NEAR Adds Robinhood Chain to Its Multichain App

$NEAR added Robinhood Chain to its near.com app, enabling deposits, withdrawals, payments and cross-chain swaps involving the network’s $ETH and $USDG, the project announced on Oct. 7.

$NEAR says users can swap those tokens against more than 180 assets across more than 30 chains. The underlying $NEAR Intents token directory lists Robinhood-chain $ETH and $USDG, alongside assets including BTC on Bitcoin, SOL on Solana and USDC on Ethereum, Base and Arbitrum.

The addition gives users another way to move value onto and off the Arbitrum-based Layer 2, which launched its public mainnet on July 1. It is access to the blockchain through $NEAR’s interface, rather than a connection to brokerage balances: Robinhood says the chain operates independently of its main app and brokerage or crypto accounts.

Bridges Move Behind the Interface

Near.com uses $NEAR Intents for swaps. Users specify the assets they have, what they want and the destination, while competing market makers—also called solvers—handle execution. The protocol’s documentation describes smart-contract verification of the agreed swap.

“No navigating bridges, no new app,” $NEAR said. That removes a user-facing step, not the underlying bridge infrastructure. $NEAR Intents’ bridge documentation says it uses multiple bridges to move assets between its verifier contract and external blockchains, each with its own trust model. Near.com’s terms also say assets may be held or controlled within bridge infrastructure during transfers.

Robinhood Chain already has several cross-chain routes. Its canonical bridge connects to Ethereum, with deposits typically taking about 10 minutes and withdrawals requiring a seven-day challenge period. Robinhood also lists faster alternatives, including intents-based bridges Relay and Across and one-step swap-and-bridge aggregators.

Costs can include interface, swap-service, bridge and network fees, according to near.com’s terms, which say the app displays estimated proceeds net of fees before execution. The linked fee schedule also splits favorable execution-price improvements equally between the user and the protocol for cross-asset swaps filled while a quote is fresh—within about 30 minutes of issuance.