Why Robinhood Built on Ethereum Instead of Launching Its Own L1

Okay, just to launch in for our English-speaking audience, Robin Hood, just backing up.

The Robin Hood myth, steal from the rich and give to the poor.

That's how Robin Hood launched.

Zero fees.

How does Robinhood differentiate itself these days when there are a lot of different places to buy stocks and crypto that also offer zero fees?

Yeah, I think for us it was mostly the idea of having this all-in-one application with a very unique UI and UX that makes it easy to use, combined with education so that anyone, even a new investor, can actually utilize the platform and understand how to use it.

But there are not actually that many platform that allows you to do brokerage, options, retirement account, crypto, prediction markets and more.

So I think Robinhood is still pretty unique.

And I think every time that we build product, we really think about the customer.

We talk to them.

We try to understand how they use it.

What are the issues that they find? And we also think about how to bring most of the value back to the customer.

So it started with zero commission.

uh for for trading stocks for example but on crypto we have two options you can uh also have zero commission or you can use a fee structure if you write your order to exchanges um and you can have fees as low as three basis points so you know that's really the idea for us is how do we bring most of the value to the customer

Would you say that you're the lowest fee place to on-ramp and off-ramp crypto these days, to buy crypto? What would you say there?

Yeah, we are one of the lowest places to buy and sell crypto on average.

And the reason for that is it's going to depend on what you're doing on the platform.

So, for example, if you're a very active trader, you can already get these fees, like I was saying, as low as free basis point.

And if you're less active, it's still going to be a lot cheaper than some of our competitors.

uh we are trying to make sure that for the people that are interested in crypto the barrier to entry is not the fees but it's more uh and and we want to remove all the barrier to entry if you think about it so uh the first time you're going to open the app and you want to trade crypto we are going to show you what is uh what is bitcoin what is a cryptocurrency um when you place an order we are going to show you the distinction between a limit order or market orders all these kind of things that are helpful for new investors uh because we think it's very important a lot of People want to control their finance.

They want to actually start thinking about investing.

They are just worried about doing it.

And so most of the time they just stop there and they don't try to invest.

A lot of the investors on Robinhood are actually new investors.

And so we want to make sure that for them, it's not scary to actually do something with a platform.