By Hannah Erin Lang
Robinhood Markets is continuing its push into the world of crypto, unveiling a flurry of new products and platform updates at a product event in London. Here are some of the key updates:
- In Europe, Robinhood will offer a broader variety of perpetual futures to traders, including those tied to currencies, commodities and major exchange-traded funds. Perpetual futures are a kind of derivative that trades at all hours and allows investors to pile on leverage.
- Robinhood is rolling out a new version of tokenized stocks of public companies that can trade 24/7 and be used as collateral. There is also Robinhood Earn, a new decentralized lending product that allows investors to lend out dollar-backed stablecoins and earn estimated annual interest of 7%.
- Robinhood is officially launching its own blockchain-something executives had noted was in progress at last year's event.
- The brokerage is also expanding to Canada, offering crypto-trading capabilities in the U.K. and has its eye on Singapore next, executives said.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has often reiterated his long-term goal of making Robinhood the world's number-one finance app. The brokerage has forged ahead with a crypto-forward international expansion even as fewer customers trade the digital assets at home.
The price of Bitcoin has tumbled some 30% this year. In the first quarter, Robinhood's crypto-trading revenue slid 47% from the year prior.
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