Buenos Aires – Financial technology giant Robinhood (HOOD) is laying the groundwork to push the traditional financial system towards 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 capital, is the first step in a longer three-phase roadmap to create a permissionless financial ecosystem, AJ Warner, chief strategy officer at Offchain Labs, said 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 fully permissionless assets that users can withdraw to external wallets and use in decentralized applications, Warner continued.
Today, in phase 1, users can buy these tokenized stocks through Robinhood apps within the EU, but cannot move them outside of it. The tokens are confined to the Robinhood app, with no access to external 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 24/7 trading of stock tokens, reflecting the always-on nature of crypto markets and breaking away from traditional market windows.
The biggest change will come in phase 3, where Warner says the tokens will become permissionless, meaning users and decentralized finance protocols will be able to use them freely. That means a user could buy tokenized Apple shares on Robinhood, withdraw them, and post them as collateral on a decentralized lending app like Aave.
That would mark a fundamental shift in the way retail investors interact with stocks. Instead of being locked inside brokerage platforms and sent through clearinghouses, stocks would become programmable building blocks in an open, global financial system.
Warner proposed it as a long-term work. “The way they describe Phase 3,” he said, “is that the assets are permissionless and have the user’s ability to interact with DeFi applications.”
A major technical hurdle to making this happen is compatibility. Most of the financial infrastructure, such as Robinhood’s matching engine and accounting systems, is built in C++ or Rust. These languages do not 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 such as C++, Rust and Python while still supporting the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM).
