Nvidia just claimed the throne. The AI chipmaker has surged past Apple and Microsoft to become the world’s largest public company by market capitalization, hitting approximately $5.1 trillion. And in a sign of how quickly traditional finance and crypto are merging, Nvidia’s tokenized stock is already the top asset on Robinhood’s freshly launched blockchain.
The NVIDIA Robinhood Token, trading under the familiar NVDA ticker, has become the flagship product on Robinhood Chain, the company’s new Ethereum Layer-2 network built on Arbitrum. It’s a small but telling development: the biggest company in the world, represented as an ERC-20 token, trading around the clock on a DeFi-compatible blockchain.
What Robinhood Chain actually is
Robinhood Chain went live around July 1 as what the company describes as an AI-native Layer-2 blockchain. In English: it’s a faster, cheaper network that sits on top of Ethereum’s security layer via Arbitrum, designed specifically for tokenized real-world assets.
The chain’s launch product is Stock Tokens. These are tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited that mirror the price performance of major equities. Think of them as digital wrappers around stocks like Nvidia, Apple, and Google that let holders trade and interact with DeFi protocols outside Robinhood’s traditional app.
