This article was compiled and organized by BlockWeeks
This week's notable developments in the crypto space centered on three main threads: Robinhood officially announced its self-built blockchain Robinhood Chain and is aggressively advancing stock tokenization; its perpetual contracts product for the EU market contrasts with the perpetual contracts Coinbase launched in the United States; and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is working to establish a "fast-track" approval standard for crypto ETFs.
Robinhood's Tokenization Leap
At this week's EthCC conference, Robinhood officially unveiled its long-awaited plan: launching its own blockchain, Robinhood Chain, based on the Arbitrum Orbit tech stack. This brokerage, led by co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev, has long been one of the most active supporters of blockchain and tokenization. The company's optimistic stance on this technology has sparked considerable speculation about its implementation path and chain-selection approach. Ultimately, Robinhood chose to build an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible Layer 2 based on the Arbitrum Orbit tech stack, complementing its core trading business.
In this system, users can still trade stocks as usual through the Robinhood App, but an on-chain "token engine" generates tokenized derivatives of the corresponding assets for users. Users can transfer these tokens to anyone with an on-chain wallet (at least a whitelisted wallet), interact with other on-chain applications, and self-custody the tokens in their own wallets—all things that traditional securities cannot achieve.
According to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, the actual underlying stocks are custodied by a U.S. broker-dealer, and the token engine then creates a layer of "token wrapper" for these assets. When users buy or sell tokenized stocks, the operation triggers the corresponding minting or burning of tokens, allowing users to trade the underlying assets at real market prices while accessing the asset's off-chain liquidity.
Controversially, Robinhood allows EU users to trade tokens indirectly linked to equity in private companies such as OpenAI and SpaceX. OpenAI specifically distanced itself from Robinhood's move, emphasizing on social media that these tokens are not equity in the AI company and that the company was not involved.
Sovereign Blockspace: TradFi's New Battleground
Robinhood's demonstration offers a glimpse into what it means for traditional finance (TradFi) institutions to integrate blockchain. It is becoming increasingly clear that these institutions want sovereign blockspace under their own control. For them, the greatest value-add and disruptive point of this technology lies in 24/7 trading.
For companies looking to build sovereign blockspace, Rollups have become a popular model. Under this model, the barrier to building a chain is lower for companies, because Rollups do not require a full validator set and staking; the company only needs to run a sequencer it can fully control. This model also provides companies with an additional revenue stream—directly monetizing on-chain activity by capturing all on-chain transaction fees, rather than distributing them among numerous validators, while retaining complete freedom of customization.
Take Base, the Rollup operated by Coinbase, as an example: its sequencer fees exceed $150,000 per day on average, and after deducting the costs of operating the Rollup (such as on-chain data costs, fees paid to the OP Superchain, and cloud and hardware costs), the net proceeds go directly to Coinbase. In Robinhood's case, "operating a sequencer + holding on-chain tokenized assets" creates a powerful synergy: the company can monetize its blockspace by encouraging developers to build applications around these specific tokenized assets. This strategy effectively turns blockspace into a sellable commodity, allowing Robinhood to monetize the entire "tokenization stack" from off-chain trading to on-chain utility.
A key focus of Robinhood's demonstration is immediately achieving 24/5 trading, and ultimately achieving 24/7 trading once Robinhood Chain goes live. Bitstamp, the crypto exchange Robinhood recently acquired, is expected to play a key role in this vision, serving as the venue to facilitate off-chain trading of tokenized assets during non-trading hours on weekdays. The market's shift to a 24-hour trading model has far-reaching implications: it is largely good for users, who can trade at any time, improving the experience of holding traditional assets; but it also brings new risks—when assets trade around the clock, prices may fluctuate while users are offline.
If traditional markets do not evolve to meet the 24/7 standard set by institutions like Robinhood, the consequences will be even more disruptive. Robinhood's tokenization efforts effectively pull assets out of traditional market trading processes and plug them directly into blockchain rails (or Bitstamp) to enable 24-hour trading. This directly challenges the deep concentration of liquidity and activity in traditional markets.
Coinbase's "American-Style" Perpetual Contracts
Coinbase's perpetual contracts product launched in the United States presents a unique price structure under regulatory constraints. Its contract prices are adjusted by the funding rate: the larger the futures basis and the further the perpetual contract mark price deviates from the spot price, the more the funding rate tends toward positive, thereby pushing the perpetual price back near the spot price. This dynamic depends to a large extent on the specific details of the funding rate calculation, but the product may offer a fairly attractive hedging option for U.S. institutional capital.
If the product structure is as described above, Coinbase's American-style perpetual contracts should persistently trade above the spot price, thereby maintaining a positive funding rate. This structural funding rate dynamic makes it an ideal short leg for delta-neutral funds such as Ethena and Abraxas; however, precisely these funding rate characteristics that make it attractive as a hedging tool make it less attractive to long-biased investors. Nevertheless, futures contracts enjoy tax advantages—profits and losses are taxed at a 60/40 long-term/short-term rate—which may still attract investors compared with trading spot ETFs.
Under regulatory constraints, this is an interesting solution from Coinbase. However, during this transitional period when the market awaits the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to decide how to regulate the growing onshore perpetual contracts market, it may be merely a "liminal space."
SEC Plans to Open a "Fast Track" for Crypto ETFs
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) plans to establish a "generic standard" for token-based ETFs and is currently in discussions with various exchanges to create a common template for issuers applying for crypto ETF approval.
The current process requires issuers to submit comprehensive S-1 disclosure documents to the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance, while exchanges must go through the 19b-4 listing approval process of the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets. These two processes often involve repeated iterations, with issuers and exchanges submitting revised documents multiple times based on consultations. If the "generic standard" is implemented, the pace of crypto ETF approvals is expected to accelerate significantly.
