Robinhood has officially launched the public testnet for its proprietary Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, named Robinhood Chain. The announcement was made at CoinDesk's Consensus Hong Kong conference on Wednesday, February 11, 2026. The network, built on Arbitrum technology, is designed to support the trading and self-custody of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), including equities and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
The move marks a significant deepening of Robinhood's push into on-chain finance and tokenization. Following six months of private testing, developers can now publicly build on the network using standard Ethereum development tools. The company plans a mainnet launch later this year.
Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Crypto, emphasized the chain's specialization. "What we wanted was the security of Ethereum, the liquidity that is available on EVM chains and the Ethereum ecosystem," Kerbrat told CoinDesk. "But we were also wanting to have a way to customize the chain and to make it really optimized for traditional assets being tokenized." He stated that Robinhood Chain is being designed as a specialized environment for regulated financial products, rather than as a general-purpose scaling solution for Ethereum.
The launch builds on Robinhood's existing tokenization efforts. In 2025, the company rolled out token versions of nearly 500 U.S. stocks and ETFs for European users, which were initially issued on Arbitrum. Data from Entropy Advisors on Dune Analytics shows these assets total almost 2,000 stocks and ETFs, though their combined value of $15 million lags behind leading issuers like xStocks and Ondo Global Markets.
Robinhood's strategy aligns with a shifting narrative around layer-2 networks. While initially seen as a solution for Ethereum's scalability, the focus is increasingly on creating customizable, application-specific chains. This view has been echoed by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who has suggested that rollups involved with compliance or real-world assets may need to accept different decentralization trade-offs.
With the testnet live, developers gain access to network entry points and documentation. Ahead of the mainnet, Robinhood plans to expand testnet functionality to include test-only stock tokens and deeper integrations with its crypto wallet, aiming to enable 24/7 trading and seamless bridging to DeFi applications.
