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 set to add private equity, is the first step in a longer, three-phase roadmap to create a permissionless financial ecosystem, said A.J. Warner, chief strategy officer at Offchain Labs, in an interview with CoinDesk on the sidelines of Devconnect in Buenos Aires.
Offchain Labs is the firm behind Arbitrum, the layer-2 network that Robinhood built its tokenized stock offering on top off.
The final phase of Robinhood’s plan ends with stock tokens becoming fully permissionless assets that users can withdraw to external wallets and use across decentralized applications, Warner continued.
Today, in phase 1, users can buy these tokenized stocks through the Robinhood applications within the EU, but they can’t move them outside of it. The tokens are confined to Robinhood’s app, with no access to outside platforms or protocols.
Phase 2 focuses on infrastructure, said Warner. Using Bitstamp, which Robinhood acquired for $200 million earlier this year, the company will work toward enabling 24/7 trading of stock tokens, mirroring the always-on nature of crypto markets and breaking 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 finance protocols will be freely able to use them.That means a user could buy tokenized Apple stock on Robinhood, withdraw it, and post it as collateral in a decentralized lending app like Aave.
That would mark a fundamental shift in how retail investors interact with equities. Instead of being locked inside brokerage platforms and routed through clearinghouses, stocks would become programmable building blocks in a global, open financial system.
Warner framed it as a long-term play. “The way they describe phase 3,” he said, “is for assets to be permissionless and have the user’s ability to interact with DeFi applications.”
One major technical hurdle in making that happen is compatibility. Most financial infrastructure, like Robinhood’s matching engine and ledger systems, is built in C++ or Rust. These languages don’t work natively on Ethereum, where smart contracts are written in Solidity. Rewriting those systems would be slow and risky.
Offchain Labs, Warner added, has developed Arbitrum Stylus to allow developers to write smart contracts in traditional programming languages like C++, Rust, and Python while remaining compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
