Robinhood Puts 10x Crypto Perps, AI Agents and Weekend Stock Trading in One App

Robinhood, the US brokerage that also operates the Robinhood Chain layer 2, used its HOOD Summit to announce a package of trading features aimed at its most active customers: perpetual futures on crypto with leverage of up to 10 times, automated trading agents built inside the app, and equity trading that continues through the weekend. CoinDesk, The Block, The Defiant and Crypto Briefing all reported the announcements on 29 and 30 September.

Perpetual futures are derivatives contracts with no expiry date, so a position can be held indefinitely as long as margin is posted. They are the dominant instrument in offshore crypto trading and have been almost entirely absent from regulated US retail venues. According to The Defiant, Robinhood is starting with eight contracts, offered through Robinhood Derivatives, its own futures commission merchant, with execution via Bitstamp, the exchange Robinhood acquired. Broader access is planned over the coming months.

Why the plumbing matters more than the leverage

The structure is the interesting part. By routing perps through an in-house futures commission merchant, the registered entity that carries customer margin, Robinhood keeps the regulated wrapper and the customer relationship rather than renting either. That is the same direction of travel as Coinbase and Kraken, both of which have been assembling their own US derivatives stacks rather than relying on third-party clearing.

The market read it as competitive news. The Defiant reported that Lighter's LIT token fell 22 percent over seven days after the perps plan was described, on the reasoning that a brokerage with tens of millions of funded accounts entering perpetual futures changes the addressable market for venues built specifically to offer them.

Agents that trade while you sleep

Robinhood Agents let customers assemble automated strategies inside the app. According to The Defiant, trade approvals will default to on, meaning the agent can execute without a per-trade confirmation unless the user changes the setting, and a planned feature called Loops will let a strategy run on a recurring schedule around the clock. CoinDesk framed the same product as an agent that can trade at two in the morning.

There is a marketplace layer on top. Crypto Briefing reported that Unusual Whales, an options analytics service, has launched an app on Robinhood's AI agent marketplace, which puts third-party signal providers inside the same surface that executes the order.

Weekend equities

Robinhood also said it plans weekend trading for US equities. Extended and overnight sessions already exist at several brokerages, but weekend stock trading is the point where the equity market begins to behave like the crypto market: continuous, with no closing auction to reset price discovery and thinner liquidity in the hours when institutional desks are closed. It is also the behaviour that tokenized equities have been marketed on for two years, which makes a conventional brokerage offering it directly a competitive fact for that sector rather than a validation of it.

For this beat, the relevant question is what any of it means for Robinhood Chain. The chain itself carried $1.02bn of total value locked and $1.64bn of decentralised exchange volume over 24 hours, according to DefiLlama, with fees of $5.8m on the day. None of the announcements described this week moves activity onto that chain by itself. What they do is widen the set of products Robinhood can point at the same customer base, and the company has already shown it will put some of those products onchain.

What is not yet public is the fee schedule, funding-rate mechanics and position limits on the perps, or which equities will be quotable at the weekend and against what liquidity. Those details determine whether this is a genuine venue or a shop window.