What happened
Robinhood head of crypto Johann Kerbrat told Decrypt in an interview published Friday that Robinhood Chain, the company's in-development layer-2 network, is being architected to support two customer profiles simultaneously. Kerbrat called them 'two wolves' living inside the same product. One wolf is the customer who wants tokenized stocks, tokenized private company shares, and other regulated real-world assets on-chain.
The other is the customer who wants meme coins and the kind of high-velocity speculation Robinhood built its retail brokerage on. 'We want to show customers that we care about what they care about,' Kerbrat said, per Decrypt. The framing is unusual because most institutional-leaning L2s launched over the past 18 months have publicly distanced themselves from meme trading.
Kerbrat's pitch is the opposite: don't pick, host both.
Why it matters
Robinhood has more than 25 million funded accounts and a crypto business that generated a meaningful chunk of its 2025 revenue after the firm's Bitstamp acquisition closed. When Kerbrat lays out product philosophy, it's not theoretical. It's what tens of millions of retail traders will see when Robinhood Chain ships.
The 'two wolves' framing also lands as a direct contrast to Coinbase's Base, which has leaned toward payments and institutional pilots, and Kraken's Ink, which has courted DeFi builders. If Robinhood ships an L2 where a tokenized Apple share and a dog-themed meme coin live in the same wallet, that's a distribution advantage neither Base nor Ink currently matches. It also creates a compliance surface area regulators haven't seen tested at this scale.