Johann Kerbrat on why Robinhood is building its own L2 on Ethereum At Consensus Hong Kong in February 2026, Robinhood launched a public testnet for Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 built with Arbitrum. Following six months of private testing, Robinhood plans to launch the mainnet in 2026 and will migrate tokenized US stocks and ETFs currently offered to EU customers on Arbitrum One to its own dedicated Arbitrum-powered L2 that still settles on Ethereum. Coinbase has adopted a similar strategy with its plans to take full control over Base’s tech stack and advance the L2 toward Stage 2 decentralization. Robinhood Head of Crypto Johann Kerbrat explains the rationale behind building an L2: “We can still get the security and liquidity of Ethereum, benefit from all of the work that the Arbitrum team has done, and on top of that, customize [the chain] every time we want to build something.” He continues: “If we want to give people access to all of the tools and elements of traditional finance, we also need flexibility [to comply with] what regulators are asking us to do. A world where you have full privacy and you can do whatever you want without KYC and trade securities is still a bit far for us. But what we are trying to find is a good middle ground. You will be on a permissionless chain. You will be able to interact with DeFi and do a lot of things with your stock tokens. We think it’s a great compromise.” Galaxy Head of Research Alex Thorn points out that you can embed a lot of compliance controls at the application and token layers on top of Ethereum. Source: @glxyresearch (May 2026)

LIVE NOW -- Crypto Has a New Catalyst with Clarity Bill Passing! Stocks Keep Hitting Highs Markets are ignoring every warning sign as stocks hit new highs, but crypto may finally have its catalyst. @RyanSAdams and @TrustlessState break down the CLARITY Act’s key vote, Wall Street’s Ethereum push, Bitcoin’s $80K test, and why private AI stocks are creating chaos onchain. [TIMESTAMPS] 0:00 Intro 2:46 Trump/Xi Meeting, Nvidia China Deal, and AI Stocks - @WhiteHouse - @BullTheoryio - @KobeissiLetter - @coindesk - @TedPillows - @biancoresearch - @researchUSAI - @byHeatherLong - @MorePerfectUS - @darioperkins - @EricBalchunas - @StackerSatoshi - @Strategy - @WuBlockchain - @coinbureau - @JustDeauIt - @21shares_us - @i - @Grayscale - @kaledora 28:06 @circle Earnings, Arc, and USDC Growth - @marcarjoon - @coingecko 32:54 @coinbase, USDC, and @HyperliquidX Team Up + @AnthropicAI and @OpenAI Crack Down on Unauthorized Private Stock Sales - @wallstengine - @caseycraig - @SolanaFloor 46:57 CLARITY Act Passes Key Committee Vote - @brian_armstrong - @DegenerateNews - @valkenburgh - @EleanorTerrett - @berniemoreno - @cdixon - @lex_node - @jchervinsky - @FidelityPolicy - @patrickjwitt - @glxyresearch 55:58 @BlackRock, @jpmorgan, and @Fidelity Bring Money Markets to Ethereum - @VivekVentures - @NateGeraci - @Etherealize_io 59:23 Bankless Thesis Check-In 1:03:43 @Euphoria_fi Mainnet Launch 1:04:45 Closing & Disclaimers

Fidelity International just launched FILQ — a tokenized money market fund issued as an ERC-20 on Ethereum. It's an onchain version of their ~$7B institutional liquidity fund: same strategy, a Moody's AAA-mf rating, but with 24/7 subscription and redemption. The biggest asset managers in the world are tokenizing cash, and settling it on Ethereum. As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink put it, "We're not spending enough time talking about how quickly we're going to tokenize every financial asset."

Etherealize general counsel @syelderman on the Clarity Act in Fortune: “I think it’s going to pass, based on all the great progress that has been made on both sides of Congress, and the support this bill is getting from the White House,” Steve Yelderman, general counsel of Ethereum-focused advocacy organization Etherealize, told Fortune. “That said, it’s Washington, and anything could happen.”

Japan Blockchain Foundation is preparing to launch a Yen stablecoin on Ethereum It's built for B2B settlement, cross-border payments, and enterprise remittances. It'll also issue on Japan Open Chain, a consortium L1 run by major Japanese enterprises. They could've kept this entirely inside their own permissioned network but didn't. When regulated institutions need neutral global rails, Ethereum is where they end up. Source: @TheBlockCo

I want to make it clear that Larry Fink’s numerous videos about tokenization aren’t marketing videos. He’s literally telling you what’s going to happen. The discussions we had at @consensus2026 with countless financial institutions only reinforce this: everyone is genuinely excited about the topic and is already making progress toward this new world.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: “We’re not spending enough time talking about how quickly we’re going to tokenize every financial asset” “The biggest questions from central banks are: What is the role of tokenization and digitization? How quickly should they think about digitizing their own currency? What does that mean for the role of the dollar if every currency digitizes? What does that mean for bank payments? What does that mean for the payment companies like MasterCard and Visa? All of these are being questioned right now.” “We spend so much talking about AI. We’re not spending enough time talking about how quickly we’re going to tokenize every financial asset… Moving ETFs and other things through a digital wallet — I think that’s going to happen worldwide very rapidly. I think most most countries are ill-prepared for that and under-appreciate how technology is changing… the plumbing of finance.” BlackRock and JP Morgan both announced more tokenized funds on Ethereum this past week.

Great charts and insights on "Ethereum's Asset Issuance Moat" in today's report from @Uptodatenow and @glxyresearch "Ethereum's TVL market share has held remarkably steady at roughly 55%-60% since mid-2022" "Liquidity begets liquidity, and Ethereum's dominance persists [in lending and DeFi] because of the depth of its collateral markets, oracle infrastructure, and surviving multiple market crashes. This creates a trust premium that newer chains can't quickly replicate, particularly for the largest allocators whose risk tolerance is the lowest." "Stablecoin issuance tells a similar story. Ethereum still hosts approximately 50% of all stablecoin market cap" "Ethereum also hosts over 60% of all tokenized real-world assets... This is arguably some of the stickiest capital on Ethereum, because institutional RWA issuers choose a chain through months of legal review, custodian integration, and compliance sign-off."

Vitalik Buterin on Ethereum as the economic layer for AI “The blockchain to me is the most natural way to allow applications and cooperation between many different people in the long term without needing to agree on who to trust. The other thing is also the economic layer. This is the layer where blockchains can support AIs.” Vitalik believes Ethereum will play a large role in the future of decentralized AI: “If you have more decentralized AI, that means you have different AIs (agents, programs) that are controlled by different people and need to interact with each other. And for that interaction to be possible, you need to have an economic layer. Either cooperation is based on economic incentives and economic rules. Or it’s based on central control. It’s usually one of the two, and if we can set up the economic system, that makes more decentralized interaction between AIs possible.” Source: @okx (Apr 2026) Read our full article on why AI agents will need Ethereum for low-risk DeFi below👇

SharpLink CEO and former BlackRock Exec Joseph Chalom on what the inflection point in tokenization will look like “We went through a period in tokenization where you had individual projects tokenized and everyone got excited. Franklin Templeton tokenized a money market fund called BENJI, then BlackRock did BUIDL, then our friends at Apollo did ACRED. So you’re going organically one fund or project at a time.” “What I’m looking for is some asset manager to wake up one day and not tokenize a fund but tokenize a fund complex measured in the hundreds of billions… When you see [massive one-time step functions], you know you’re at the right point of tokenization and it’s irreversible. So not individual projects, but entire complexes and asset classes. When that happens, there’s no going backwards.” Yesterday, BlackRock filed to launch two more tokenized money market funds. One is a newly created fund built specifically as a stablecoin reserve vehicle. As more stablecoins come to market, issuers are seeking reserve funds that are both Genius-compliant and tokenized to allow for 24/7 trading and near-instant settlement. The other is more interesting. And it's only on Ethereum. Unlike BUIDL, which was its own standalone fund, BlackRock added a tokenized share class to BlackRock Select Treasury Based Liquidity Fund (a $6.1B fund inside their institutional money market complex, BlackRock Liquidity Funds). The complex holds hundreds of billions across funds like FedFund, MuniCash, and T-Fund. The infrastructure is now built inside the complex. Extending it to FedFund or MuniCash next is a much smaller lift than what BlackRock just did. Chalom's step function isn't here yet, but the rails are - on Ethereum. Source: @CoinDesk (Feb 2026)

Tom Lee explains his $62,500 ETH price target “If we clear this Middle East problem and the US economy holds up through higher oil, I think we’re looking at a bull market that could run through 2028. A major move in equities is the setup… and here’s something to keep in mind. Since the war started, the best performing asset in the world — outperforming energy stocks — was Ethereum. It outperformed the S&P 500 by almost 20 percentage points, and you can see it has massively outperformed gold and silver. And if you take a look at Ethereum’s chart over the last 10 years, I think it’s going through a massive consolidation.” In its first consolidation of 2016, Ethereum went on to rise by 227x. In the second consolidation of 2018 and 2019, Ethereum rose by 54x. Tom points out that Ethereum is in the midst of its third consolidation: “I think there is a massive move coming in Ethereum, driven by a couple of things: tokenization and agentic AI… I think this means you can get something like a 25x for Ethereum.” Tom gives a quick overview of the tokenization thesis: “I think we’re going through an important moment in the financial system that’s not too different from 1971. Tokenization is making almost every asset synthetic, and it follows a roadmap that happened when the US went off the gold standard in 1971. This led to a huge unleashing of innovation and products from money market funds to currency futures to CDOs to indexed futures all because the US was trying to preserve the sovereignty of the dollar when we went off the gold standard. I think that’s happening today because we’re digitizing everything.” He points to the following quote from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon (formerly one of crypto’s biggest skeptics): “Crypto is better than the current financial system.” Tom continues: “I think everyone who’s building in crypto is going to develop these future products — stablecoins, tokenized equities, monetized reputation. It’s also part of the future agentic system.” On a separate slide he points out all of the things Agentic AI will need that work better on crypto rails. Two are identity and payments. “Agents almost certainly won’t want to use PayPal or Visa or MasterCard to do micropayments,” Tom argues. Lastly, Tom turns to price: “Blockchains should gain relevance against against crypto’s store of value, which is Bitcoin. In our minds, the way to think about the future of Ethereum is its price ratio to Bitcoin The 8-year average was 0.0479. The high was 0.087… We think fair value for Bitcoin is $250,000, so if Ethereum goes back to the 8 year average, that’s $12,000 ETH. If Ethereum goes back to its 2021 high, that’s $22,000 ETH. But of course I think it’s better positioned today than it was in 2021. So that gets us to what we think is the ‘payment rails’ number — that Ethereum is going to be roughly a quarter of the value of Bitcoin. And that gets you to $62,500. And that’s kind of following the previous historical price cycles.” Source: @ParisBlockWeek (May 2026) Read Etherealize's "Productive Money" report on the path to $250,000 ETH below 👇

🎙️ NEW episode is live! Dylan Grabowski (@GrabowskiDylan) sits down with Vivek Raman (@VivekVentures) of @etherealize_io to talk: 🏦 Wall Street to Ethereum 💰 Tokenization in practice ⚙️ What institutions are actually doing 📺 Watch now:

🌟 NEW ETHConf speaker announced: @VivekVentures, Founder and CEO of @Etherealize_io Launched Etherealize in January 2025 to rewire Wall Street's infrastructure on Ethereum, alongside co-founders Danny Ryan, Grant Hummer, and Zach Obront. June 8–10, NYC. 🗽

.@drakefjustin: "I don't see how ETH could not flip BTC" Justin is asked: What's Ethereum? Is it a settlement layer? A world computer? Monetary network? He responds: "For me, this hasn't changed for many years. Ethereum is the Internet of Value." "In order to be successful as the Internet of Value you need very good money at the center of it because that will be the substrate -- the economic bandwidth -- that will allow you to build a lot of services (e.g. loans, stablecoins)." "In some sense, the success of the platform and the success of the money are tied at the hip. This is why I think those who are pushing for ETH as money are really helping the platform and vice versa -- those who are helping the platform are helping with ETH the money." "One of my theses is that we'll have winner-takes-most platforms. There's only one Internet. There's only going to be one Internet of Value that captures 90-99% of all economic activity. And just for weird, path-dependent reasons, we have Bitcoin that is the largest money right now. But I think this is a highly-unstable equilibrium for multiple reasons. And I think the best candidate to win the Internet of Value is by far Ethereum." @fede_intern adds to this point, "I was never convinced there was a chance of [Ethereum flipping Bitcoin] to be honest. But I'm getting convinced there's a high probability -- you [Justin] have played a part in convincing me because of the issuance (declining block subsidy) and now the post-quantum. I do think there's a high chance that ETH becomes the dominant economic substrate in the long-term. I don't see how proof-of-work could work long-term." Justin echoes this: "Unless there's some catastrophic failure of Ethereum, I don't see how Ethereum could not flip Bitcoin." Source: @blockspaceforum Read our thesis on why ETH is better money than BTC below 👇

Marc Andreessen: “This is the grand unification of AI and crypto” “I think AI is the killer crypto app… It’s now obvious that AI agents are going to need money. It’s already happening.” Marc explains: “My friends, who are the most aggressive users of OpenClaw, have given their Claws bank accounts and credit cards. And not only have they done it, but it’s obvious that they needed to do it… It’s just completely obvious. The number of people who have done that today is, I don’t know, probably 5,000 or or something. But it will grow. That’s how these things start.” Source: @latentspacepod (Apr 2026)