Wall Street is warming up to blockchain. Standard Chartered is out with a new report bullish on Arbitrum. Robinhood is also building its own blockchain called Robinhood Chain using that same technology. Banks and brokerages are no longer just talking about crypto — they are starting to move everyday financial business onto the blockchain. Joining us now is A.J. Warner, Chief Strategy Officer at Offchain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum. AJ, thanks so much for being here today.
Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.
For viewers not familiar with Arbitrum — why is a bank like Standard Chartered paying attention to it?
You are starting to see a real shift that has been happening over the last two years in how traditional markets are looking at blockchain infrastructure. Historically it has been very speculative. What is happening now is these technologies are becoming the new backbone of financial infrastructure — and coming with that are cash flows, revenues, and real sustainable business models. The Standard Chartered digital asset research team is excited because it is becoming a much more investable asset class for their customers. They are starting to initiate coverage so that people really understand what the future of digital assets and financial infrastructure entails.
What does that report signal about where big institutions stand on blockchain right now?
I have been doing this for about six or seven years. In the earliest days it was crypto-native builders and early-stage startups. Their conversations with traditional financial institutions were with one or two people in an innovation lab. Over the last two years it has extremely rapidly accelerated. Every major financial institution now has a digital assets team. They are trying to make sure they do not get out-competed by stablecoin issuers, credit card providers, lending programmes — all of which are the backbone of what we call the programmable economy. Finance is going to be rooted in software instead of legacy systems. Our platform is powering some of the largest platforms doing this, like Robinhood.
Robinhood chose Offchain Labs for Robinhood Chain. What does that decision signal?
We have been working with their team for a really long time — the original beginning of our partnership was about three years ago. As Robinhood decided to increase their on-chain presence, it made a lot of sense for them to build their own blockchain using our technology. On Robinhood Chain they have up to 2,000 stocks tradeable on-chain, fully permissionless, programmable, composable with any other product or asset. It has been a core part of their global expansion strategy. Instead of opening a brokerage arm in every jurisdiction, they are making assets available through a shared pool of liquidity and a single tokenised standard. They started with Europe and have now expanded to over 120 countries.
What is the broader wave you are seeing beyond Robinhood?
Stablecoins as an asset class were the first example of this wave. The next category is money market funds — we have probably seen 100x growth in tokenised money market funds in the last two years. And then tokenised stocks coming on-chain. This is all driven top-down by financial institutions that are no longer just getting their feet wet. They are starting to build the next generation of financial infrastructure — and at Arbitrum, we are hoping to power all of that.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
