Robinhood hands AI agents your crypto trades in major platform shift

Robinhood has introduced plans to let eligible U.S. customers authorize AI agents to execute cryptocurrency trades on their behalf, extending automated investing beyond stocks and options.

Robinhood said during a Friday presentation that the upcoming feature will allow eligible U.S.-based crypto users to connect third-party AI agents capable of managing trades within user-defined limits. The company did not announce a launch date for the crypto version but said customers in the United Kingdom will receive access after the U.S. rollout.

A Robinhood executive said users will be able to build trading strategies with predefined guardrails instead of watching their accounts continuously. According to the company, the feature is designed to let customers automate decisions while keeping control over the rules that AI agents must follow.

Robinhood expands AI automation beyond stocks

The crypto rollout follows Robinhood’s beta launch of AI-powered agentic accounts for equities and options traders in late May. During the same presentation, Robinhood said more than 70,000 agentic accounts have already been created through that program, indicating early demand for automated investing tools.

Robinhood also said the service works with AI models from third-party providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX’s Grok. Beyond investing, the company is extending the same technology to consumer finance by allowing eligible customers to authorize AI agents to complete credit card purchases on their behalf.

During the presentation, a Robinhood executive said automated agents could help retail investors act on information they might otherwise overlook, giving them access to capabilities that have historically been more common among institutional investors.

Outside Robinhood, several crypto executives have made similar predictions about AI-powered financial activity. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire have both said they expect AI agents to become major users of blockchain-based payment systems over the next few years.

Robinhood Chain gains traction alongside AI rollout

The automation announcement comes as Robinhood continues expanding its blockchain infrastructure. The company has centered recent crypto development on tokenized real-world assets and Robinhood Chain, its Ethereum layer-2 network built on Arbitrum.

Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, said the network processed 17 million transactions from nearly 350,000 wallet addresses during its first week after launching on July 1.

DeFiLlama data also shows Robinhood Chain’s total value locked climbed above $115 million after increasing 23% in 24 hours, while cumulative addresses approached 200,000. The same data places the network behind only Ethereum mainnet in 24-hour Uniswap trading volume after daily activity reached about $500 million on July 8, following more than $250 million in cumulative trading volume during its first week.

Separately, Token Terminal data shows Robinhood Chain attracted more than $70 million worth of bridged Ether within its first week. The analytics platform said continued growth could turn the network into “a meaningful new source of demand for ETH.”

AI-driven blockchain payments are also beginning to appear outside Robinhood. In May, Amazon Web Services integrated Coinbase’s x402 payments protocol into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, allowing AI agents to settle transactions using USDC. Earlier, in April, crypto wallet startup Oobit introduced a Visa-backed virtual card that enables AI agents to make business purchases using USDT.

Even so, blockchain payment activity from AI agents remains limited. Artemis data shows the AI agent-enabled x402 protocol processed about $2 million in transaction volume during June, suggesting adoption is still in its early stages despite a growing number of product launches.