Robinhood Opens AI-Agent Crypto Trading to 70,000 Accounts on Ethereum L2

Crypto News

Robinhood will soon let eligible US customers connect third-party AI agents to a dedicated account and trade cryptocurrency on their behalf, extending its agentic-trading product from equities into digital assets. The feature, unveiled during a company presentation, lets an AI agent — an autonomous software program that monitors markets and executes orders — build a custom crypto strategy within user-defined risk limits. Customers open and fund a separate account that the agent alone can access, with the ability to disconnect at any time. Connected agents route through Robinhood’s Model Context Protocol servers and carry the same real-time profit-and-loss tracking and push notifications already available for equities.

Demand for the underlying product has been steep. More than 70,000 agentic accounts have been opened since the equities beta launched on May 27, a Robinhood executive disclosed during the presentation. The company offers the accounts through several third-party AI providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX’s Grok, and is separately enabling AI agents to make credit-card purchases for users. Executives framed the rollout as a way to level the field for retail traders, arguing it gives individual investors advantages that institutions have enjoyed for decades. Eligible customers can already direct agents to buy crypto-mining equities, and altcoin and other crypto trading is positioned as the next asset class to follow.

The expansion builds on Robinhood Chain, the company’s Ethereum layer-2 network that launched earlier this month. On-chain data shows the network processed roughly 17 million transactions from nearly 350,000 wallet addresses in its first week, a fast start for a rollup aimed at real-world asset tokenization. Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, pointed to the throughput as evidence of early traction. The chain sits at the center of Robinhood’s broader digital-asset strategy, which pairs tokenized equities and other real-world assets with the exchange’s growing suite of on-chain and agent-driven services.

Robinhood is not moving alone. Coinbase introduced its own agent platform in June, letting users connect software agents to execute trades, payments and automated tasks, while AI agents have reached tokenized stocks through other protocols. Chief executive Vlad Tenev argued that autonomous agents will increasingly compete with human traders by monitoring markets continuously and executing around the clock, and suggested such systems could eventually manage portfolios with minimal human input. Robinhood has not set a launch date for crypto agents but said its UK customers would be next in line after the US to access the offering.

The rapid adoption has drawn regulatory scrutiny. In June, Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee sent the SEC 13 questions about agentic trading and set a July 31 deadline for answers. Representatives Bill Foster and Brad Sherman warned that agents trained on similar datasets could herd — moving in the same direction at once — and amplify market volatility, and they questioned how liability would be split between broker-dealers and the developers building the agents. The letter signals that autonomous trading, still largely unregulated, is moving up the agenda for lawmakers as retail adoption accelerates ahead of any formal framework.

The push also fits a wider bet that AI agents will become dominant users of blockchain payment rails. Industry executives, including Circle’s Jeremy Allaire and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, have predicted that autonomous agents will drive a growing share of on-chain transactions within a few years. Recent months have brought a wave of integrations enabling agent-driven stablecoin spending, including work from major cloud providers, as firms race to give software agents the ability to hold balances and settle payments without human sign-off. That trajectory positions crypto rails — not just trading — as core infrastructure for the emerging agent economy.

Read together, these developments point to a single arc: finance is racing to hand execution to autonomous software, and crypto is becoming its testing ground. Yet our reading of the market shows caution beneath the enthusiasm. COINOTAG’s aggregate data puts the Fear & Greed Index at 26 out of 100 — firmly in fear — with Bitcoin dominance elevated at 69.7% and total crypto market capitalization near $1.85 trillion, a defensive posture that favors majors over speculative alt exposure. The gap between rapid agentic-trading adoption and an unresolved regulatory framework, underscored by the SEC’s July 31 response deadline, remains the key risk we are watching as this infrastructure scales.