Robinhood’s Tokenization Thesis Gets Real After Bitstamp Deal

Robinhood is leaning harder into crypto’s next narrative. Specifically, putting financial assets on-chain and keeping markets open longer than legacy rails allow. The clearest signal is its Bitstamp deal.

Bitstamp was bought by Robinhood for $200 million in cash on June 3, 2025. Bitstamp isn't just a spot venue with an old-school reputation for running a tight ship. It also has institutional-grade rails and services Robinhood wants to scale. This includes crypto-as-a-service based on APIs and yield products like lending and staking. 

Tokenized Stocks Land in the EU, With an “Always-On” Pitch

Robinhood's push for tokenization became real on June 30, 2025, when it announced that EU customers would be able to trade more than 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs without having to pay any fees, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The company said it would work towards 24/7 trading later.

Have you ever used an instant withdrawal flow crypto casino? If so, you already know the psychological hook Robinhood is using: settlement that feels immediate, access that feels continuous, and fewer "banking hours" restrictions. The business is trying to connect this expectation of always being on to stocks, but it's doing this with tokens.

The tokens were made possible by a partnership with Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer-2 ecosystem. Robinhood's EU disclosures also make it clear that these "Stock Tokens" are MiFID II derivatives, which are contracts meant to track price exposure and not traditional shares.

Tokenization isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s following user expectations that crypto has already been trained into the market. Money moves anytime, not just during banking hours. People now expect instant money for stablecoin remittances, creator and freelance payouts, wallet-to-wallet transfers, and even immediate settlement for online merchants. This behavior spills into Bitcoin casinos, where the promise of a crypto casino instant withdrawal is essentially stablecoin UX in practice. Deposits clear quickly, withdrawals can hit a wallet fast, and users aren’t waiting on card batches or bank cutoffs. That’s the same mental model Robinhood is trying to port into equities with tokenized stock exposure.

That distinction matters because the product can read like “tokenized stocks,” while functioning more like a regulated synthetic wrapper. As Investopedia noted, token holders may not get the full bundle of shareholder rights. The structure has already drawn scrutiny and criticism, including pushback around private company tokens. Companies like OpenAI have publicly distanced themselves from any implied endorsement.

Perps, Staking, and the On-Chain Brokerage Stack

Robinhood did more than just expose people to stock tokens. In June 2025, the same rollout added crypto perpetual futures for users in the EU as well as staking for users in the US, starting with Ethereum and Solana. This made the app more than just a crypto broker and gave users a fuller set of tools for trading on the blockchain.

The line about "up to 7x leverage" is real. However, it only shows up in later Robinhood communications and coverage about the growth of perpetual futures pairs and leverage. This is not necessarily the starting point on the first day of the June 2025 announcement.

Robinhood's own metrics, on the other hand, show how much of this is caused by volume cycles. Robinhood reported $11.7B in crypto trading volume in May 2025, which is 36% more than the previous month (April to May). Moreover, Robinhood said that cryptocurrency sales brought in $252M in Q1 2025. 

Robinhood is also making its own layer of the network. In public, the company has described "Robinhood Chain" as a permissionless Layer 2 that is best for real-world assets. This is the kind of infrastructure pitch that makes tokenization sound like it's not just a feature, but the main idea behind the product.

This story fits with what Vlad Tenev said in public during Token2049 season in Singapore in early October 2025. He called tokenization a "freight train" that will "eat the whole financial system."