Robinhood CEO Claims ‘Crypto Will Replace Traditional Finance’

Financial services giant Robinhood continues to double down on its pro-crypto posture as its CEO, Vlad Tenev, tells CNBC that crypto will eventually replace traditional markets.

Tenev suggested that instead of looking at crypto as a market of assets that can be traded or invested in, it should be viewed as an infrastructure layer.

“I do think that [for] crypto itself, there’s two ways to look at it. One is a tradable asset like options, futures, and equities, the other is at the fundamental underlying technology. In the second lens, it's the next stage in evolution. We’ve gone from paper and pencil, filing cabinet-based financial services, to mainframe, to on-premise, and more recently cloud; now crypto is the next stage in that,” said Tenev.

Robinhood first introduced Bitcoin and Ethereum to its clients in 2018, and went on to become the preferred trading platform for retail traders during the 2021 cycle, when users flocked to buy assets like Dogecoin.

The company also has its own self-custodial crypto wallet and launched a crypto deposit match program yesterday, which offers customers a 1% match on crypto deposits to the platform. This move sent the stock soaring more than 6% on the day, with HOOD stock now up more than 11% over the last five business days and 95% since the beginning of 2025.

HOOD Chart - TradingView

Robinhood is also reportedly developing a 24/7 marketplace for trading tokenized stocks in Europe on either Arbitrum, Ethereum, or Solana. If approved, the move would mark a major milestone for the company as it outpaces crypto-native entities that are also working to offer tokenized stock trading, such as Coinbase and Hyperliquid.