US-based stock trading app Robinhood is planning to expand its European presence by offering investors in the region access to tokenised US securities.
According to a Bloomberg report, Robinhood is planning to build a distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform and is currently in talks with an unnamed digital assets company.
Two blockchain providers mentioned in the report are Arbitrum and Solana.
Tokenisation, whereby securities are represented on a blockchain, has been cited as a way to democratise the investment and trading worlds by making it easier for investors to access stocks and shares and to bring liquidity to real-world assets like property and private markets.
And after years of modest activity, tokenisation is starting to gain traction with securities firms and asset managers alike. A report from web3 firm Ripple forecast that the tokenisation market will be worth $18trn by 2030.
Robinhood’s European customers currently have access to cryptocurrency trading. The US firm has recently secured a brokerage licence in Lithuania which would enable it to offer traditional share trading services across the EU.
Robinhood also opened an office in the UK in March 2024 in a bid to make it easier for UK investors to access US stocks, as Robinhood UK president Jordan Sinclair told FinextraTV in January.
"When we look to expand, what you need to do is to understand that local customer and what pain points that they’re still struggling with and that’s the way we looked at it,” said Sinclair.
“Things like 24/5 trading where we could bring the innovation from the US and deliver it in a local way and break down those time zone barriers for the UK investor.”
The company, which enjoyed a sharp rise in revenue during the pandemic thanks to a boom in online trading, now looks to be targeting Europe as part of its expansion plans.