Robinhood to launch perps, weekend stock trading for US users

Robinhood outlined a three-part expansion of its US offering on Tuesday, saying it intends to launch in-app perpetual futures trading for eligible American users in the coming months, add round-the-clock weekend trading in select equities, and roll out an AI agent builder inside its app.

The perpetuals product would allow customers to take long or short positions on bitcoin, ether, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, ADA, LINK and HYPE. Leverage would be capped at 10x for bitcoin and ether perpetuals and 3x for the other contracts, with Bitstamp supporting the offering. Robinhood said it will charge 0.01% per trade through the end of the year. Users will be able to place stop-loss and take-profit orders, follow their liquidation price in real time and receive alerts when a position is at risk.

CEO Vlad Tenev described the launch on X as America's first genuine perpetuals offering, noting that the contracts carry no expiry and that profit and loss settles every 15 minutes, which he called a new chapter for US derivatives. The plan lands as crypto firms explore how perpetual futures can be offered domestically. Ondo Perps CEO David Wells told The Block that he sees a substantial opportunity in the US perps market, pointing to opportunities that were previously unavailable.

On the equities side, Robinhood plans 24/7 trading for a curated list of US stocks and ETFs, pending regulatory review. The service would extend the platform's existing 24 Hour Market, which already lets users trade hundreds of stocks and ETFs from 8pm ET on Sunday through 8pm ET on Friday, and would be supported by Bruce ATS, an institutional-grade alternative trading system.

AI agents

The company also introduced Robinhood Agents, which lets users build AI agents within the app to develop strategies, run research or trade automatically. The feature builds on the agentic trading service Robinhood launched in May, which connects third-party AI agents to the platform. Robinhood said more than 150,000 users have opened agentic trading accounts since that launch, with those agents now using its tools nearly 30 million times a day.

Abhishek Fatehpuria, vice president of product management at Robinhood, said the company is working to set the standard for what agentic finance can be, with safety and security at the centre of the effort.