Robinhood (HOOD) Rolls Out 10x Bitcoin Perpetual Futures for US Traders

Crypto Perps With 10x Leverage

Robinhood (HOOD) will let eligible United States customers trade crypto perpetual futures directly from its app, with Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum contracts carrying up to 10x leverage. The company announced the product at its HOOD Summit in Houston on Tuesday, September 29, alongside the broadest batch of new products it has shipped in years. The news lands with the Bitcoin (BTC) price near $83,900, majors largely flat ahead of this week's economic data. Eight assets will launch: BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK and HYPE, with the six names outside Bitcoin and Ethereum capped at 3x. Robinhood Derivatives, the unit registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, will route the contracts through Bitstamp, the crypto exchange the company finished acquiring in June 2025. Fees are set at one basis point per trade through the end of 2026, with the rollout beginning over the next few months. Chief executive Vlad Tenev called the launch “America’s first true perps” in a post on X, adding that profit and loss on the contracts settles every 15 minutes.

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AI Trading Agents Go Native

The software pillar is Robinhood Agents, which puts a native AI trading bot inside the mobile app with no technical setup. Users open a dedicated agentic account, pick a model from a lab such as OpenAI or Anthropic, and let the agent research markets, draft strategies and place trades with its own funds. Manual approval of each trade is on by default and can be switched off, while a coming feature called Loops turns a strategy into standing instructions the agent executes around the clock. Agent Apps will add outside data from 11 providers, including Nasdaq, Spotgamma, Unusual Whales and Token Terminal. Crypto was added to the agentic accounts in July. The company said more than 150,000 customers have opened agentic trading accounts since external AI connections opened in May, with agents now calling Robinhood’s tools about 30 million times a day. Tenev framed the launch as bringing traders gear that hedge funds, big banks and quant desks have long kept to themselves.

Weekend Stocks and the Everything App

Trading hours are the third front. Robinhood plans 24/7 trading in a curated list of United States stocks and ETFs through Bruce ATS, an institutional alternative trading system, starting early next year pending regulatory review. That extends the 24 Hour Market launched in 2023, which currently runs Sunday 8 p.m. ET to Friday 8 p.m. ET and leaves the weekend dark. The summit also added earnings contracts from Cboe, binary contracts on whether a company hits a specific revenue, earnings per share or, in Apple’s case, iPhone sales figure. Robinhood Social, the company’s answer to the social trading trend, is now live inside the main app. Company product leadership described the destination as one account where customers sell stocks, buy crypto and trade prediction markets without thinking about which side they are on, the long-teased “everything app.”

Regulatory Opening and Rivals

The perps push rides a regulatory opening. The CFTC cleared the first Bitcoin (BTC) perpetual listing in the United States in late May, a decision that also let Coinbase send American clients to perps traded by its Bermuda affiliate, and Kalshi to list a contract of its own. Unlike dated futures, a perpetual has no expiry: traders go long or short without ever holding the underlying coin. Robinhood says its app will display the liquidation price in real time and support stop-loss and take-profit orders from launch. Its head of United States futures products told attendees traders want leverage, but the company chose a safer 3x start on smaller coins. The move lands as traditional venues edge the same direction: Cboe and S&P Dow Jones extended their S&P 500 options partnership through 2051 and said they may work on tokenized options contracts. Fees beyond the promotional 2026 rate were not disclosed.

The $122.92 Question for HOOD

Robinhood's vice president of institutional crypto, Nicola White, has detailed the plumbing behind the perps launch, saying it rests on a CFTC no-action letter, the Bitstamp exchange and the Robinhood Derivatives unit. In remarks recorded after the summit, White also connected the rollout to the company's wider always-on markets push, including the planned 24/7 stock trading, and pointed to Bitstamp's depth for institutional clients, with large block trades available alongside the retail offering. She said lessons from the 2022 market meltdown shaped how the company set US leverage limits on the contracts, and framed tokenized stocks and the basis trade as part of the path that opened the door for American perps. Robinhood's sub-account controls for agentic trading, she added, sit on the same institutional infrastructure.

In a follow-up interview on September 30, White added new detail on the launch timeline and the company's always-on thesis. She confirmed the perps product went live with a first cohort of customers the day before the summit, with a full rollout to all Robinhood customers planned over the coming months. She also said a CFTC no-action letter issued in June accelerated the launch, and that Bitstamp has run perpetual futures in Europe for roughly a year and a half, giving the company a working template to port to the US market. On product direction, White noted strong offshore demand for a basis trade pairing tokenized stocks with perps positions, which Robinhood is working to address. She argued tokenization lets markets run 24/7 and allows fractional share ownership, framing Bitcoin (BTC) infrastructure as plumbing that could ultimately drive traditional finance rather than sit apart from it.

(as of 05:39 UTC) COINOTAG data shows the stock responding to the summit: Robinhood (HOOD) last changed hands at $121.50, up 2.25% over 24 hours, after trading between $115.09 and $122.06. COINOTAG’s composite scoring rates the $118.51 support at 80/100, where a Fibonacci 0.214 level and the 20-day EMA converge, while the $122.92 resistance scores 83/100 on the confluence of R3 and the Ichimoku Tenkan. Momentum is mixed: the daily trend is up and RSI sits at 56.6, but the MACD signal is bearish. Perp positioning on the stock is modest, with funding at 0.0233% and roughly $21.7 million in open interest. A daily close above $122.92 would confirm the post-summit bid; losing $118.51 would stall it.