No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:24:46 · Sarah Guo, Vlad Tenev
[00:24:46] S1: Is there an example of a composition that you think should exist on stock tokens or has already come from the ecosystem that you're excited about? [00:24:55] S0: I mean, one of the things that I'm thinking about is, yeah, it's like how can we take some of these derivative products, like options? You make like really nice smart contract native options contracts? You know, there's been a tremendous amount of innovation in the traditional markets that's to some degree like stymied by how hard it is to just move off of mainframes onto more modern things and take all of the counterparties that rely on the system being predictable and slow moving. So I think a big part of it is just let's provide the primitives and let the developers put them together in new ways. Don't wanna presuppose what developers come up with, because I wouldn't have been able to tell you that stock token linked NFTs or stock token meme pairs would would become a thing. Like, just had no way to foresee how quickly those things would grow and become become real. [00:26:06] S1: It's not necessarily ownership. What is your perspective on prediction markets?
00:26:06 · Sarah Guo, Vlad Tenev
[00:26:06] S1: It's not necessarily ownership. What is your perspective on prediction markets? [00:26:11] S0: Yeah, I mean, actually think prediction markets do tie into ownership because a lot of people have unique knowledge and ideas and they have hot takes on things that maybe not everyone knows. Like you might be an expert in AI model development. We have lots of contracts that allow you to speculate and hedge on what AI model will be best this week or this month or this year. And the way to kind of like monetize that knowledge before prediction markets was highly indirect. Like maybe you could trade derivatives on Google stock or Nvidia stock. [00:26:51] S1: And Zaprecise, yeah.
00:26:52 · Vlad Tenev
[00:26:52] S0: Yeah, and so there is an important thing with being able to monetize your own knowledge and doing it more directly. It's actually one of the reasons we announced and we're planning to launch KPI contracts. So for a long time, if you wanted, let's say you're studying a company and you have a pretty good idea that it's gonna beat earnings, EPS or revenue. Well, in the past, if you bought the stock or, yeah, you bought like an option on the stock, sometimes the stock would beat, the company would beat earnings, the stock would go down for some unrelated reason, you know, guidance and one of these things. So KPI contracts now allow you to actually trade the EPS print, the revenue print, or any of the other KPIs that might matter to a company. So I think there's that aspect where you can actually monetize your belief. You can hedge more precisely. For example, there's a will the California billionaire tax pass contract, which I think is a useful hedging instrument for some people. Not me personally, I'm not hedging with it, but one could. The other thing about it is I think it's a new source of information. I think of it almost as in the pure form prediction markets are an evolution of news. So what does news look like in the future? I don't think it's the New York Times, but I think it could be something like it where you have your front page, your business section, lifestyle, culture, sports, and sports is a big part of it, and you just can see what's happening and what's likely to happen in the future through the odds. So a lot of people don't even trade these things. They just like to open the app and just check out
00:28:47 · Sarah Guo, Vlad Tenev
[00:28:47] S1: That's me. [00:28:47] S0: What's gonna happen, yeah. [00:28:49] S1: Do you think people will let agents trade for them, and when, and what's the impact of that? [00:28:53] S0: Yeah. So we launched a product earlier this year, which is basically a Robinhood MCP. We call it Agentic Trading, and we have Agentic Credit Card as well. So in the broader realm of Agentic Finance, I think there's two things that have product market fit. One is Agentic Trading, very clearly, like having an agent execute your trades and do a strategy for you. And we're seeing really strong adoption. Like over 150,000 customers have opened Agentic Trading accounts with us in the few months since we've launched it. [00:29:29] S1: Wow.
00:29:29 · Sarah Guo, Vlad Tenev
[00:29:29] S1: Wow. [00:29:29] S0: And if you look at the tool calls, the tool calls have just been following this smooth exponential where the last number we announced was something like 30,000,000 tool calls per day. So Agentic Trading, clearly a product market fit. And we started by just having an MCP and a couple weeks ago at our hood summit event, we announced Robinhood Agents, which is basically taking it one step further and the harness and the entire UI is now inside a Robinhood account. So you can kind of think of it as if you're a Claude code or a Codex user, it's almost like a tool like that that's optimized for trading. So you can run loops and say, okay, every day execute a run of my strategy, rebalance my portfolio, look at opportunities. We have skills, so you can you know, do like a portfolio rebalance or all sorts of other things. We have agent apps, so we launched an app store where you can, for example, connect to a source of satellite data and if you wanna create a strategy that like counts cars and parking lots of retailers or something of that nature, we'll make that available. And the way that I think that'll evolve is we're gonna look at all the capabilities that the coding harnesses have and see how we can provide really nice, clean, trader native versions of that that just make it really really easy to be an active trader.
00:31:10 · Sarah Guo
[00:31:10] S1: Amazing. What do you think the impact is of this on either you know, participant mix or financial infrastructure? Just because many of these things that you describe, institutional traders have the ability to do this, but it's expensive and sophisticated, right? And so if that's democratized, what does that mean?