Robinhood Adds Crypto Perpetuals With 10x Bitcoin (BTC) Leverage for US Traders

Robinhood is bringing crypto perpetual futures to eligible US customers with leverage of up to 10 times on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), the brokerage confirmed at its HOOD Summit in Houston, Texas, on Tuesday. The contracts will run through Robinhood (HOOD) Derivatives together with Bitstamp, the crypto exchange the company acquired, starting with digital assets before any other market. Supported assets outside the two largest coins will open at a maximum of 3 times leverage, a deliberate tiering the firm says reflects volatility differences across tokens. “We do know a lot of people who trade perps want the leverage,” the company’s head of US futures products, Grace Q, said. “But we wanted to start off a little safer with especially the long-tail coins.” Perpetual futures, the leveraged, no-expiry contracts that dominate crypto derivatives volume offshore, have historically been out of reach for US retail traders because of regulatory constraints, making the rollout one of the more consequential product moves in American brokerage. Robinhood acknowledged the added risk profile: a small adverse move against a heavily leveraged position can trigger liquidation, and the company said it could adjust leverage limits over time. The announcement sits inside a broader push to keep active traders on-platform. Robinhood will also fill the last gap in its trading-hours coverage by offering select US stocks and ETFs on Saturdays and Sundays through Bruce ATS, an alternative trading system, extending the 24 Hour Market it launched in 2023, which still pauses on weekends. Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have filed to expand their own trading hours, and rivals including Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers and Fidelity have broadened their lineups for investors conditioned by crypto exchanges to expect markets that never close.

The second pillar of the announcement is automated: Robinhood Agents, AI agents customers can build inside the app by choosing a model from OpenAI or Anthropic and granting access to a separate trading account. The agent can analyze markets, build watchlists and trade stocks, options and crypto, and a feature called Loops will let users set standing instructions so the agent monitors conditions and executes a strategy without waiting for a new prompt. Demand for the more technical version of this idea is already measurable: more than 150,000 agentic accounts have been created since Robinhood opened its trading infrastructure to outside AI agents earlier this year, generating millions of calls to its tools each day, according to company figures. The embedded app version strips out much of that setup. Guardrails matter here, and the company has drawn them explicitly. Every agent-proposed trade will require customer approval by default, though users can switch that protection off. At launch, agents cannot borrow on margin and can only access funds placed in their dedicated account. “I would think of the agent as an extension, like a trading tool that’s mainly for research that can execute trades,” senior director of product management Gina Pasqua-Abeles said. “We do expect users to still have some level of oversight over what their agent is doing.” Robinhood is also selling agents access to outside data — options flow from Unusual Whales, market data from Nasdaq, crypto fundamentals from Token Terminal and government-activity tracking from Quiver Quantitative. The product stack is rounded out by longer options hours, more intraday margin, and binary earnings contracts offered through Cboe that let customers trade directly on whether companies hit metrics such as revenue, earnings per share or iPhone sales.

New detail has emerged on the regulatory mechanics behind the perps launch: Robinhood vice president of institutional crypto Nicola White said the rollout was made possible by a CFTC no-action letter, combined with the Bitstamp exchange and Robinhood Derivatives. White, speaking on the record about the company's push for always-on markets, also tied the product to a basis trade and to tokenized stocks as part of the path for US perps, and pointed to Bitstamp's volume as the venue where retail and institutional flow meet. On the institutional side, she described demand for large block trades in Bitcoin (BTC) and depth that can absorb them, alongside the sub-account controls that govern the AI trading agents. The comments also referenced lessons drawn from the 2022 meltdown in shaping the platform's US leverage limits, with tokenized stocks named as a next step.

Our reading of the company’s own announcement at HOOD Summit is that the throughline is deliberate: crypto spent years running markets that never close and derivatives with no expiry, and that market structure is now being reabsorbed into mainstream brokerage. “One of our top priorities as a company is to be number one for active traders,” vice president of product management Abhishek Fatehpuria said — the stated purpose behind both the leverage tiers and the AI guardrails. Whether retail adopts 10x Bitcoin perps inside a regulated brokerage, or trades through AI agents, will now be measurable in the platform’s own disclosure cycle.