Robinhood has confirmed that eligible US-based customers will soon be able to connect third-party AI agents to execute crypto trades autonomously on their behalf, extending an agentic trading feature the brokerage first introduced for equities and options users in late May.
What Robinhood Is Offering
During a Friday presentation, a Robinhood executive outlined the appeal of the system: ‘You can work with an agent to create a strategy with specific guardrails and not need to be constantly monitoring your account.’ The company did not set a specific rollout date for US crypto traders but confirmed that UK customers would be next in the queue after the US launch.
Robinhood already supports agentic accounts through partnerships with several prominent third-party AI providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI’s Grok. The platform is also enabling eligible users to authorise AI agents to make credit card purchases on their behalf.
Strong Early Adoption in Equities
Since the beta launch of agentic trading for equities and options in late May, more than 70,000 agentic accounts have been created by Robinhood users. Equities traders can already instruct AI agents to invest in crypto mining stocks on their behalf, giving a preview of what crypto-native agentic trading could look like.
Levelling the Playing Field With Institutions
The executive framed the product as a democratisation tool for retail investors: ‘This is another big step towards giving retail investors every advantage that institutions have enjoyed for decades.’ The argument is that AI agents can surface and act on data that individual retail traders would otherwise miss, closing the information gap with institutional players.
Part of a Broader Robinhood Crypto Push
The agentic crypto trading announcement sits alongside Robinhood’s wider expansion in the digital asset space, which has centred on real-world asset tokenisation and its Ethereum layer 2 network, Robinhood Chain, launched earlier this month. According to Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, the new blockchain processed 17 million transactions from nearly 350,000 wallet addresses in its first week.
AI Agent Payments: Growing But Still Small
The Robinhood move comes as broader AI agent payment infrastructure continues to develop across the crypto industry. In May, Amazon Web Services integrated Coinbase’s x402 payments protocol into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, enabling agents to transact using USDC. In April, crypto wallet startup Oobit launched a Visa-supported virtual card allowing AI agents to spend USDt on behalf of businesses.
Despite the activity, on-chain AI agent transaction volumes remain modest. Artemis data shows that only 2 million dollars in transaction volume was processed through the x402 protocol in June, indicating that adoption is still in early stages even as infrastructure builds out.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire have both publicly suggested that AI agents will become the dominant users of blockchain payment rails within the next few years.
