Morning Minute: Robinhood Debuts 'Robinhood Chain'

Tyler Warner

Thu, July 2, 2026 astatine 7:06 AM CDT 5 min read

Morning Minute is simply a regular newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The investigation and opinions expressed are his ain and bash not needfully bespeak those of Decrypt. And cheque retired our new regular quality show covering each of the apical stories successful 5 minutes, downloadable connected Apple Pod oregon Spotify.

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Today's apical news:

• Crypto majors are precise greenish arsenic SOL jumps 10%; BTC +5% to $61.3k

• Venice AI announces $65M rise astatine $1B valuation, creating crypto's newest unicorn

• Robinhood launches Robinhood Chain with tokenized stocks focus, Lighter perps

• Lighter's LIT jumps 15% to caller section highs connected backmost of Robinhood motorboat

• Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire responds to OUSD, says consortium stablecoins person a mediocre way grounds

🏦 Robinhood Launches an 'AI-Native' Ethereum Layer-2 With Tokenized Stocks

Robinhood launched the nationalist mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum-powered Ethereum layer-2. The institution touts its caller concatenation arsenic "AI-native," meaning it supports trading by AI agents straight onchain.

The web opened with integrations from BitGo and Chainlink and partnerships with Uniswap and Pleiades for market-making, and it's designed to span Robinhood's accepted brokerage with its crypto stack.

The centerpiece is Stock Tokens, onchain versions of shares successful companies similar Nvidia and Apple. On Robinhood Chain, users tin driblet those tokenized shares into lending pools and usage them arsenic collateral successful DeFi. That turns a banal presumption into composable on-chain capital, the benignant of happening that's intolerable wrong a mean brokerage. Robinhood besides opened perps trading straight successful its wallet done the decentralized erp dex Lighter, and switched connected Robinhood Earn for eligible US users, letting them lend the USDG stablecoin for astir 7% APY.

HOOD shares closed up much than 8% to $108.65, up astir 20% connected the month, though inactive good disconnected their highs. Lighter's LIT token jumped 15% to $2.14 and caller section highs connected the backmost of their integration.

💸 Venice AI Hits $1 Billion Valuation arsenic Voorhees Bets connected Private AI

Erik Voorhees' privacy-focused AI level Venice AI raised $65 cardinal astatine a $1 cardinal valuation, its archetypal extracurricular backing circular and capable to marque it a unicorn hardly 2 years aft launch. The circular was led by crypto VC Dragonfly, with Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures joining.

Voorhees said the rise validates Venice's ngo to physique a private, uncensored alternate to mainstream AI similar ChatGPT. For those unfamiliar, Venice gives users entree to much than 200 unfastened and closed AI models crossed text, image, video, and code, portion storing thing connected its ain servers. Prompts are encrypted client-side and routed done an outer proxy.