Morning Minute: Robinhood Debuts 'Robinhood Chain'
Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum-based Ethereum layer-2 built to connect its brokerage and crypto products. The chain is designed for AI-agent trading onchain and debuts with integrations from BitGo and Chainlink, plus support from Uniswap and Pleiades. Its key feature is Stock Tokens: tokenized shares of companies like Nvidia and Apple that can be used as collateral in DeFi lending pools, turning equities into onchain capital. Robinhood also added perps trading in its wallet through Lighter and enabled Robinhood Earn for eligible US users to lend USDG for about 7% APY. HOOD rose more than 8% on the news. Separately, Venice AI raised $65 million at a $1 billion valuation in its first outside funding round, led by Dragonfly with Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures participating. The privacy-focused AI platform says it stores no user data, serves over 3 million users, handles 1.7 million API calls daily, and is already profitable. The new funding will go toward GPU purchases and building its own data centers.
