Robinhood’s Big Bet on Crypto, AI & Tokenized Stocks

The advantage of Bitcoin is and crypto in general is that it's 24/7. So I think we are going to slowly get into this world where you will see 24/7 trading. I think it's important for accessibility. I think to trade the news. The reality of Robin has been you know removing the friction, removing fees when possible, reducing as much as possible the barrier to entry and also bringing all these educational tools that you have on the platform to make it just a thing that you can actually do because now you're learning and you know what to do moving forward. — What's going on guys? Today we got a great conversation with Johan Kerbat. In this conversation he is going to explain exactly what is going on at Robin Hood. They're one of the fastest growing retail platforms in the world. They've been embracing crypto prediction markets, equities, tokenization, and much more. He is the SVP and general manager of crypto and international at Robin Hood. And he's going to not only explain what they're doing from a product standpoint, but also how they're building products internally, what their investors are doing on the platform, and then we get deep in the details. What's he doing on the platform? how's he using some of the products for his family and he also helps us better understand what is going on with artificial intelligence both in the market and at Robin Hood. This conversation is packed. I also give him a little bit of a hard time cuz he's French and you know from America's perspective we got to give him a hard time. Here's my latest conversation with Johan Kerbat. All right, Johan. I thought a great spot is uh there's a lot of geopolitical uncertainty right now. Obviously there's missiles dropping in the Middle East. People are trying to figure out what's going on. We've seen bonds, Bitcoin, and gold all do things that we did not expect. We saw bonds go down. We saw gold go down. and Bitcoin went up and so I think a lot of people are scratching their head and saying what is going on you guys have one of the largest retail trading platforms in the world you get to see what are they doing are they buying are they selling are they panicked are they cool and collected — yeah I mean it's it depends of the weekend because so many things happen in the past few weekends but what we've seen so far is that a lot of our customer are actually uh taking advantage of the deep and trying to stay afloat of what is happening on the market um bitcoin has been difficult. You know, it's been going up and down, but so far it's been fairly resilient if you look at the past 12 months since last February. Um, so you know, overall, I think what the advantage of Bitcoin is and crypto in general is that it's 247. So when something happened on the weekend, uh, people can actually use that to trade and use this information to actually take a position. — And when you see the weekend chaos, one of the things I find very interesting is, you know, Trump, for some reason, he waits till, you know, 4:01 p. m. on Friday. He'll say something good or bad — aftermarket stuff will uh will react. Obviously crypto will react and then somehow someway every Sunday afternoon right you know an hour before futures open he'll say something else and market will move again. You guys have been one of the pioneers I think of the after hours trading and trying to get as close to 245 as possible. What's kind of the state of that now and do you see different behavior during the after hours trading? — Yeah, absolutely. So 245 is already live for us. So it start uh on Sunday at 8:00 p. m. and it it goes all the way. Um it's not for all the tickers. So we have a limited function but at the end of the day it's really interesting because I think to your point uh on weekend there are things happening but also at night uh during the week and also for some of our customers that are in the UK for example they want to be able to access the market uh when they're awake and not wait for the US to come in. I think to trade the news and also to you know balance everybody because basically at some point on Sundays you have future that opens a bit before the market. Uh and so the people that are a bit less sophisticated we're using uh we're waiting for you know the stock market to open. And when these investors are coming in and they're looking at this stuff, you guys now have stocks, you've got uh crypto, you've got prediction markets. Um you seem to really kind of be pushing uh along the way. How siloed is it? Like are investors just saying, "Hey, I'm a stock investor. Let me stick with stocks. " Or do you see a lot of cross promotion? — No, that's one of the big advantage of Robin. So you have all of it in one place. You know, you also have options. You also have futures now. Um and I think that's the beauty of the platform is that you can really go from one asset to the other without having to transfer between platform and you can also create complex uh strategies. Uh so we see people for example buying the ETF, buying the spot crypto. uh we see people doing hedging with prediction market or with futures for their position and I think that's really becoming more and more complicated and now with you know AI coming in place and uh you will see more and more of these strategies happening in in the market but I think for us what we've been really focused is accessibility we think that if you want to have all your financial investment all your wallet into Robin Hood you need to be able to access to all these products and we shouldn't be the one like deciding which product is good for the customer or not, which would give them access and the educational tool for them to make sure that they understand what they're doing. — You think people are using prediction markets for hedging or you think they're just speculating and gambling and all that? — I mean, I think it's a combination

right? Like there is definitely uh people that are using it more because they are interested into sports for example. Uh but we see a lot of people using some of the new contract that we have. For example, AI is an example I like to give where if you want to invest in AI right now. You can pick a stock, you can pick like, you know, Nvidia, AMD, maybe Google. Uh, but it still gives a lot of flexibility into what is going to be return. Maybe Nvidia is going to miss a quarter or maybe they are contract or something like that where a contract on AI is a lot simpler and has only like so many outcomes for the customer. And so I think that's really important and that gives a lot of this investor and other options for them to um invest in the market basically. Yeah, it is interesting when you think of almost there's like sophisticated contracts that you know people are trying to do and then the ones that I just I'm like what are we doing here are like you know how long's the press conference going to be right or what color someone's tie like that's just pure speculation and maybe there's entertainment value to it right but uh I don't think anyone's hedging you know let me hedge on the Gatorade color on at the halftime show — that's fair and you know Robin Hood is actually spending a lot of time into which contract releas on the platform for example we don't do any of the mention contracts uh there are a lot of things that we put on the platform we've been working with regulator for a long time. Uh we know what can be a problem or not and so uh there are a lot of these contracts that we stay away from and we focus a bit more on what can have an impact on you know actual prediction basically. — Yeah. So it's trying to be more thoughtful just about what you guys put there. Um so one of the interesting stats about Robin Hood I think now there's eight different business lines that do at least $100 million of revenue if uh if I remember correctly. Um the just ship shipping speedway is it more? — A bit more. 11 — more. Okay. It's 11 now. So, you have 11 different business lines with $100 million. All right, I got to update my facts. Um, you guys are just shipping at this incredible speed and it does feel like uh it's kind of like a bunch of startups inside one big company. Can you talk about just like how do you guys build products internally? And it does feel like maybe you guys are getting faster now with the rise of AI and I'm assuming that that's playing into some of this. — Yeah, it's a combination. I think we have a very good structure. So, basically every of his product line are almost a little startup within the company. Um and I think you know Vlad or CEO and the entire company has really put a good structure where uh each business line can push a bit on their direction but also we want to create this cohesive UI and UX so that you don't feel like you're jumping between different apps when you're just going between you know crypto and equities for example. Um but we also invested a lot into some of these new seeds and so you're just seeing them materialize now. For example, credit card. Uh banking is also another new seed that is getting really successful uh return and feedback from our customers. Um AI has also definitely played a role. Uh you know our engineer are all using uh AI to not just write code but review code. Um also like start thinking you know when they're not working for example. Um, and so we see more and more of our code being shipped through AI or by AI directly. And I think that's really going to be just a beginning to be honest. And I think there's so much to do if we really want to um that you know having tools like this is really important. But for us AI is not just a tool for internal usage. We're also using it for external customer feature. For example, uh one that I particularly love is Cortex. uh we create this digest that we give you for any stock any crypto um and it's updated like almost real time and so when you see a notification popping up saying like the Bitcoin is up for example you tap on it you will see a digest of what's happening on the market and so you save a lot of time you and you're able to really stay on top of the news which I think was something that was missing before because you will have to go on X go on different news website you will miss something and by the time that you're finally up to speed the market has moved. Um, so being able to have all these tools within the app, I think is pretty crucial. — And how do you guys think about just as we get like more into the engineering of it, right? How do you think about using the major US uh model companies? How do you think about taking offtheshelf like open source thing and then you know fine-tuning it yourself like you know you've been running engineering teams for a long time, right? So how do you think through some of the decision- making for a company that's obviously got a lot of resources but you can do them with anything, right? So like the prioritization becomes pretty important. Yeah, we use a lot of the models that exist already. Um we've been testing different ones. We see which one are better for different type of usage. So for example, engineer like uh one specific model more than our compliance team or marketing team. Uh but I think we we're still at the very beginning. I it's crazy to think you know one year ago, 12 months ago how far we've come along with AI. And it used to be that you will look at it as an engineer, you'll be like, "Okay, it's helpful, but it's not there yet. " Now, it's actually really powerful. And the amount of tools that you can build within just a weekend just playing with AI has been really

cool. We have a crypto API for example that is available. And a few times over the past weekend, I've been like working on a little bot that is using the API to trade and I've done that just like in a few hours. So, it's been really cool to see. when you start thinking about how the acceleration is impacting our team, it's really interesting because for us we are still you know very US first uh company. We are starting to expand internationally and for all of that we'll need to build features that are more and more personalized and more localized for every country. So having AI tools that are going to help us there is pretty critical. — Yeah. Now, you guys have started to build technology not just in traditional software UIUX type stuff, but now you're building a L2 as well. Um, all right. So, this is a little crazy. Um, by the way, I have a theory. I don't know if you're going to like this or not, but here's my theory is uh I think that you guys and Coinbase are locked in this mimemetic war and almost don't haven't even realized it yet. It's like every time you guys do something, they do it. Every time they do something, you guys do it. And what's fascinating to me is you guys are coming from the equity world, right? and pushing towards this like, hey, we want to offer all these different markets. They're pushing from the crypto world and frankly the winner is the consumer. — Absolutely. — Right. Like you guys are fighting it out so much, but it's this amazing battle. Like if you're just a student of business or technology watching this happen, like obviously the consumer is winning at the end of the day, right? But talk about this L2 you guys are building. — Yeah. And to your point, I think you're totally right. I think the more competition, the better it is for the customer. It reduce fees. It creates innovation. And so I think that's a great thing for Americans in general that we have like all these big company fighting each other. Um I wouldn't say we copy — a Frenchman saying that's a big deal. — Well true. But you know I have an American citizenship now. Um but the you know the reality is that I don't think we copy everything that Coinbase does. Like for example they launch an NFT marketplace. We never did. I think for us what's really critical is — um thinking about our own customers. We spend a lot of time talking to them uh doing user research. We discuss we try to understand what are the issues that they are seeing. — Um one of them was this idea of um tokenization for stocks for example like we see a lot of people not able to access US stocks and US ETF because they are in a location where getting a US brokerage is difficult. Uh we also see issue with settlement instant settlement or T plus1 settlement is still a thing here in the US. uh 247 is still not there and so at some point we're like okay we need a technology to build all this and we can either use an existing one like we could use any L1 we could create our own um we found a combination of the two uh we wanted to have the decentralization of Ethereum the security of Ethereum um and also the liquidity that is available in all the EVM uh space and so that's why we decided to do an L2 um that way we can customize everything that we want to do to really make the Robon chain like the best real world asset chain and at the same time have all the benefit of Ethereum. So that's how we get to there and we launched a test net recently. We are at 45 million transaction more or less and I think that's really uh the most exciting part is like we see developer are excited to build on the chain. uh we see that they are not you know frustrated by so many chains they're just thinking about how do we get the distribution from Rob Robin Hood how do we get connected to the tools and products that Robin Hood is building and I think that's pretty critical — yeah it is um this rise I call them independent investors right they're like uh people who are getting all their information online they don't care what the mainstream media says so they're thinking independently then they want control they don't trust a lot of financial adviserss and stuff like hey I want to make the decisions and live or die with the results and then they're chasing some degree of financial independence, right? They they've been convinced my W2 is not going to get me my financial goal and so I got to go do this. And so that independent investor that thinks, acts, and chasing financial independence. Um that feels like that is the fastest growing segment of finance and you guys are one of the leaders in helping them have the tools to go and actually access the market. — Yeah, I think it's one of our big customer segment, but we also have a lot of customer at Robin that are first-time investor. Um and I think for a very long time these people felt like managing your finance was complicated. You needed to get an advisor, go to a bank, uh you could only do certain things, only invest in some specific funds. And what Robin Hood did is really took down the barrier to entry. And you can open an account uh pretty easily. You can invest with as low as $1 in some different stocks or crypto. And I think that's really what people were missing for a long time. And if you think about it, we've done that multiple times for every product that we launch. For example, we launch um IAS uh where we give you a match. Uh like if you are working at a big company and you open a 41k, we do that for IRA for anyone. And so for people that are, you know, driving for Uber and like all their like um uh jobs like this, it's

like a pretty big difference from not having a match at all, not having any retirement instrument to being able to do that and still self-direct and pick what uh stocks you want to invest in. So I think the reality of Robin has been you know removing the friction, removing fees when possible, reducing uh as much as possible the barrier to entry and also bringing all these educational tools that you have on the platform to make it u just a thing that you can actually do because now you're learning and you know what to do moving forward. Yeah, it is um this like gig economy like there's all these like new types of jobs that are happening now and I think one of the promises has been hey there's going to be these ways to access the market that obviously people want. What about like stable coins? Are you seeing you know uh people get paid in stable coins, use this stuff like what are you seeing there? — Yeah, we see a lot of uh usage of stable on the platform. We are more like a on-ramp off ramp. Um so people basically come to Robin Hood buy USDC transfer to their wallet or transfer to different platform that they are using and vice versa like people that get paid for example USDC transfer to Robin Hood and then convert to cash. Um what we see the most usage on our side is also between institution and between uh the market maker we work with the liquidity providers all of them uh we work with them 24/7. So when it's Saturday, we can't wait for the Fed wire to open on Monday, right? So we use stable coin for that. Um and I think, you know, you go to some places in the world, they actually prefer you to receive like stable coin versus cash because they can verify that it's real. It's not like a fake bill and whatever and they can actually use it everywhere they go. — Yeah, it um it is definitely a product that has product market fit. I always say like Bitcoin, stable coins, exchanges, tokenization is I think the fourth, you know, thing that everyone is looking for it to be successful. Um, you guys have what 2,000 different stocks I think now. Uh, but interestingly, you have 2,000 stocks in Europe. — Yeah, that's right. — On chain. — That's right. — And do you offer them in the US or just in Europe? Not yet. — Okay. So, is that a regulatory thing or a product decision or a combination? — A combination of the two. I think uh in the EU uh you have already like this uh framework. It's called Mika or Method. Uh it's basically the — a small equivalent of the clarity ax that is being passed in the US. And so we have this framework where we can offer this structure. We call it the stock tokens. We started in June with 200 now we're at 2,000. And so you can see that our engine is working pretty well and that basically you could expand to any asset any reward asset in my opinion. Um stable coin to me is probably the first example of tokenization. uh you took a real asset and then you created a token that represented um and I think for the US there's still a lot of debates we meet regularly with a with the regulators uh we discuss a lot about it um and I think there's a ton of benefits uh instance settlement like we mentioned uh right now if you buy a stock on Friday you're still waiting Monday basically for the real exchange to happen um 24/7 is going to be a pretty big part of it um but I also think the access to all the exchange of the world and to other type of assets, private equity, uh real estate, arts, all these things can be tokenized and can be a lot more accessible if you can go to any exchange and find the tokens that you care about versus currently where you have to find the right platform. You have to invest in specific ways through SPVS and all these kind of things. — Now, when people tokenize these uh assets, there's a couple different ways they've done it. There's like let me take the asset, put in an SPV, tokenize the SPV. There is uh maybe if you go the other uh really far extreme I think Figure Technologies um I was talking to Mike Kagny recently and they will actually let you create native stock that is digital — that doesn't replace is just kind of like its own thing. — Where are you guys right now in terms of how you guys are doing tokenization and then is there like an end goal or thing that you're trying to get to? — Yeah, I think you know there will be a bit of a shift in culture and how you think about tokenization. um the idea for us of like you can directly issue um stocks on the chain we can support it like tokenization engine doesn't really have um any problem to support it but going after every single company that are on the market on NASDAQ or n and asking them to issue a specific amount of their float on chain it's just not scalable um so the way that our system work in the U is that we have a derivative in between that basically track the price of the stock and still give you uh dividend in cash, still give you corporate production results and all these kind of things. Um and I think you know three, four, five years from now probably like the shift will be to direct insurance because a lot more of the uh NY NASDAQ all these people are starting to get on chain and at some point everyone will be on chain and so it will be a disadvantage for you to not do it but we are at step zero basically day one and so I think we just found like a good balance between the

two systems. — Yeah. What have been the downsides or like the big challenges in doing all this? Like are there things that you guys ran into that if you could start over you'd be like hey these are the things we would you know try to solve first? — Um I don't know if I would change things. I think for us if I could start over it would be like coming five years ago and talking to the administration and being like hey we're going to be left behind the EU behind other countries uh where like they have this framework and so it's a bit sad to be honest to uh see some of the progress that we've been able to do in other part of the world. Um but you know I think right now we are seeing a lot of change. We're push around the Genius Act around Clyde. Um and so I think we're in a good path here. — So you're basically saying the uh American trope of uh Europe as a museum is not true. They're ahead when it comes to crypto regulation. — For a bit it was uh crazy to think about it because you know I move away from the EU for that reason because the US was first u but yeah for a bit ma framework was in front of the US. Yeah, — today's episode is brought to you by Abra, the secure way to grow crypto wealth. Abra offers individuals and institutions end-to-end crypto wealth management solutions, including custody, trading, yield, and cryptobacked loans through a unique, separately managed account structure, where title is retained by you, the client. In other words, your assets stay your assets. Abber's been partnering with crypto holders for 8 years and has processed over $2. 5 billion in loans to date. With Abra's loan product, you can access up to 50% of the current value of your collateral. There's no minimum or maximum loan sizes, and Abra can handle 9 figure plus loans. Rates are extremely competitive in the 4. 5 to 6. 5% APY range. Loans are open term, meaning you can keep borrowing against your collateral without closing a loan as the price appreciates. Buy a house, take a trip, make a large purchase, or diversify your investments without selling your Bitcoin. All deposits are held in secure MPC wallets and there is no rehypocation. Find out more at abra. com and tell them Pomp sent you. Again, that's Big Pomp sent you. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account but don't have any crypto in that retirement account? Then listen up. This message is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement. They're helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 80 cryptocurrencies. With world-class customer service, militarygrade encryption, and a vertically integrated licensed trust company, it's no wonder more than 200,000 Americans trust Bitcoin IRA to secure their financial future. Getting started is quick and easy. It takes just 3 minutes to open an account. Once you're set up, their team of IRA specialists will reach out to guide you through every step of the process. Whether you're transferring an IRA from a legacy bank, rolling over an old 401k, or starting fresh with new contribution, the Bitcoin IRA team is here to help you access real crypto in your retirement account. And here's the best part. As a Pomp podcast listener, you can earn up to $1,000 in rewards. All you have to do is add funds to your account. Search for Bitcoin IRA in the app store or visit bitcoinirra. com/pump and you can join 200,000 Americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement. That's bitcoinirra. com/pump to upgrade your retirement today. Um Bitstamp, you were very involved in the acquisition of that. What what's the latest on uh on that acquisition? — Yeah, I mean Bitstamp is doing great. Uh we have a lot of platforms. So basically we have a white label solution where you can create crypto as a service and uh we are seeing banks embedding uh this system so that they can offer crypto to their customer uh — for buying and selling. — Yeah. For buying, selling, holding, staking, all these kind of things. So that's been very encouraging because uh with the regulation coming in a lot more companies want to actually offer crypto to their customer but instead of building everything from scratch, they can use white label solutions like the Bitstamp one. Uh we've also done a lot of work on the technology around the exchange and the matching engine. Uh so we're able to support more and more operation on the platform. So overall uh it's been a great acquisition also allowed us to really get into this institutional business that we were not really present before. We were mostly focused on retail. Um so yeah. — What are you doing on the institutional side? — Um so we work with market maker, hedge fund, family offices, uh ETF provider for example. We source liquidity for them. um the white label solution as well um staking like all of these kind of products basically. — So pretty much you're just taking the retail offering and now saying hey how do we evolve this for the institutions themselves but they want the same end service just maybe in a different wrapper or something — basically and because we built like one of the largest retail platform in the US a lot of people want to be able to use the same type of technology that we built. Um the other advantage that we have is that on Robin Hood we have a lot of this like take your flow basically like the non-toxic flow that is buying and so combining the two with Bitstamp is really helpful for the liquidity on the exchange as well.

— Mhm. That uh that makes sense. Um when you're recruiting people on the team now um are you guys not hiring as many people because of AI or like talk about like the actual team dynamics and like who you're looking for etc. I find it very fascinating that you understand the business side but also the engineering side and AI is kind of hitting both at the same time. Yeah, I think uh you know if you look at our job portal like you can see we still hire quite a lot um because we are really growing as a company uh not just on the crypto side but across the entire company um and like I said before we're also expanding in the rest of the world and so for us we still need to hire a lot of folks uh but I think AI for us we see it as a tool we do a lot of training for example because we have a lot of the current employee that uh didn't necessarily grew up with AI like the new grads that are coming in today. Um, so we do a lot of training. We provide all the tools for people and I think at the end of the day it's going to be a bit of a function of uh making sure that what we build with AI is beneficial for all the teams. So for example uh compliance instead of spending too much time uh reading very specific uh messages or documents how can we use AI to um improve the digest for example so that they don't spend as much time on uh reading a document and we want to do that across the entire company to make sure that we can accelerate uh basically the product that we're trying to ship. So uh at this point I think AI is going to be just a great way for us to optimize everything that we do and also spend less time on things that are maybe the less exciting part of the job and more about thinking about how to build and how to achieve like the goals that we have. — What are your goals for the next like 12 months? — Um internal exp international expansion is really uh a big one for us and then um you know really pushing on advanced traders. Uh for a long time Robin Hood was seen as uh a place to buy crypto but more for the simple side of things. Now we are really pushing on the advanced traders. So uh you can buy crypto as low as three basis point now depending on your volume tier. You can do staking for example that we didn't have for a very long time. Um and we have more and more coins being listed on the platform. So uh for us it's been really interesting to see how we've seen a shift on our customer segment. we see more and more of these advanced traders coming from other platform. Um, and so we are going to continue on this journey. — You mentioned earlier a kind of a discipline as to picking your spot when you guys go to build something versus when you don't. Um, you're building an L2, but I don't think I've heard you guys are building a stable coin. — No. — What is the thought process as to maybe not going into the stable coin game? — Yeah, so actually we join a consortium. It's called the global dollar network. Um, it's issuing a stable coin called USDG. And basically it's a consortium of big companies uh Kraken, OKX, uh Bullish and other are part of it. And so the idea was um the stable coin is going to become a commodity at this point like there's maybe already 50 different stable coin. Um and so there isn't really much that we can do that is going to be different from what USDC or what uh USD is doing. Uh but what we care about was the revenue coming from the stable coin, the what we call the name. we wanted to distribute it with our customer um either institution or either retail if we can uh depending on the regulation and so uh based on that we wanted to find a solution where the revenue is not locked with the issuer um and that's what the consortium is doing so it distributes all the revenue with the member of the consortium uh people can join the consortium it's not just limited to the four company I listed and based on that uh you can actually create a lot more uh tools and features on your product and so we think that's really important. Um and we're just at the beginning on USDG as well. We started to use it internally. Uh we haven't put it in front of our customer yet, but it's going to come soon. — So just to make sure I understand how this consortium works is you guys join a couple other let's just say 10 there's 10 companies total. Uh you take all of the revenue minus whatever it takes to actually run the uh the stable coin and then it gets divvied out probably on like some prooda basis depending on how much volume was yours, right? And then once you guys get that you can do whatever you want. you can put in your pocket, you can give it to your users, whatever. But the whole idea of the consortium is it's kind of like this like decentralized ownership essentially of a stable coin. — Exactly. And the idea was really also — that creates a network effect, right? Uh because uh Kraken and Bullish are going to also use USDG. So when people want to move between this platform, we're already kind of all incentivized to make sure that it's well done where like all these other stable coins that are popping left and right at some point it's it's good for the people that are issuing it, but it's not necessarily good for everyone else. — Uh and I think that was something that was really important to us. Uh the name coming from a stable coin. Right now, if you're a customer and you hold, you know, $10,000 worth of uh USDC on specific platform, you're not going to make any revenue from it. get any yield, any NE no matter

what. Um, but if you're holding $10,000 of cash, you can actually get yield. So, it doesn't really make a ton of sense, right? Like we are making it more complicated for people to use the technology. Um, and so what we thought was we really need to find a way where we can actually pass the yield to customer. — Interesting. Um, you guys have this like open developer uh ecosystem versus you guys have some closed components of the financial infrastructure that you've built. How do you think about whether you kind of open it up or you keep it closed? And is there some framework or decision? And the reason I ask is you mentioned earlier the API allows for your like AI bot to go trade. With the rise of AI, it seems like everyone wants just like, hey, just open it up for me, right? Like I can do all kinds of crazy stuff, but there's some competitive components as to why you might not want to do that. — Well, there there's a few things, right? There's uh competitive reason, there is regulatory reason, u there is compliance reason, there's a ton of reason, right? So for example, every customer on Robinu. kyc it fully uh verified it. It's so there is some things that we need to do there to be uh compliant with our licenses but uh we do want to make sure that our APIs are usable. So we started with crypto. Um it's probably the easiest for us to open. Um but you know definitely seeing a lot of people starting to play with MCPS and things like that. So we'll see more and more of that I think. Is there any data internally that suggests that agents are becoming a material part of the usage of Robin Hood? Like we've seen I've seen a couple companies say, "Hey, now more than 50% of our uh documentation is read by agents instead of people. " I don't assume that Robin Hood's 50%, but is it like 1 or 2% or do you not know? — I don't think we have data on this one. Um our API for example, it's still pretty small compared to the volume that we see on a daily basis. Um, but you know, we see a lot more people coming up with new uh usage of AI on a daily basis. Like when you look at X, it's pretty crazy. So I wouldn't be surprised if at some point it changed. — Do you feel like you guys are behind just given no matter how many resources you have, it's like every day somebody is out releasing something and you know, I'd say you could sit on X all day long and you could be think you know everything and then you see something you're like, "Oh my god, I got to go learn about this thing now. " Um I personally feel sometime behind because I feel like if I travel for three days and I miss like all the news on X it's definitely uh something — you're a normal person you're not on the internet for three days — to catch up. Uh but I think the company Robin has been and you know credit to our CEO Vlad has been really pushing on AI from the beginning. Um so it's been you know years now that we have more and more of this tooling available internally and we've been building features for AI for a long time for our customers. So I actually feel pretty good at the Robin level. Well, he's got the AI math thing, right? — He also has that. Yeah. So, it's definitely like one of his brain that is, you know, thinking 10 years before everyone else. — Somebody told me not to say this uh long time ago, but I stopped paying attention to math when they started putting letters in the supposed to just be numbers, right? This guy's too smart for me. Um AI, uh there's a big debate right now. Is it going to replace financial advisors? I think you guys have a Robin Hood like AI advisor on the platform. How does that work or what is your guys thought process there? Yeah, we started to roll out our assistance and it's somehow about you know having specific feature that is related to your portfolio and so uh knowing what's going on the market uh knowing what else you could uh think about when you want to diversify like this kind of things. So it's not giving you advice investment advice per se uh but it's also helping you find what to do. So um I think it's going to become more and more smart uh the more we work on it and we're able to build uh a lot of this tooling but there's also a need for regulation around AI and how it's going to impact financial services. So you know for us we are uh mostly thinking about how to use AI more as an educational tool at this point than as an investment tool. — Yeah. Is there a world where like you guys will build a bunch of agents and I just give it my money and it just, you know, goes hog wild in the market and makes me money? — I mean at some point, you know, I think the agent is — it feels like that's where it's going, right? — It's becoming more and more interesting. I don't know yet if Robinu would be the one building the agent, but what we want to make sure is that we have actually the tools that the agent can use. — Yeah. Because I guess part of what uh is interesting to me is like everything starts off as information, right? So you know whether you're using chat GBT Robin Hood advice or whatever and then over time it becomes obvious as I've used more and more of it — I realize I'm the blocker right like the human in the loop actually is slowing down the machine and you know sometimes that's a good thing right asks hey you know I could do this are you sure you want me to do it okay that's nice but for something like an investment decision right if the model or agent is saying okay based on all this information here's something I think you should consider and then you've got to go be the one to press the button And like at some point people just be comfortable and like let the machine press the button, right? — Yeah. I also think there's a ton of interesting use case. So for example, you let's say you had a ton of capital gain and you want to lock it and wait for long term, you can use

different option. It's fairly complicated to calculate which one and to create the right corridor. Uh but the AI tool can actually help you on all of these things. um learning the market uh knowing how to diversify knowing uh which product to look at if you're if you care about AI for example which stocks to think about like all these kind of things I think are a bit more on the helping you as a customer and I think like we're doing pretty good at this but yeah I could see a world where agents are going to take more and more of that — yeah and also um I've talked to a lot of financial advisors we built this uh AI CFO product and one of the things that's interesting about the RAAS is uh it's very split. Half of them are like, you know, you AI people are idiots and you're going to try to automate my job and you know, they're all kind of hung up, but the other half are like, hey, this is a tool to make me better at serving my client. And so, um, the truth is probably somewhere in between like it is helpful, but also will automate some of the job. Um but it is very interesting to see what my experience has been is the people who want to embrace it tend to have bigger businesses than the people who are like a little bit more you know protecting uh the old school way. — Yeah. I think it's like every technology you know back when Google started or when uh Google Docs and words and spreadsheets and all these kind of things there was always like the reticent people and then the people that started to embrace it. I think we're at the same situation here where if you don't embrace AI, you're going probably to be left behind at some point. Like the amount of when you start really understanding how to use it, right? It's extremely powerful. And so I think you will see hedge fund, you will see family offices all incorporating AI uh and maybe will replace some specific jobs but you will also see new jobs coming in and uh the the AI expert of the group or the people that are helping create the right agents or skills uh all these kind of things and yeah I think we are just at the beginning and to your point like I still think there's a lot of things where uh if you just create one skills you know plot will try to do whatever I can to make you happy, right? So, they're going to try to do crazy things. So, there's still a lot of need for the human in the loop. Um, and it will be interesting to see where it goes. — You know what's funny is I talked to uh Ben Sarah. He's the one who's doing Pulsia, you know, the company that's got millions of revenue and no employees or whatever. And I asked him, you know, what is your day like? Like if everything's automated, like what do you do all day? And uh in hindsight, it was an obvious answer. He's like, oh, I just focus on marketing, — right? He's just like, all of this is automated and so it's all about distribution. which you know if you've ever built a company before you yeah distribution is really important and so almost the human is left to do the thing that you know um sure a lot of it is automated for distribution but still he's constantly thinking about how do I find more distribution — right and I think that's going to be critical and especially now with AI like the agents also will need to find the solution to print so there's also this aspect on how do you market to other agents and other AI bots and all this kind of things so — uh you see a bit of you know SEO coming up for Chad GPD and Gemini platform and all this stuff. Wouldn't be surprised if you see more of that. — Yeah, it's very uh it's very interesting. Um is there anything that you guys are doing internally that people aren't paying as much attention to but you're very excited about like you think is uh um you're like hey you know we're talking about this like you know pay attention over here. — Uh banking has been really exciting for me like uh we also launched recently a suite of product for families. Um so I have a — what is that? Um, so basically you can create a custo account for your children. Okay. Uh, you have a very cool I created one for my son and you have this link that you can send to your friend and family and they can found using stocks and cash. Um, that was really cool because people kept sending me checks and I was like I don't even know what to do with this anymore. — I got to get your friends getting checks. — So at least — my friends send me invoices, not checks. Well, you know, for the kid, not for um but I think that's being it's really important because there's this big uh wealth transfer coming in uh in the next few years. And I think for us being ready to have the entire family was really important and it was also very frustrating like uh all my assets were on Robin Hood, but I still needed to have a separate account for my kid. And so being able to have all this in one place was pretty cool. Um and we're doing more and more uh of this type of products that are for the entire family. So you can have your joint account uh with your partner. Uh you can see which uh investment account you want to see or if you want to trade for them. Um so we're really taking it to the next level of like not being robbing just for you as an individual but for your entire family. — Mhm. That's cool. And is that part of the like whole Trump account and the Invest America? Like it — No, that's a it's a separate thing, right? Yeah. But a similar idea, right? Is even if the government isn't putting money in, people can send money for the kid is pretty cool, — right? And you can really invest. So, you know, I started uh this account.

I'm thinking for college for him. He still has a very long way to go. Uh — the world's going to with the AI stuff, we're all going to be retired in the French countryside, the college. — But at least, you know, he will have this account that at I forgot what age I put. You can select what age you will transfer to. — Oh, interesting. Um, and so when it's time for that, you will be able to get access to the account and continue uh the investment. So, — you know what I think is cool is um I don't know how old your kid is, but uh when they're young, they've got no clue, not interested, right? But at some point, it will switch and then it'll become like they want to talk with you about what are we doing in here cuz they see the number going up, you know, a little bit of a video game and uh it kind of is like putting um uh training wheels on a bike, right? Like you get the experience of riding the bike, but you know, somebody's there to make sure you don't mess it up, right? — Yeah. And I think that's part of, you know, this education that we we're talking about is for a long time, I feel like finance was a bit taboo in some family. You don't talk about how much you're making, about uh what money is and all these things, but it's actually the opposite that you need to do. You need to start talking to your children about money, about thinking about finance, so that when they get to 18 and they start being by themselves, they understand what is budget. that they understand like to think about taxes when they have a job. Um, and so I think again like having access to things like starting to use it is kind of critical and we see that with crypto for example when people start you know buying their first like five bucks of Xcoin. Um then they start following the news they start getting interested and slowly they get more and more into the investment route. So — do you know uh the Ken Rishi uh rule? — Never heard that one. Henry Xi is a uh he's a guy who built uh a number of like private jet type companies. He was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, a gun over there, interviewed him and he talks about I can't remember if it's monthly or quarterly. He does a family meeting about money — and okay, a lot of families you know do not all of them but a lot of them pretty good idea except for he said one thing that he does. He says that he starts off the meeting and he tells them his net worth — and where all of his assets are and he goes in case something happens to me, you know, I want them to get, you know, uh, normal and whatever. — Little out there, right? But still, okay, kind of cool. But then he said that he makes his kids tell each other what their net worths are. I said, "This guy is stuck in competition in the family. " — Yeah, that I don't know. — And his point was they should learn from each other, right? He had like a very thoughtful, you know, reason why he did it. But I was I grew up in a family of five boys. I'm like, if my parents sat us down like y'all got to tell each other's net worth, first of all, they would all lie, right? But second of all, that's all they would focus on, right? Is I got to go to the next meeting to make sure I made more money than everybody else. — Well, but also you will share, you know, your advice. You will share about IRA or 401k, whatever, like all this stuff. When I moved here into the US, I didn't know anything about 41k. I was like, what is this thing? — Um, — well, they don't have anything in France. We have different type of retirement account and so it's more limited. You can't really do the same thing as you can do here. Um — in the US we think everyone in France is retired. Uh but that's one thing we are seeing also in Europe, right? It's like more and more countries are starting to think about retire pushing the retirement age. — Some countries are talking about you won't get the full amount. Um and so you're starting to see this shift that we've seen in the US a long time ago where you know a lot of people are investing in the US. they are self-directed investing — in the Europe. It's still like pretty small, but you're starting to see this growth happening because people are thinking about their retirement and it's not going to be guaranteed by the state anymore. So, they need to start thinking about that when they're like 20, basically. — Yeah, it makes uh makes sense. Um, where can we send people find you on the internet? — Me? — Yeah, you. — Oh, um, John Kra on Twitter. — They know where to find me. — Robin Hood, basically. — Robin Hood. com. Yep. — Amazing. Thank you for taking the time to do this. do it again in the future. Oh, — thank