During Link:NYC, Chainlink Labs’ Chief Business Officer, Johann Eid, sat down with Johann Kerbrat, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Crypto and International at Robinhood, for a conversation about how tokenization is democratizing access to financial markets and unlocking 24/7 global trading.
Robinhood allows retail investors to trade stocks, options, ETFs, and cryptocurrencies with zero-commission fees. As of mid-2026, the platform supports over 27 million active funded user accounts with over $345 billion in total platform assets.
In July, Robinhood launched Robinhood Chain, a permissionless, AI-native layer-2 built to connect traditional financial markets to DeFi and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) such as U.S. stocks and ETFs. Chainlink was selected as the official data and cross-chain oracle infrastructure powering Robinhood Chain and all Robinhood-issued assets, including stock tokens such as NVDA, GOOG, and AAPL.
“We are super excited about the work we’ve been doing with Chainlink,” Kerbrat said.
“It’s one of the core components we need for all the things we are building and planning to build.”
About 60% of the U.S. population owns stocks. That figure dwindles to 20% across Europe and even less across Asia.
“We think that’s a big issue and something we can solve with stock tokens, because anyone using the stock tokens doesn’t need a brokerage and doesn’t need to wake up during New York hours,” Kerbrat explained.
“They just need a mobile phone, an internet connection, and a wallet, and then they can start trading.”
For Kerbrat, watching the majority of Robinhood’s stock token trading happen outside regular U.S. market hours “really proved the mission.”
Eid described Robinhood Chain as one of the industry’s biggest milestones in 2026 and emphasized Robinhood and Chainlink’s shared vision for broadening access to global financial markets and products.
“We’re excited about everything else that you can do with stock tokens,” Kerbrat said.
Among the most promising use cases are the ability to use stock tokens as collateral and fractional ownership that makes owning a stake in a private company more accessible.
The recently launched Chainlink 24/7 delivers around-the-clock pricing data for RWAs. With market coverage extended to weekends and holidays, developers can build a broader range of financial products around tokenized traditional assets.
The combination of Robinhood Chain’s low-latency network and Chainlink’s highly resilient 24/7 data creates a synergy that directly appeals to traditional finance.
“We need to offer the same primitives and better,” said Eid.
“The mission of this whole space is let’s transform the whole world; let’s create a whole new future for financial markets. And because financial markets underpin our whole society, we transform the world through that.”
Watch the full conversation.