Robinhood picks its own Bitstamp over Lighter for US crypto perpetuals

Robinhood is actively rolling out perpetuals to U.S. users, and they will run through Bitstamp rather than Lighter, which shocked many observers.

Bitstamp is owned by Robinhood and is the clean path for perpetuals today.

The Bitstamp choice sent Lighter's LIT token down about 17% in less than an hour.

"We were like, 'Oh, if we made this like 100 times easier and more delightful, ... you could probably go from 150,000 people using it to millions," Abhishek Fatehpuria, Robinhood's vice president of product management, said.

Agents can only use funds transferred into a separate agentic account; trade-by-trade approval is on by default but customers can turn it off; Robinhood will initially offer models from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Robinhood said customers are responsible for their agents' trades and that it has not yet measured or compared the investment outcomes of customers using agentic accounts with those of non-agentic strategies.

Robinhood will bill customers for model usage through its platform, one OpenAI model, Luna, will be free for the remainder of 2026, and the company declined to disclose whether it has revenue-sharing arrangements with AI providers.

Bankless wrote that the announcements demonstrate Robinhood's ambition to own the entire investment cycle, from conducting research to forming a thesis to executing it.

Robinhood is bringing agents directly into the app rather than only connecting outside agents through its Trading MCP.

Agent Apps let users plug premium data and tools from providers including Nasdaq, Unusual Whales, SpotGamma, Quiver Quantitative and Token Terminal into their agents.

Robinhood is introducing a live earnings experience that combines earnings calls and trading in one place.

Robinhood Social moved from beta to all eligible U.S. users, who can post charts, portfolio allocations and P&L, with verified commentators and company profiles in the feed.

According to Bankless, Robinhood Crypto head Johann Kerbrat said two weeks earlier that regulation is fragmented, Robinhood is cautious as a public company, and it is still unclear how decentralized perps can legally operate in America.

Bankless wrote that if decentralized perp exchanges get a clear U.S. path and Robinhood still does not integrate Lighter, that is when it would start asking harder questions; until then the selloff looks like a repricing of near-term expectations.

Robinhood also announced round-the-clock trading in select stocks including weekends, earnings prediction contracts, extended options trading hours, up to 4x intraday margin and OCO orders.

Robinhood Chain and tokenization played a lesser role at the summit, which had not much explicitly about crypto.

CEO Vlad Tenev said in a press release the products give retail investors increasingly sophisticated products "once reserved for hedge funds, big banks, and quant firms."

A feature called Loops is coming next; it will keep checking the market and run a strategy automatically when certain conditions are met.

Agent tool usage works out to at most about 200 calls per agentic account per day.