Gaëtan Thabot

👀 @RobinhoodApp

Four million transactions in the first week of Robinhood Chain testnet. Developers are already building on our L2, designed for tokenized real world assets and onchain financial services. The next chapter of finance runs onchain.

@austin_rief 👀

Everyone is talking about the Square layoffs but just a reminder... - Robinhood has 2500 employees (market cap of $70b) - Coinbase has 4500 employees (market cap $50b) Square (market cap $30b) just cut to 6000 employees. I wouldnt say this is all the sudden a symbol of AI transformation and leanness.

@jack @vkhosla @blocks If you’re affected by the lay off and want to keep building, check out Robinhoods Carter’s page: careers.robinhood.com

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack

The SEC just handed crypto its most important win of the year so far, but nobody’s really talking about it. Here’s what actually happened today, and what comes next.

@_ErenNevin @arno39 @vladtenev @Dune docs.robinhood.com/chain/connecti…

@arno39 @vladtenev @Dune Don't the yhave public node setup guide yet?

In case you missed it, Robinhood Chain is now live on testnet. An early step in our work to build onchain financial infrastructure, giving developers a place to build ahead of mainnet. Explore the testnet: robinhood.com/chain

@jchervinsky @jessewldn 👀

I’ve read a lot of pieces lately re: “what is crypto good for” and I bet you have too. @jessewldn nails it here. Crypto is for finance, and if that doesn’t excite you, it’s because you aren’t thinking big enough. Expand your mind:

Private markets have been closed to everyday investors for too long. Robinhood Ventures Fund I is changing that by expanding access to private companies at the frontiers of their industries. Tune in live in the app, on X and YouTube for the unveiling, followed by a live Q&A with Vlad and the Robinhood Ventures management team. 2/17 at 10:00AM PT/ 1:00PM ET: rbnhd.co/RHV-Fund-I-Roa… rbnhd.co/RHV-Fund-I-Roa…

@lorenzo_elle_ @shaunmmaguire @LayerZero_Core @giacomozucco x.com/gthabot/status…

@shaunmmaguire @LayerZero_Core @giacomozucco thoughts on this ? Smoke and mirrors or something that has potential?

I was at the @LayerZero_Core event today It genuinely felt historic A gigantic leap forward in blockchain technology

@shaunmmaguire @LayerZero_Core The cool thing with AI models is we can check what is hype versus what’s real computer science advancement.

@laurashin @hosseeb As Keynes said, on a long enough time frame, we’re all dead.

@hosseeb I agree with Chris. On a long enough time frame he’ll be proved right and “crypto” will be the Internet of money. Not just for finance but for the entire Internet/any activity that involves money

With all due respect to Chris, I completely disagree with this take. Chris argues that "web3," particularly crypto-powered gaming and media, failed due to scams and regulation, and that better regulation will unlock these non-financial cases. OK, think about this for a second. Does this pass the smell test? Do you think web3 gaming failed because of Gary Gensler? Do you think web3 media plays failed because the scammers crowded out the honest media innovators? Really? If this is true, why didn't they kill financial crypto, which had WAY more of both? Financial use cases were right in the crosshairs of the regulatory harassment, and they also attracted way more scams. Why shouldn't we instead accept the more obvious answer: non-financial use cases for crypto have failed because no one wants them. Let's just admit it. They were bad products. They failed the market test. It was not Gensler or SBF or Terra that caused these things to fail, it was that no one wanted any of it. Pretending otherwise is cope. Enormous sums of capital and talent explored these ideas, and we should acknowledge what we learned. That lesson is not "if we just had better laws, then finally people would finally be using decentralized Spotify" or whatever. Call a spade a spade. Every single use case in crypto that has worked at scale has been financial in nature. 2008: Bitcoin - non-sovereign store of value 2014: Tether - stablecoins 2015: Ethereum - programmable money 2017: ICOs - capital formation 2018: Prediction markets (Augur, later Polymarket) 2020: DeFi - literally finance is in the name 2021: NFTs - non-fungible financial assets (to the extent they worked) 2024: RWAs (the year BUIDL took off) All this stuff was adopted bottoms-up. We as investors discovered that people wanted to do these things with crypto. The web3 consumer stuff, on the other hand, was primarily conjured up by investors and pitch decks, ZIRP accelerationism, and "wouldn't it be crazy if" blog posts. This was the opposite of the "what smart people are doing on their weekends" thesis. In fact, if you go back to the Ethereum white paper from 2014, almost every single Ethereum use case Vitalik describes is financial in nature: token issuance, stablecoins, derivatives, on-chain treasuries/DAOs, on-chain savings, insurance, price feeds, escrow, gambling, prediction markets. It's all in there. This is nothing to be ashamed of. Finance is almost 10% of GDP. It's an enormous part of the world economy, and banks are some of the lowest NPS score companies in the world. People hate their banks and the outdated financial architectures their money runs on. It's literally why Bitcoin was created. There is so much to innovate in the realm of finance, and I truly believe we are only at the beginning of that displacement. You don't need to assume anything more to project the next 10x in crypto. The old saying goes "crypto will do to finance what the Internet did to every other industry." I respect Chris's optimism. But 18 years in, we should not be propagating this meme about consumer web3 use cases as though they're inevitable. If you are hanging around the rim hoping that crypto is going to disrupt media and gaming, you should know the history and look at it with clear eyes. Now if you as a founder believe that despite that, you know the secret to cracking this market--I respect that, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone to follow their convictions. But I think it's important that investors be honest that all the evidence points the other way.

👀🤔

@NateSilver538 What a dumb thing to say for someone whose work is all about data.

Would be sort of funny if we're saved from the singularity because AI agents turn out to be like the French.

The small but fast-growing tokenized stocks industry is relying on one little-known brokerage. Alpaca, a California-based broker-dealer, is dominating the business because few other brokers are willing to sell stocks to tokenization firms. Ondo Finance, Kraken's xStocks and Dinari all send their users' orders to Alpaca to purchase the underlying stocks backing the stock tokens theinformation.com/articles/littl…

If you own, trade, or are simply curious about stocks, and how blockchain technology is making trading stocks a whole lot better, this is worth a read.

JUST IN: Robinhood to enable 24/7 trading and "self-custody" with tokenized stocks.

@alexolegimas @ojblanchard1 Maybe this will help: You said “Irrelevant, sidelined, and dependent” In absolute terms, at least for most people, that’s not the opposite of “doomed”

Olivier, I'm absolutely not saying it is doomed, when did I say that? I had hoped that my statement was clear that the implications are about relative global power. The first sentence stated that this approach makes sense within the country. The rest of the post said that this approach comes at the cost of leverage at the global stage: When other countries are trying to maximize output, a country that puts more weight on leisure will simply have less power in agreements and the way that it is treated. None of this implied that the country is "doomed". Do you disagree?

Alex, how can you say such things? You are saying that if a country, given its productivity level, decides to decrease hours worked, and has 10% less production and income, it is doomed? (What about the country which was 10% less productive to start, and keeps hours constant. Is it doomed as well?). And what is this stuff about trade surplus? Are you saying that countries with low income for whatever reason cannot have balanced trade? And that a trade surplus is a good thing?

If you’re a Bitcoin believer, you can be very sad or very optimistic by this knowledge gap within our elites.

In response to the new Trump tariffs on Europe--if they stay. Most countermeasures the EU has considered are costly for the US, but also costly for the EU... Be it export restrictions on pharmaceuticals, higher digital taxes on non resident firms, etc. They should definitely be considered, but one must realize that they would involve some pain. One measure I can think of however, which could be announced now and implemented relatively quickly, and would be good for the EU, is the creation of a deep eurobond market, reducing dollar dominance. shorturl.at/341aB It can be done, at little political cost, with benefits for the EU, and costs for the US. (It is worth doing anyway, but announcing it now would show that Europe has some cards to play and is willing to play them)