Fight back like the rest of the industry. You know, if it goes to the court, is Robinhood prepared to fight the SEC overall?
What I would say to begin with is that we've been very disappointed when when we received the world's noticed. We were engaging with the SEC for many, many months, and you know, when the SEC chairman told the industry come in and register, we actually believed in it and we went there. We met with them more than fifteen times, and you know, we discussed with them to try to get there.
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Consulting Group to build a revolutionary decentralized application ecosystem. I'm a big believer in this project. I have been since twenty eighteen. I've been a VET token holder for years and this blockchain is highly scalable, great with security and speed, and it has low energy consumption. If you'd like to learn more about v chain, please visit vchain dot org. Link will be in a description. Welcome to the Thinking Crypto podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward and with me
today is Johan Kerbrat, who's the crypto general manager at Robinhood. Johan, great to have you.
On, Thanks for having me. Always excited to Chaid.
Yeah, Johan, I'm very excited to speak with you because I've been a user of the Robinhood platform for years, even before you guys are offering crypto, and it's exciting that you've added a lot of crypto services and features. You're doing a lot of antioned and I got a lot of questions for you on your plans around that. But let's start with your background. Tell us about yourself. Where are you from and what's your professional background?
Yeah? Absolutely so, I'm actually your original from France, so you will hear it from my accent. Always a bit difficult at the first few seconds to get used to it, but I'm used to it now, and so I grew up in a near nice it's in the southeast of France, and I'm an engineer by trade, so I've been an engineering leader for the past few years. And I joined robin Hood actually as a cito for Robbin and Crypto and so moved to the position of general manager a
few years ago. And before robin Hood, I worked at a bunch of startups, including my own back in France and Airbnb as well, which was a good ride, I will say, in term of expansion and growth of the business.
What was your first encounter with bitcoin and crypto and what was your aha moment?
Yeah? So, uh, the first company that I built when I was young and back in France was actually a company building payments rails and so you will you will use those services to receive or send money from from different businesses, accept cray cards, like all these kind of things that are very easy now to do with with
Stripe and some of the system like this. But at the time a thing that we saw a lot was the fraud coming for merchant and you know the fact that you can pay with a credit card and then you have thirty days to to kind of charge back or issues like this that we're really making the world complicated for merchant. And at the same time, you know,
crypto started to exist. A bitcoin white paper was here, uh and and we looked at it and we're like, hey, this is a is a solution and very cheap to send between merchants, very easy to accept it, and it's irressible. So if merchants send goods, you know, they don't have to worry about the fact that they might be a
charge back in the future. So yeah, at the time, it was also like the economic crisis in the in the EU where there was a lot of discussion around the you know, the central banks and all these things. So really thought that this would be like the prime use case for something like goodcoin at the time. And if you look at it, I think it was not necessarily payments that was really the first use case and bitcoin was more useful for trading and as a reserve.
But it's it's interesting to see the adoption of stable coin right now and see that, you know, we're going back a bit to the roots of the initial problem, which was payments.
So so yeah, that's awesome, And I'm curious to get your thoughts on when do you think companies like Airbnb and Uber may start to integrate cryptocurrency payments using stable coins or maybe bitcoin, and also integrate blockchain maybe in their infrastructure and make things more efficient. I know there's some companies that have started highlighting and doing some trial and error testing, But when do you think we might see these big companies start to adopt this technology.
Yeah, I think it's a great question because for some of this very global company, crypto actually solve a lot of the issues that they have with payments. So you know, in the US, we're very lucky to have a banking system that is very robust, that exists for many years, and payment system and rails that works very well. Craigcoud is one example that you know, in the US it's very easy to just pay with a credit card and
tap and be done with it. But a lot of countries actually didn't go through the same growth and the same adoption of banking system and rails. For for some of these countries, you know, just having a banking account is not that easy, and you also have the issue with the local currency and the very inflation of some of some of these countries. So if you think about it right, the stable coin can be a solution for all that. You can have a stable coin, big back
to USD or back to any kind of currency. Anyone can have a bank account. But I do think that the issue for some of his companies to adapt it is a regulation. You know, what kind of license do you need to be able to transmit currencies between customers? How do you look at you know, transaction motoring, you know m L these kind of things. That's all the things that you know a company like robbin it provides because we are in the space and we are like
core to the to the space. But for a company where it's not necessarily like the the core product, it's bit more difficult to justify the initial investment. And so the tendency that we've seen in the past has been for this company to start using another company to provide these services, and so then with a number of middleman in between, it starts to be an expensive solution and
we don't see a ton of adoption. But I think this is going to start changing the more like we are seeing some of his products like that are providing these services for low cost, and I think that's going to be something that we will see more and more. Robbing A, for example, offer a new product called robbing a connects that we launched last year where it's basically on our ramp, like you can use your robbing account or card or anything to buy crypto and transfer it
right away to your wallet. And I think this is the kind of services that really makes it easy for merchants to adopt and start using.
Yeah. Absolutely, and you know, hopefully maybe in the next five year window start to see more adoption. But like you said, we need the clarity. There needs to be proper regulation, and I know in the United States there's some movement, but we're not there yet.
Absolutely.
Now for those who may not know, give us an overview of all of Robinhood's crypto services and offerings.
Yeah, so you know, I'm going to try to be quick so you don't get bored. But I think we have a few different products because we are now a very global company. The main product that we offer is robbing and crypto in the US. Our mission is ready to make robbino the lowest cost and the most trusted place to translate with crypto. We offer the lowest cost to trade in our average you could get up to three point six percent more crypto and robbin UNIVERSUS some competito,
and we have about fifteen assets on the platform. You can buy them, you can hold them, sell them, and you can transfer them if you're eligible to crypto deposit and transfer. And the thing that we've been building in the past few years has been giving the tools for
people to invest and trade into the scryptocurrenc easily. So we of course offer recurring bikes if you want to do ADCA and you want to make a cost averaging trading strategy, but we also have a lot more advanced training tool, some advanced sharts, customer price alerts and things like that. So we've been really trying to push on serving all the customer segments that we have and making sure that we have everything that you need to trade crypto.
And at the same time, we also launch in December in the EU, and so the the great thing there is that we've been trying to push a lot more adoption. So we we have an offer, for example, where you can trade bitcoin with zero fee, zero commission or anything like that. So we really have again like this low cost offering that we've been pushing on. We have about thirty five plus cryptocurrency there, so we we really try to add any currency that our customer we're asking for.
And we also started to offer staking for Solana and it's been something that we've seen working very well with our customers. They are excited to be able to get yield generated from the earnings of the staking on top of their holdings, so that's been something that we rarely excited about. And finally, you know, we also offer an option if people don't want to use robin to custody
the assets. We also have the Robbin wallet, which is a self custody wallet available in one hundred and forty plus countries, and you can store and manage your crypto on many network like we have from ethereum bitcoined to Optimism and base and Arbitrum and so on a network.
So we've really been trying to offer the tools that you need and therefore, like we give the choice to the customer if they if they believe that, you know, they just want to hold on robin hood, we have top of art custody to make sure that they're found their safe. But if they also want to be self custudying and you know, playing a bit more with the website world, they can do it through the robin World. That's really great.
And I love that you guys offer that self custodial wallet aspect because it shows that you believe in the ethos of crypto where if you want to self custody and be your own banks, so to speak, you buy your crypto on robinhood and move it to the self custody wallet. That's really great. So I appreciate you guys doing that.
Yeah, it's also been something where you know, I think the crypto world move at a pace that is so quick. If we wanted to implement everything in house, you know it will take it will take a massive amount of engineer and time to do it. And so really what we think that with the wallet, you can really have access to to everything that you're interested in, and you know, we are trying to make it in a way that
you're not necessarily disrupted in your in your usage. So if you look at the robbin wallet, it's it has the same kind of best in class UX and uire is that that Rabbino is famous for. And so we've been really trying to spend time on making sure that people understand how to use it. We we also invested a lot in educational content to really try to help
people understand like what are they doing? You know, Like sometimes a lot of the feedback that we get from customer is that that crypto is a bit intimidating and it's been made for for people that are a bit more technical, and so we are trying to remove this barrier one other time.
Yeah, absolutely. Now, a few months back, you guys and now on such media an acquisition of the bitstamp exchange. And I remember using bitstamp in early days twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. Was that to expand your EU footprint?
Yeah, I was also early bitston cu customer. So you know, you can can think that it's funny when you when you work on something like this, on a deal like this, and then you find your account from a back ten years ago. But yeah, so you know, the bit stamp acquisition is something that I'm really excited of about. And there's a few things that we looked at, and we we looked at to make sure that this was a great deal for the for the business. The first thing
was the international expansion. Like you mentioned, bitstamp has fifty plus licenses across the globe from you know, the EU, the UK, Singapore and the US. So for us, that was a great step forward in our ambition to expand global, and we started to do that since since last year.
The second thing was it's an exchange. You know, I think for for us, we've been really focused on offering a great marketplace like robin Hood doesn't match orders between customers, but we think there are some limitations with this flow and this UH mechanics, and and we think the exchange will allow us to actually offer more and more product, more and more advanced features for customers, but also support our expansion in in the in the future, like for example,
when we think about organization and things like that. And the third thing was really the institutional business. You know, Rabinoud has been focused on retail for for a very
long time. On the crypto side, we were huntirely retail focused until we launched Rabbino Connect, which is our on ramp or ramp, And you know, acquiring bits tamp actually give business that is already established, was already a long standing relationship with institutions, and so it's a great diversification of revenue for us and also a great diversification of product and offering and you know, the thing that we've been looking a lot at was Robinot has been a
very safety first type of company when it comes to crypto. We've been you know, slower to add assets or to our for features and some of our competitor and the reason for that was really that we only wanted to offer of his features when we think that they are ready, when we are hundred person sure that you know, we went through all the checklists and it's ready for public. And so when we looked at Bitstam, we saw that
they had like similar values. You know, there's been a very long standing exchange in twenty eleven and so it's even older than Rabinoe. And when you think about all the issues that initial crypto exchange I've been through, you know, being able to still be here, still be like a relevant player in the space really show that it's a it's a great team, and it's a great structure that we are acquiring as well. Yeah.
Absolutely, And to your point, I think being here from multiple cycles, going through bull and Bear markets is a testament to the company's staying ability. So that's really great. I'm curious about how does Robinhood custody crypto assets. So aside from the self custody wallet that folks use, let's say folks are just leaving it in their Robinhood account, where do you custody the crypto assets.
Yeah, so Robinhood you know, has been considering the assets for the customer. We've been building the kind of the safest product that we can around this. When you know, like back in the FTX days, for example, a lot of customer we're accompanying to us that they were saying like, hey, there's not enough future, there is not enough asset on the platform. And like I said earlier, like we were rarely focused on the safety first approach, so we didn't
list hands of assets on the platform. We didn't you know, comming funds between firm and customers outside of you know operations for like a networking feel things like this. So our goal was really to build a custody that can support all the assets of our customer and we have a large amount and make sure that we have the best in class kind of rules for everything. So you know, if you look at our processes, for example, ninety five plus percent plus of the assets are stored in cool storage.
No one person can move funds no, you need a you know, a group of leadership members to write list in a new address. So it's all this kind of rule that we put in place to make sure that you know things that we've seen with FTX, where you had one person that was able to move ons you you had firm assets and customer assets commingle, and so therefore it's very hard to distinguish what is what all of this thing is is not a concern for us, thanks thanks to all our processes.
Basically, okay, so you guys have your own proprietary custody platform. You don't use an outside custodian.
Right, No, we don't use an outset CONDI.
Got it, got it. I'm curious about the dynamic of your stock and equities trading side of the business versus crypto because crypto is twenty four to seven and stocks and equities is an opening and closing bell and trades and so forth. It won't like if you put a trade in at midnight, it won't get executed till the morning and the market opens up and so forth. How has that change your business? And how are you guys handling the twenty four to seven aspect of this?
Yeah, you know, it's one of the part that makes SCRPTO exciting in my opinion, is that we don't necessarily have these moments where there is a pose in the market, and so there's always something to watch. It's been something that you know, was really on top of our mind
when we started to launch a business. We wanted to make sure that our operation team could work twenty four seven and and you know, we invested a lot in alouting system, manitoring system and so and our team itself to make sure that we always have coverage and we know what's what's going on in the market. But I think, you know, Crypto was probably the first one to do that, but I think equally easy slowly getting up to speed.
Actually robinhood off for twenty four five trading, so it starts on the afternoon of Sunday and goes all the way to the next Friday for about does a different ticker, and so you know, slowly we are going to start seeing equities. I think catching up with this twenty four
seven world. I think, you know, it doesn't make necessarily sense for people to be restricted on when they can trade, especially like people that have like a full time job, they don't necessarily have time to watch the market and see that it's closed when they can finally do something. So we've seen that coming from Robinoud, and we see some competitor now starting to also do it, and I think, you know, slowly, we'll be able to do more and
more of these things. And I think that's where you know crypto and by crypto I also mean blockchain technologies. I've been really helpful because I think the the technology that is behind crypto is so much more powerful. It's software base, and when you think about very basic things like settlement or like all these issues that we are struggling with on the on the equities world, this is
not an issue on crypto. And I think that's where the toganization will be very important and really can be a game changer for a lot of assets because with crypto, you get for free fractionalization, and you get for free twenty four seven, you get for free salment because everything can be automated and software based. So we're going to see I think a lot more of these convergence between the traditional finance space and the crypto space.
Yeah, it's to your point of tokenization and tokenization of stocks and so forth. It's going to help bring that market into the twenty four to seven world. So great to hear that you guys are working on solutions like that. Another dynamic that I'm curious about. Obviously, you have bigcoin et aps now and etherio metfs issued by black Raft,
Fideli and so forth. So you guys offer et apps on your platform, I'm curious, And I don't know if you notice at the top of your head are people buying more on the ETF side versus the actual crypto side of your business.
I don't know if I have that on top of my head. I mean, I know for sure I don't have that on top of my head. But I think we, you know, for robbing the guys the way to give the choice to the customer. So I think I mentioned that earlier with the self custody versus the custodial aspect. I think we've done the same kind of approach for the ETF. So the next day the BTC ETF wire approved reallysted eleven of them. We did the same thing
for ITVMTF. We listed them right after they were available, And I think the beauty of that is now that the customer has the choice. You know, they can use robbery crypto if they care about the underlying asset, if they want to have the options to transfer it. They also have a bit more control of the price because you know, they can decide when they go and at
what price they go in the product. Or they can you know, use their procrage account to buy one of the TTF, or they can also use their retirement account that we offer to buy one of the ETF and therefore there will be like some tax advantage potentially if they if they trade with it. So you know, I think at the end of the day, for us, it doesn't really matter in my opinion, if we if we get a customer to buy bitcoins through our platform or
through one of the ETFs. I think what's really important is uh to give the accessibility and and therefore, if some people are more comfortable with the ETF, you know, they can still get into the space and they can
still get some education from from that activity. And and that's really something where you know, we'll I think we'll see more usage coming from the CTF because usually you just need to start, you know, getting into something a little bit and then you get a bit more curious, you learn a bit more, and then you get even more uh stuck into it. And I think that's how it started with me, you know, And I started to read the white paper and so slowly I was getting
stuck into it. And I think we are, We're going to start seeing that with some of our customers as well. So I think overall, we we we are really happy with the fact that some of the CTF are made avaiable. It brings a bit more options to the customer and at the end of the day, you know, that's a good thing I think for the crypto space.
Yeah. Absolutely, well said. And you know there's different people in different walks of life, some who are more comfortable with the ETF rapper versus you know, the self custodial wallet. You know, I think about like my parents or older folks in my family, they'll probably want to go to the ETF route. Absolutely absolutely, And I'm curious how you guys are viewing the changing dynamic in investors. So a couple of things. One at social media allows people to crowdsource.
It allows people to come together and say, hey, we're gonna buy this token, We're gonna buy this talk you know example GameStop AMC. But now we're seeing it with mean coins. You know, there's been so many mean coins and so forth. How are you guys looking at the modern day investor and how the dynamic is changing with social media?
Yeah, you know, I think overall, what we believe as a platform is that we should give to customer access to to the assets and coins a lot. So we're not necessarily in the business of deciding if if an asset is you know, right for the customer or not. Like if if I knew which which one to bet on, you know, I will I will probably have retired by now.
But what we are doing as a platform is again like as a as a safety first company, what we want to make sure that we have a rigorous framework in place to help us evaluate the asset that we support on a platform. You know, we want to make sure that if we see brought an asset, we are able to, for example, safely settle with our liquor provider and market makers. We want to make sure that there is not like just one person that can change the contract or things you know that could potentially be a
loss of funds for the customer. So we have a what we call listing committee. We look at many aspects of the assets, from operational to legal analysis, to technical analysis and security analysis, and we are going to make sure that this is safe for us to the asset on the platform and that there is no obvious problem
that could come from it. But at the end of the day, you know, if we use the assets, we are hoping that the customer can can safely trade it and all these things, but at the end of the day, we do want the customer to do their own kind of research and make sure that this is the right investment for them. And that's why we also sometimes invest in some of our learn educational module to make sure that people have the time to read what is bitcoin? What is this? What is the difference of the between
the two? Why does it even matter that you know there is a layer two? Like all of these things, you know, super easy answer for us are in the space, but for people that are new to the space, we want to make sure that they can actually understand why it matters and why we think that this is a good investment. Yeah.
Absolutely, Obviously there's some incredible changing dynamics and you know, I personally, you know, I'm not a big fan of meme coins, and I always warn people, look, you can invest, and I mean it's your right, but it's on the higher end of the risk curve.
And yeah, and frankly, some of the main coin you know that started, they also fixed some of the issue, you know, some of the pines where for example, lowering the network fee when back in the days you had to pay like ten bucks to center transaction on bitcoin. So I wouldn't say all the min coins are exactly the same. I think some have real team behind it without developing and they just picked a funny name and a funny funny logo as a as a marketing solution.
But I do think yet a lot of them are also not there for the long term and we have to be careful.
Yeah, tell me about your thoughts on stable coins. We're seeing a lot of stable coins enter the market. Obviously, the biggest is Tether USDT circles USDC. Second, PayPal launched your own. I think Ripple's going to launch one as well. How is Robinhood incorporating stable coins? Uh? And are you planning to launch your own at some point?
Well? So, you know, I think for us, the main focus so far has been giving access. We we have a partnership with a Circle and so you can buy and sell U s d C on the platform on on the on the US platform for for free, like we don't charge any any kind of fee or anything,
and you get one to one. So we we try to make it as easy as possible for you to get into the stable, to get off of the stable, and then you can transfer it on multiple network and the same thing with our with our wallet, we try to make it very easy to understand with us U s d C being front of the product. So you know,
for us, we've been trying to focus on that. The main concern that I have with some of the stable coins out there is how you know guaranteed are the the reserve you know, is as a reserve really what the stable coin is? You know, are we taking risk
behind it or not? And so I think for us that's been the main concern when we are looking at potentially disting a stable coin, and we want to make sure that, you know, if all customers are trying to redeem their USDC or whatever stable coin, they can get actually access to the cash and there is not going to be a risk of a deep bag or anything like that. But I think, you know, stableard grind stable coin has been like a huge traction for the world
crypto world. I think a lot of cases that you're seeing people using crypto for has been stable because are able to send money easily. They are also able to use it as a safe event because they prefer to hold a stable coin versus something else like their local currency or something like that. So, you know, we think that giving access to it is very important in terms
of us launching it. At this point, we have nothing to announce, but you know, if if we are planning to do it, I will make sure to come back here.
Yeah. Look, I think it would absolutely make sense for robin For my opinion, it makes sense for robin Hood to do that. And your ecosystem is pretty big, you got a lot of customers you're expanding globally that that would work out pretty well. US back stable coin. Maybe in a eurobackstable coin I would use different. Yeah. All right, let's talk a bit about like crypto regulations. Obviously in the United States we don't have the clarity. The SEC
is sending wells notice to everybody. I know they sent one to you guys, coin based UNISWAP, my uncle, my aunt, right, everybody, It's it's kind of ridiculous at this point. You know, what's Robin Hood's outlook on this? And are you guys planning to fight back like the rest of the industry, you know, if it goes to the court, is Robinhood prepared to fight the SEC?
Overall? What I would say to be to begin with is that we've we've been very disappointed when when we received the well's notice. We were engaging with the SEC for for many many months, and you know, when the SEC chairman told the industry come in and register, we
actually believed in it and we went there. We met with them more than fifteen times, and you know, we discussed with them to try to get there because we as a company have been regulated from the beginning, right Like if you think about robin Hood, it's regulated by funeral Art, it's regulated by the SEC on the brokerage side, on the cryptic side, we have licenses across the US. So really, when you think about that, it's hard to imagine that we could not come in and register and
get the right things in place to get there. So we were very disappointed. At the end of the day, you know, we felt like it was kind of something that every crypto company, if they start to be a big they are basically going to get one at this point, so it's it's becoming a bit of a weird situation. And yeah, we are definitely ready to, you know, keep pushing on this, like we want to keep pushing on the regulator to give access to crypto and make sure that we are going to be able to keep offer it.
We think that crypto easier to stay, you know, So at this point we've been focusing on innovating and on pushing on our road map and at the same time we'll keep fighting for the cloudy that we need. The thing that is a bit you know, frustrating for me,
especially as a as a French guy. So I'm European, and you know, when I moved here from from France, I moved in the US because really I felt like the US was top of class in terms of innovation, in terms of helping companies, especially technology call company like internet companies and all these things to get it upright and running very quickly and really be able to expand. And you know, it sounds like for some reason. On the crypto space, it's been the opposite, and you know,
there have been a bunch of blockers. And if you look at the other side, the EU are starting to actually embrace crypto and they developed the Mega Framework that is going to be live in twenty twenty five. Really you know, helping companies to build in the space. And you know, regulation have their own issues. So not everything
on the Mega Framework is amazing. I will you agree with that, but at the end of the day, the advantage at least is that there is something and that you can use this framework to understand what you can do or not do and how you can do it, you know, with that conform with the regulation. So I'm hoping you know that the US tax position and hopefully a favorable position, you know I right now, if you look at the world, they are like a bit of
two classes. You have the countries like China for examples, that I've created a ban on crypto, and you have countries like the US where they actually created a framework. So I'm hoping that we get into the direction of the framework and that we will be getting clidys so that once and for all, like US, companies can strive in the business and we can offer safely to customer like the products that they want.
Yeah, well said, And I'm hoping twenty twenty five is a year we get something here in the US because this year the FIT twenty one bill made it out of the House. That was surprising that you know, a bunch of Democrats joined Republicans to get it done. So there seems to be some momentum. And you have presidential candidates like Donald Trump, Barkay Jr. You have been talking about crypto, they want to embrace it and so forth.
So I'm hoping fingers crossed that the Senate can get their version of the bill through early next year and exit that a president and becomes law. That would be really great.
For absolutely absolutely agree. I think you know, at the end of the day, we and it's something in the crypto world where you know, a lot of the the decentralized world doesn't want any regulation or anything like this, and so we are not necessarily on the opposite side. But I think when you look at what happened in the past ten years on crypto, we also saw a lot of scam. We saw the FGX, we saw the mongogues and all these things. So having some regulation I
think will prevent some of his issues. You know, having clear roles on custody, for example, is not a bad idea. Not becoming link funds between firm and customer. It sounds like not a bad idea either, you know, like this kind of basic thing that company like us are abiding because we think it's it's important. But you know, forcing some of the other companies not a bad idea. But I think, you know, hopefully twenty twenty five is a year, like you said.
Yeah for sure. Now you mentioned Robin Hood's crypto roadmap, can you tell us a bit about what else is on your roadmap for the remainder of this year and if there's anything for let's take Q one twenty twenty five.
Yeah, so you know, I can't go super deep in the details until we announce things. But usually what we've been focusing on for the best couple of quarters, and what we're going to keep focusing on, is on the on the US side, really pushing on the user experience. You know, really want to make it more accessible, We want to make it more user friendly. So we've been helping a lot of some some of the customers to get into the space and apply the right trading strategy
that they've been looking for. And in the EU, we're going to keep adding features. You know, it's still a new product. In the EU, we are not at the point where we can feel like, you know, we see
is UH ready for for everybody. You know, we're still adding a lot of features, and it's going to be something that we're going to keep doing for for this year and and next year, and and really the goal for us at the end of the day is going to keep bridging the gap between crypto and stratify and and so I think robil is a very unique position there. You know, we have customers that are able to to trade the two different type of product, and we want to make sure that they can do it safely on
the platform. I think the last really thing that we we can say on the on the U S side is we're going to keep trying to push for lowering our cost and making sure that we can offer the loways cost on the platform for UH for almost all the customers and making sure that it's available for everyone.
Mm hmmm, are there plans? And I apologize, I don't know if I missed this or I didn't see this. Are you guys playing to do anything with NFTs? Eventually I know there's there isn't clarity there and we saw open Sea just got a wells notice as well. But once there's clarity, you know, are you planning to expand
to NFTs? And not just from everybody, but let's say legit artists, right, people who even if it's like Taylor Swift was like I'm releasing one hundred NFTs with Robinhood list things like that.
Yeah, so you know it's definitely something we so so for any product that we have on the platform or
for everything, we really look at customer feedback. So we have teams of user researcher that are going into the uh on on the ground and that are going to meet with customers and trying to understand what do you like, what do you not like about Robbinhood and then you know, at very very low level details, So they will go through some of the flow with customers and and try to see their reaction, try to see how they interact with the product, and and our goal is to really
learn and understand what's missing, and that's how sometimes we make change in the in the products it's it's from this customer feedback loop that we were getting, and so NFT was something that was really requested a lot, not so much on Robbio Crypto itself, like the product, but
on the wallet. You know a lot of people wanted to be able to go and open see and trade on open See or their NFT marketplace, and so that's why we we made it kind of a prime feature on the wallet and so you can have all your your n f T there, you can access all the marketplace there. We also did some partnership in the past. One one of them was fairly recently where you could meet and get an n f T for free on the platform, and we've seen a lot of engagement with it,
so you know, definitely something that we love. I think NFT have a ton of future. Also, there is a there's a basic NFT that just do like you know, the the image or however I want to go is the art. But there are things where NFTR being used for a lot more like for access to concerts or things like that, and so I think for us it's going to be a pretty important part of ostrategy and making sure that you know, people can can do it if they want it. Yeah.
Absolutely, I'm excited for the future iteration and adoption of NFTs that I've been seeing folks at chain Link they're doing like dynamic n f ts, like for example, both take a house deed and it's turned into an n f T and then it gets updated automatically with changes on the land, changes to the house, you do maintenance. It's amazing the future potential for this technology and even just concert tickets some artists and how that can be used and include special perks and benefits, and then the
secondary markets and so forth. It's pretty core doable stuff.
Yeah, I agree, And I think the dynamic ones are really cool. One day months ago, so I saw one where it was a reflection of the stock market and it was changing based on you know, what was happening on the market, And you know, it's kind of cool to have heart that can change based on what's going on in the real world and it's not just something fixed in time. So I'm really excited about it. I think we will stop seeing a lot more. And you know, I think we saw a lot of disruption in the
space as well. You know, from the original model from from Open Sea to what we are today, Like a lot of things have changed, and I think that's that's not going to stop anytime soon.
I want to get your thoughts on bitcoin adoption because you've seen it, you know, from a while back, and we got et aps. Now we have companies putting it on their balance sheet as a reserve asset, right and this is happening globally. I think there's a Japanese company, Meta Planet. Obviously, you got micro Strategy year, Tesla SpaceX, and I know some smaller companies around the world are doing this. And then I'm hearing rumblings of energy companies.
They want to mine bitcoin they can monetize the excess energy and wasted energy. You got El Salvador has made it a legal tender. You know, what are your thoughts on the future adoption? Are we going to see more of this? Are we going to see maybe central banks eventually hold bitcoin as they do gold as a reserve.
Yeah, you know, I think I think so many things can happen, so like you know, the reserve question, Like we even heard during the Bitcoin Nashville President Trump mentioning that it was thinking about creating one. So you know, I think it's it's something that can definitely happen. I'm a lot more interested into the innovation in the space. You know, what people are building with the lightning network. A lot of things that have been created there and
I think can solve a lot of issues. Lightning technical implementation is still fairly complicated for a lot of companies to implement. But now you're starting to see startups really simplifying this and and kind of creating the raales for you and you don't have to deal with the channel concept of lightning and all these things. I think the energy one was also something that was very interested in.
You know, there is always kind of this like bad reputation around bitcoin and crypto engineer around like the cost for for energy, even though that if you look at the most recent kind of analysis, it sounds like more than the majority of the of the mining energy is already clean energy. But I think if we can start looking at that to help offset some of the costs for these new energies, I think that's that's really interesting when you when you think about you know, solar production
and wind production. A lot of times the issue is not so much into during the energy, but it's seemedto getting into it, into the grid, and oftentimes like either hope, we don't have the right connection system to put in place, or there is a very long list before you can connect your new wind or solar farm to the grid, and it will take you years before you can do that. And so a lot of projects are actually being can
soled because of that reason. And so I think if we can use crypto to actually upset that and make it more profitable and push people into the space, that's a game changer for the planet. So definitely a big supporter of that.
Yeah, absolutely, I'm excited, you know, to see how Web three evolves, see how big one gets adopted. You know, I got in twenty sixteen and it was scary. It was no any you know, it wasn't news like this. It was more of the foot right of oh, this is all a scam, ponzi this and that. Now it's a completely different narrative. So I'm actually excited. It's like entering I don't know if you want to call it hyper bitcoinization and just mainstream adoption.
So it's exciting times. I think mainstream adoption is the right word, you know, Like the fact that just the ETF the creation of the ETF when you think about it, right, like to your point twenty twelve sixteen, like people were still thinking it was a scam. Now you have this massive institution getting into the space. So I think it's it's a very different world. And that's kind of the
beauty of blockchain technologies or crypto in general. It's been to see at the speed that things have been moving, Like the Bitcoin took a bit of a while before kind of breaking things, but then you started to see them and the adoption of new layers on ism and all this thing. It's been. It's been really exciting.
Yeah, for sure. All right, Johanna, I got some wrap up questions there for you. First, if you could create your own metaverse, what would the team be?
Oh, that's a good question. I love comic books, so I think I will create something ready to comic books and you can be your own kind of hero and build your own world around yourself.
That's great, And so I grew up reading tons of comic books, X Men everything. Marvel had some DC as well, so I have to ask what's your favorite comic book?
So I actually love some that are like European based, Belgian based, actually, but on the US world, I will say, like Spider Man was probably one of my favorites as well.
Oh for sure. Yeah, I'll let you know about this. I've been collecting some of the rare CGC graded comic books as like an investment because they grow in value, right if you have them in good grades. So I have some Spider Man, had some X Men and stuff like that I've been collecting over the years.
Do you have a conversion of that as well to exchange or not yet?
Not yet, but you know I'm looking at I seriously thought about that. You know, how can I tell you, you know, create a market on it?
So absolutely, I think that's really like the real world. I said, it's all going to become part of the tumorrow type of trading. Absolutely.
Yeah, I'm excited to monetize some of these collectables. I have all right, rapid fire questions, favorite food, pro lasagna, favorite musician or band.
That's too odd. That will really depends on my mood. Again, and someone will listen to everything from electro to metal to classical music, so it will it will already depend on the mood. Favorite movie I don't know as well. I have a lot of classic h that I really love.
And also on the technical side, when I was like young and becoming an engineer, I watched some movie like Anti Trust and any things like that, and I was like, oh, this is so awesome to be a hacker and to be able to quickly go into building like new software. So yeah, anything like that. Nice favorite book probably twenty dozen leagues And there's a c a very old book
from from back in the days. But when I was young, it was the first book I've read and made me think about science fiction and really gave me the love for science fiction and thinking about what's out there and get into that world.
And when you're not working at Robinhood, what are you doing for fun?
So I have a two year old now, so a lot of time just playing with him and building legos and stuff like that. But something I love also is woodworking, So love to build things. As a as an engineer, you always write things on the screen, but being able to do it person and build something with your hand, it's really cool.
M hmm, Johan, pleasure chatting with you. I'm really excited for the future updates around Robinhood. Like I said, I'm a user, so I'm keeping a close eye and I would love to have you back on you know, when you guys make the big announcements. But thank you so much for joining me anytimes.
Thank you for having me. What's great