#247 - SEONG LEE

Um, you know, I've heard, uh, I think you and, and others from, uh, from robin hood talk about the crypto opportunity it's it's interesting in a few ways um to me like i've heard vlad talk about you know he's been interested in crypto for a long time um but robin hood has not been focused on crypto for a very long time like i think his interest and sort of understanding and and uh sort of agreement with the importance of it preceded his, you know, focusing Robinhood on, on working on it by, by a number of years.

And so I'm sort of curious, you know, obviously you've, you've been around for that full time, basically.

Um, I'm curious, like the impetus on the timing where, you know, you guys decided to launch the wallet as, as a large step, um, in 2023, now you've got the chain in 2026. other products like earn and you know prediction markets so like the sequencing of all these products and i don't want to ask too big of a question we don't need to get into it all at once but i'm curious about the timing of things and what strategy's been around that in terms of like how you guys thought about the timing of introducing crypto to uh the robin hood customer base and how you thought about that

It's a great question.

And to your first point, Vlad's definitely both a big supporter of crypto, but also has an extremely deep understanding of the technology.

And that's been extremely critical in us being able to set this strategy for the long term.

For the strategy itself, ultimately our vision and goal and mission, as they would say, is we believe that crypto is the best way and will be the best way for users to get access to the financial tools, services, and assets that they need.

These transactions being on chain are oftentimes cheaper, obviously all the time more transparent, faster because you have faster settlement times, less prone to fraud.

Our vision here has always been that.

I think the timing of certain products is more around what we think we can do at that point in time to offer the best product experience to the customer.

So the chain is a really great example here alongside stock tokens.

It's taken us a long time to make sure that we're working with the right regulators and the right jurisdictions and the right compliance tools and safety measures to make sure that we can offer a really great stock tokens product.

And our strategy of launching this, the timing of these products is based on when we can do that.

So, you know, I don't think this type of product was possible three years ago.

It is possible as of last year and this year, which we've released multiple stock tokens products since then.

And the chain is an impetus of us focused on this stock token division, where we believe that the best way to access the Robinhood stock tokens is going to be on a very performant chain.

And from our view, the best way to do that is to launch our own chain.

You know, it's designed for very high throughputs, block times are extremely fast.

That's sort of the impetus of timing where it's really all about can we build the best product that we think we can? And if we can, then let's go do it.

But if we can't, then we need to figure out what it's going to take to go and do that.

And sometimes that just takes a lot longer than you would expect, whether it's technology, whether it's all that stuff.