Robinhood adds perpetual futures trading to platform, expanding beyond crypto into traditional assets

Robinhood announced on July 1 that it’s expanding its perpetual futures offerings in Europe to include traditional assets like commodities, ETFs, and foreign exchange pairs, a meaningful leap beyond the crypto-only perps it launched earlier.

Eligible European customers can now trade perps linked to gold, crude oil, popular ETFs like QQQ and EWY, and FX pairs including EUR/USD. All of it comes with up to 10x leverage and 24/7 trading access.

From crypto perps to everything perps

Perpetual futures are contracts that let you bet on the price of an asset without ever actually owning it, and unlike traditional futures, they never expire. They stay aligned with the underlying asset’s price through a mechanism called funding rates, which are periodic payments between long and short traders that keep the contract price from drifting too far from spot.

Robinhood first dipped into perpetual futures with Bitcoin and Ethereum perps, then expanded to include pairs like XRP, DOGE, SOL, and SUI with up to 7x leverage. Crypto perps quickly became one of the fastest-growing products on the platform following their EU rollout.

A broader international push

The perps expansion is just one piece of a much larger international strategy that Robinhood has been assembling. The company is pursuing crypto trading capabilities in the UK, entering the Canadian market through its acquisition of WonderFi, and pursuing a capital markets service license in Singapore.

Building the rails underneath

Beyond just adding new tradable products, Robinhood is working on Robinhood Chain, a Layer-2 blockchain designed for tokenized assets, with a public mainnet launch in the pipeline.

Robinhood Wallet users in eligible regions can access decentralized perpetual futures through the Lighter exchange, with incentive structures tied to the $LIT token.