Robinhood Completes $180M WonderFi Deal as Radiant Capital Winds Down After $50M Hack

Crypto News

Robinhood Markets has officially closed its $180 million acquisition of Toronto-based digital asset firm WonderFi, marking the U.S. retail brokerage's formal entry into Canada's regulated crypto market. The deal, first announced in May 2025, brings WonderFi's two flagship platforms — Bitbuy and Coinsquare — under Robinhood's umbrella, with existing users to be migrated onto the Robinhood app. Both venues hold regulatory licenses in Canada and serve a mix of retail and advanced traders. Closing was delayed beyond the originally targeted second-half-2025 window to allow regulatory sign-off and the rollout of Robinhood's proprietary trading stack across the acquired infrastructure.

Radiant Capital, the cross-chain lending protocol that suffered a devastating $50 million exploit in October 2024, announced it will begin winding down operations after failing to find a viable path to recovery. The protocol's decentralized autonomous organization confirmed in a Monday blog post that despite contributor efforts to keep the system running under severe constraints, the lack of recovered funds, fresh capital, and runway meant continuing as a going concern was no longer feasible. The decision closes a turbulent chapter for a project that once ranked among the largest cross-chain liquidity venues during the 2023 expansion cycle in decentralized finance.

Canada represents a strategic foothold for Robinhood's international ambitions, with the WonderFi transaction adding roughly 300,000 funded clients and pushing the firm's non-U.S. funded customer base past one million. Executives indicated they will preserve WonderFi's existing institutional partnerships, layering Canadian wholesale flow on top of the European institutional pipeline established through last year's Bitstamp acquisition. The combined footprint positions the broker to compete directly with regional incumbents on both spot trading and custody services, while leveraging the same compliance posture that has allowed it to scale tokenized equities and staking products in select jurisdictions across North America and Europe.

The October 2024 attack on Radiant has been attributed by multiple investigators to North Korea's Lazarus Group, which has been linked to a string of nine-figure crypto thefts targeting cross-chain bridges and lending protocols across multiple blockchain networks. Before the breach, Radiant had grown total value locked to a peak of $386.8 million in December 2023, riding a wave of multi-chain liquidity demand. Within weeks of the exploit, TVL collapsed from $75 million to roughly $5 million, an outflow the team was never able to reverse. The damage extended beyond capital flight to user trust, governance participation, and long-term token viability.

Robinhood shares closed the session down 3.8 percent at $90.73, extending a year-to-date drawdown of more than 21 percent that has tracked broader weakness across retail-facing fintech equities. The market reaction underscores investor skepticism about whether incremental international acquisitions can offset slowing U.S. crypto transaction revenue, particularly as competition from spot Bitcoin ETF flows continues to redirect retail order flow toward custody-light products. Nonetheless, the strategic logic of locking down two licensed Canadian venues is widely viewed as defensible, given the limited supply of regulated crypto-trading infrastructure available for acquisition in North American markets at this scale.

Rather than executing a full shutdown, the Radiant DAO will move the protocol into what it described as a maintenance state, preserving frontend access and keeping smart contracts operational so existing users can withdraw collateral, repay loans, and unwind positions on their own timeline. No further development, upgrades, or product expansions will be funded. The RDNT token slid 4.2 percent on the announcement, deepening losses from an all-time high of 58 cents reached in September 2023. Recovery efforts tied to the 2024 exploit will continue through an existing remediation portal, with any clawed-back assets earmarked for distribution to affected depositors.

The two storylines — one a regulated brokerage absorbing licensed exchanges, the other a permissionless lending protocol unwinding after a state-sponsored hack — capture the bifurcation defining this cycle. Capital and customers are consolidating around compliant intermediaries with deep balance sheets, while early-stage venues without sustainable revenue or robust security budgets are quietly exiting. North Korean threat actors remain among the most disruptive forces in on-chain finance, and regulators across multiple jurisdictions are signaling that licensed platforms will dominate the next phase of retail adoption. For builders, the message is clear: distribution and security are no longer afterthoughts.