Robinhood has made a significant shift in its platform by introducing plans that enable eligible U.S. customers to authorize AI agents to execute cryptocurrency trades on their behalf. This feature extends the company's automated investing capabilities beyond stocks and options, allowing users to connect third-party AI agents that can manage trades within user-defined limits.

During a presentation, Robinhood officials highlighted that this upcoming feature will provide eligible U.S.-based crypto users with the ability to connect their AI agents to a dedicated Robinhood account. This will allow for real-time profit and loss tracking, along with push notifications similar to those used in agentic trading. Although a specific launch date for the crypto version has not been announced, Robinhood indicated that customers in the United Kingdom will gain access following the U.S. rollout.

According to a Robinhood executive, users will have the opportunity to build trading strategies with predefined guardrails, eliminating the need to constantly monitor their accounts. The aim of this feature is to allow customers to automate their trading decisions while maintaining control over the rules that the AI agents must follow.

This crypto rollout follows the beta launch of AI-powered agentic accounts for equities and options traders that took place in late May. Robinhood reported that more than 70,000 agentic accounts have already been created through that program, indicating a strong demand for automated investing tools.

Additionally, Robinhood's service will utilize AI models from third-party providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX’s Grok. Beyond investments, the company is also extending this technology to consumer finance, allowing eligible customers to authorize AI agents to complete credit card purchases on their behalf.

Robinhood's automation announcement coincides with the company's ongoing efforts to expand its blockchain infrastructure. Recently, Robinhood has focused on developing tokenized real-world assets and Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum layer-2 network built on Arbitrum. Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, revealed that the network processed 17 million transactions from nearly 350,000 wallet addresses during its first week after launching on July 1.

Data from DeFiLlama indicates that the total value locked in Robinhood Chain climbed above $115 million, reflecting a 23% increase in just 24 hours. The network has also seen significant trading activity, ranking just behind Ethereum mainnet in 24-hour Uniswap trading volume, with daily activity reaching about $500 million on July 8.

While AI-driven blockchain payments are emerging, they remain limited in scope. Notably, in May, Amazon Web Services integrated Coinbase’s x402 payments protocol into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, enabling AI agents to settle transactions using USDC. Despite the growing number of product launches, data suggests that adoption of AI agent-enabled blockchain payment systems is still in its early stages.