Robinhood’s crypto wallet serves as ‘a gateway to DeFi,’ says Johann Kerbrat
Robinhood’s crypto wallet is playing a crucial role in bridging centralized finance with Web3, making self-custody and DeFi participation more accessible, according to Johann Kerbrat, the company’s Head of Crypto.
“For us, it was really important to have a wallet,” Kerbrat said in an interview with Roundtable host Scott Melker. “A lot of customers were interested in self-custody or in doing more things on-chain, but they were used to [Robinhood’s] UI/UX, everything being very well done. Suddenly, they get into the wallet world or the DeFi world and things are pretty complex… and we were getting a lot of frustration from customers.”
Kerbrat explained that Robinhood’s crypto wallet serves as a simplified gateway to decentralized finance, where users can interact with thousands of new tokens and dApps without the complexity that often deters retail adoption.
“Crypto and DeFi in general is such a big space. It changes so much, so quickly. You have tens of thousands of new tokens added every day. You have new dApps existing every day,” he noted. “For us to think about a world where we could integrate everything in the centralized exchange, it’s very difficult… But we wanted to give the tools for customers to still participate in it.”
He likened the wallet’s role to that of a web browser: “Here, you have the wallet to access Web3.”
Robinhood currently has roughly 25 million customers, though Kerbrat acknowledged that only a fraction of them are actively using the crypto wallet.
“If you look at addresses and what addresses [are] online, you can see that it’s definitely not as big as the amount of millions of people trading on a platform like ours,” he admitted. “But I think what we’ve seen is a signal of activity. We see people doing more things on-chain.”
To ease the transition from centralized finance to Web3, Robinhood has launched Robinhood Connect, an on-ramp and off-ramp system that integrates with wallets like MetaMask, Phantom, and Moonshot.
“We are focusing on making the bridge between centralized [finance] to decentralized very easy,” Kerbrat said. “For us, the important part here is making sure that people can take advantage of their Robinhood accounts… then transfer easily [to] the other platform.”
Robinhood Markets, the Menlo Park-based firm that gained prominence during the 2021 GameStop short squeeze, surpassed $1 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter. The surge was largely driven by its crypto trading division, which benefited from increased activity during the 2024 presidential election, where one in seven voters identified as “crypto voters.”