Buenos Aires — Fintech giant Robinhood (HOOD) is laying the groundwork to push the traditional financial system into a permissionless ecosystem, according to the head of strategy at blockchain development company Offchain Labs.
The brokerage app’s recently launched tokenized stock offering in Europe, which already includes nearly 800 publicly traded securities and is expected to add private equity, is the first step in a longer three-phase roadmap to create a permissionless financial ecosystem, said AJ Warner, chief strategy officer at Offchain Labs, in an interview with CoinDesk on the sidelines of Devconnect in Buenos Aires.
Offchain Labs is the company behind Arbitrum, the layer 2 network on which Robinhood built its tokenized stock offering.
The final phase of Robinhood’s plan ends with stock tokens becoming completely permissionless assets that users can withdraw to external wallets and use in decentralized applications, Warner continued.
Today, in Phase 1, users can purchase these tokenized stocks through Robinhood apps within the EU, but they cannot move them outside of it. Tokens are confined to the Robinhood app, with no access to outside platforms or protocols.
Phase 2 focuses on infrastructure, Warner said. Using Bitstamp, which Robinhood acquired for $200 million earlier this year, the company will work to enable stock token trading 24/7, reflecting the always-on nature of crypto markets and moving away from traditional market windows.
The most consequential change will come in Phase 3, where Warner says the tokens will become permissionless, meaning users and decentralized financial protocols will be able to use them freely. This means that a user will be able to buy tokenized Apple shares on Robinhood, withdraw them, and post them as collateral in a decentralized lending app like Aave.
This would mark a fundamental shift in the way retail investors interact with stocks. Instead of being locked into brokerage platforms and routed through clearinghouses, stocks would become programmable building blocks of an open global financial system.
Warner presented it as a long-term play. “The way they describe phase 3,” he said, “is that the assets are permissionless and the user has the ability to interact with DeFi applications.”
One of the main technical obstacles to achieving this goal is compatibility. Most financial infrastructure, like Robinhood’s matching engine and ledger systems, is built in C++ or Rust. These languages do not work natively on Ethereum, where smart contracts are written in Solidity. Rewriting these systems would be slow and risky.
Offchain Labs, Warner added, developed Arbitrum Stylus to enable developers to write smart contracts in traditional programming languages like C++, Rust and Python while remaining compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
