The biggest headwind for DeFi’s growth to date has been the lack of high-quality assets Historically, DeFi has primarily been used to facilitate the speculation of tokens of questionable and circular value But I have long-held the perspective that if we could hot-swap in high-quality productive assets, then the true value of DeFi would really shine There is inherent, self-evident value in having a globally-accessible, permissionless, and programmable financial system I used to think Coinbase was perfectly positioned to facilitate this transition to RWAs, and maybe they still are, but they got distracted with selling gambling products to retail This has left a void I think Robinhood is quite well positioned to capture as the competing brokerage with far less crypto rot baggage Yes, Robinhood Chain’s growth so far has been mainly a result of memecoin gambling, that is undeniable (and true of every new chain ecosystem) But I believe Robinhood’s suite of tokenized equities and ETFs offer the core RWA primitives to build DeFi 2.0 (for real this time) With Chainlink as Robinhood’s official data and cross-chain oracle provider, they have the distribution & utility layer needed to scale TVL massively Not to mention Robinhood’s quality of execution, seamless user experience, and strategic focus on expanding access to financial services I have been waiting for this transition for many many years, and it’s never felt more inevitable than right now(Zach Rynes | CLG)