Robinhood to launch perps, weekend stock trading for US users

Robinhood is launching in-app perpetual futures trading in the coming months, as the platform continues to expand its offerings for the U.S. market.

In a statement released Tuesday, Robinhood announced that it plans to enable perps trading for eligible U.S. users to take long or short positions on assets including bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, ADA, LINK, or HYPE.

It also intends to offer up to 10x leverage on bitcoin and ether perpetuals and 3x leverage for other perpetual futures. The company said the perps offering will be supported by Bitstamp and will charge 0.01% per trade through the end of the year. 

"You can set stop-loss and take-profit orders, track your liquidation price in real time, and get alerts if a position is at risk," the team said.

"Robinhood is bringing America its first true perps. No expiry, with P&L settled every 15 minutes," Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said on X, calling the new offering a "new chapter for U.S. derivatives."

Robinhood's planned launch comes as crypto firms are exploring how perpetual futures could be offered in the U.S. markets. Ondo Perps CEO David Wells said in a Tuesday interview with The Block that he sees a "huge opportunity" for the U.S. perps market.

"Everybody's looking at the U.S. because there are more opportunities now that are opening up that were just never possible," Wells said.

24/7 trading

Robinhood also announced Tuesday that it plans to launch 24/7 trading for select U.S. equities, pending regulatory review. 

That would be an extension of the platform's existing "24 Hour Market," which enables users to trade hundreds of stocks and exchange-traded funds from Sunday at 8pm ET through Friday at 8pm ET.

Robinhood said the 24/7 weekend trading would begin with enabling a curated list of stocks and ETFs, and will be supported by Bruce ATS, an institutional-grade alternative trading system.

AI agents

Also on Tuesday, the company introduced Robinhood Agents, which allows users to build their AI agents within its app to "help them develop powerful strategies, run detailed research, or trade automatically."

The new feature builds on the agentic trading service Robinhood launched in May, which enables customers to connect their third-party AI agents to the platform. Robinhood said more than 150,000 users have opened such agentic trading accounts since launch, with the agents now using its tools nearly 30 million times a day.

"With safety and security at its core, we're setting the standard for what agentic finance can be," Abhishek Fatehpuria, VP of product management at Robinhood, said in the statement.