tokens in 120+ countries, and agentic trading. The real story is a quieter line: Robinhood Earn, a DeFi lending product inside the main app, paying an estimated 7% on the USDG stablecoin through Morpho, a protocol Robinhood does not control.
This is our CEO Note for PRO subscribers. Download the PDF below.
Hey, it’s Marc!
I watched Robinhood announce a blockchain, global stock tokens, and AI trading agents in one keynote. Everyone covered the chain, I keep coming back to that quieter line:
US users can now lend dollars at an estimated 7%, one tap from their brokerage account. The engine is a DeFi protocol most of them have never heard of.
What’s happening
Robinhood took Robinhood Chain, a Layer 2 built on the Arbitrum stack, to public mainnet with Uniswap deploying a dedicated AMM, Pleiades running a proprietary trading venue, and Alchemy, BitGo, and Chainlink live from day one. Robinhood covers gas fees for the first 90 days. New Stock Tokens launched in 120+ countries as tokenised debt securities issued out of Jersey. They trade 24/7 and work as DeFi collateral. US persons are excluded.
Robinhood Earn is the US product. Eligible customers buy USDG, Paxos’s Global Dollar Network stablecoin, and lend it from a self-custody wallet into a Morpho vault curated by Steakhouse Financial, settling on Robinhood Chain. Morpho holds $11B+ in deposits. Borrowers post collateral from Spark (spUSDG), Ethena (USDe), and Maple (syrupUSDG); their interest funds the estimated 7% APY. Lloyd’s of London and RELM insure covered losses from cyber or smart-contract exploits.
The rest of the keynote: commodity, ETF, and FX perpetuals at up to 10x leverage in the EU, maker fees as low as 0% in the US, a Canada launch built on the WonderFi acquisition, a Singapore capital markets services licence, and Agentic Accounts for crypto through Robinhood’s Trading MCP. MORPHO rose about 12% and Standard Chartered initiated coverage the same day. HOOD traded near $108, up about 7%, on strong June volumes rather than the keynote.
🚨Save your spot for our next webinar, space is limited.
I’m sitting down with the people dvising the banks and building the stablecoin rails those banks will plug into.
For CEOs, board members, and heads of strategy at banks, FMIs, asset managers, and custodians.
📅 23 July, 11am EST
🚨 Space is limited. RSVP to secure your spot.
Why it matters
The DeFi mullet is now the default retail playbook. Coinbase ran this play first: crypto-backed loans in January 2025, then USDC lending in September, both on Morpho with Steakhouse curating. That stack ended 2025 with $960M in active loans, $1.7B in collateral, and $450M in USDC earning yield, and Morpho’s user base grew from 67,000 to 1.4 million. Crypto.com, Gemini, Bitget, Ledger, Trust Wallet, and World built their own versions; Société Générale runs its MiCA stablecoins on the same rails. Aave is running the opposite play, going direct with its own consumer app. Robinhood’s choice is a vote that distribution beats protocol brands, and Standard Chartered initiating coverage on MORPHO the same morning tells you institutions now underwrite the protocol as infrastructure, not as a token.
Robinhood engineered around the yield war. The GENIUS Act bars stablecoin issuers from paying yield, and banks want the workarounds dead: the Bank Policy Institute published a brief on the “payment of interest loophole,” 40+ banking associations asked Congress to extend the ban to affiliates and exchanges, and the OCC has proposed rules targeting rewards on white-label stablecoins. Draft fixes like the RFIA would restrict yield to “identifiable activities” by the holder. Robinhood’s structure reads like it was built against that test: the customer holds a self-custody wallet, initiates the loan, and earns interest paid by borrowers. Coinbase’s reserve-share rewards program is the structure the bank lobby is aiming at. Robinhood picked the architecture most likely to remain standing. Flag: that is our reading of draft text, not a prediction of how Congress votes.
USDG lets Robinhood get paid twice. Robinhood co-founded the Global Dollar Network with Paxos, Kraken, and Galaxy in November 2024. GDN shares reserve economics with distribution partners instead of keeping them at the issuer, and analysts now put USDG supply at roughly $3B. So every Earn dollar pays Robinhood on the float, then gets lent through a vault settling on a chain Robinhood owns. The customer gets 7%. Robinhood earns on the money layer, the settlement layer, and the relationship. Kraken runs the same play; it pays its 2% stock-transfer bonus in USDG.
The big picture
Three stories collided this week, and we think they are the same story. On 30 June, 140+ firms including Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase launched the OpenUSD consortium to take Circle’s reserve economics. On 1 July, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire fired back with 80% volume share. Hours later, Robinhood shipped the working version of the idea OpenUSD is still pitching: a partner-owned dollar (USDG), lent through neutral credit infrastructure (Morpho), settling on a chain Robinhood owns, sold to 28 million customers inside an app they already trust.
The stablecoin fight has moved from issuance to distribution economics. Whoever owns the customer now demands the float, and issuers who refuse to share it get routed around. Robinhood assembled a bank from parts: Paxos issues the money, Morpho clears the credit, Steakhouse prices the risk, Lloyd’s takes the tail. The one part it kept is the only part that compounds: the relationship. Coinbase built the same anatomy on Base and USDC. Kraken is building it on Ink and USDG. The US now runs three parallel shadow-bank stacks, none of which needed a charter, all of which the bank lobby is fighting symptom by symptom while the structure gets built underneath them.
The Robinhood money stack, 20 months in the making
“Decentralized finance technology works best as infrastructure.”
— Paul Frambot, co-founder and CEO, Morpho (1 July 2026)
