FinTech said is AJ Warner, chief strategy officer at Off Chain Labs.
AJ, welcome.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yes, we're happy to have you.
Now Robinhood just launched its public test net for Robinhood chain on arbitram with massive partners, of course, like ChainLink and Alchemy.
Of course you're playing a role in this.
As well, what more can you share?
Yeah, it's a very exciting moment.
So I work at Offchain Labs.
Our product that we build is something called Arbitram.
It's the leading scaling technology for people that are looking for execution environments to build on top of blockchain technology to power their business.
We have a partnership with Robinhood where we're building for them their infrastructure.
Um, right now they're living on the current public arbitram chain.
We have about $20 billion in assets that live on the chain that are powered by billions of dollars of economic activity.
Robinhood decided the next phase of what they're trying to do in a deeper partnership with us is use our technology to build their own chain, a chain designed for stock tokenization, the tokenization of other assets that they can bring to their users, and it's a really exciting moment.
So we're the infrastructure running all of that for them.
I want to dig into that a little bit more.
What does this tell us about institutional blockchain infrastructure?
Yeah, so we're like 4 or 5 years ago you had a lot of people using blockchain.
It was much smaller organizations, startups, DI protocols.
Every day more and more institutions, fintechs, financial firms are coming on chain using their assets, looking at tokenization, stablecoins, how can that improve their businesses?
And it's been a true clear watershed moment.
Robinhood, I think, has been at the forefront of this.
Even last year they launched the tokenized stocks throughout Europe.
So if you're buying a stock token, if you want exposure to Tesla through the Robinhood app in Europe.
You're really buying a token underneath the hood on Arbitram.
It looks and feels exactly like the regular Robinhood app in America, but it's blockchain technology that's powering that global expansion for them.
How is the user going to notice the difference in this, the change that this is bringing?
So the nice thing is, is that the user should not feel the difference about whether something is a brokerage issued asset like it is in the United States or if it's a token.
The thing that tokenization allows is it allows first of all, the business to grow more quickly.
Which is better for the business.
It gives more access to retail in different parts of the world where it might be harder for them to access US equities.
But the other thing that it enables is more utility for these assets, the ability to seamlessly pledge these assets as collateral.
That's something that's available to accredited investors today, more sophisticated financial actors.
But for the average retail person, if they want to borrow against their Tesla stock or their Vidia stock, it's not something that's seamless and easy, and tokenization makes it much.
Easier for these assets to be enabled into defy protocols to borrow against.
And in terms of the doors that this can unlock for 24/7 trading, digital trading, instant settlement, what more can you share?
Yes, I mean that's a huge component of this.
You don't have to deal with T+1.
Everything's happening at the finality of the blockchain, milliseconds at best, and it's really a powerful user experience.
So if you think about opening leverage positions, the ability to access your liquidity.
Upon opening or closing a position, blockchain technology enables all of this through the mechanisms designed in the underlying technology.
And when you look at Robinhood, and we work really closely with them, their goal is to rebuild the fabric of the company on blockchain rails.
It allows more access.
It allows for more inclusion.
It allows for more efficiency, and it also improves their business margins in a way that's really impactful to the underlying bottom line.
In just a few seconds, EJ, anything more viewers should know about Arbitram?
Yeah, so Arbitram, um, was technology that was founded in Princeton in 2018.
It's the leading technology that's scaling Ethereum.
There's millions of transactions occurring a day, billions of dollars of assets flowing through Arbitram.
We've got hundreds of different financial institutions and enterprises that are using the technology in a customized form like what Robinhood wants to do with the Robinhood chain to ensure and enable that they can build environments using blockchain technology that work for their needs.
So in the early days, a lot more people were using the public arbitram chain.
And today we're seeing a lot of financial institutions want to build their own versions of this technology using our stack.
A compliance layers, privacy layers, whatever the business use cases and needs are for what they're trying to accomplish.
We have the flexibility of the technology secured by Ethereum.
Using Arbitram to build what we call the programmable economy.
We think all of these assets should be using shared liquidity, composability for more efficiency for users, and more access and availability.
AJ Warner, Chief strategy Officer at Off Chain Labs.
AJ, thank you.
Thank you so much for having me.
