Why are institutions choosing ARBITRUM? Robinhood, BlackRock, Onchain Finance & Tokenized Stocks

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:01]Hello, hello to all the web3 enthusiasts out there. This is Max speaking and welcome to the new exciting episode of Synopsis. Today I'm hosting this one with a new expert of Synopsis. Please welcome our today's guest, Steven Goldfeder, the CEO of Offchain. Hello, Stephen. How is it going?

[00:00:16]>> Hey, it's good. Great to be here.

[00:00:19]>> Yep. Uh I see you're in a good mood and uh I believe today's discussion will be very easygoing and pretty much insightful. And uh well, if you don't mind, let's get straight to the action because I have a bunch of questions for you.

[00:00:32]>> Absolutely.

[00:00:33]>> Well, awesome. So, um uh to warm up a little bit and uh since it's your first time at Synopsis, let's start with some introduction, could you please tell uh uh us about your background and what you are building right now?

[00:00:47]>> Yes. So, I am uh co-founder and CEO of Offchain. We build a few things. We're most well known for building Arbitum.

[00:00:54]Arbitum is the leading layer 2 platform on Ethereum. Both have the public chain Arbitum one which is the most liquid layer 2 on Ethereum but also we have the Arbitum orbit stack which allows you to build your own custom layer 2 blockchains and we have many institutions that are building this including Robin Hood is probably the most well-known example. Personally um I started off my crypto journey in 2013. I was a PhD student at Princeton and actually if you look back to uh the very very first mention of arbitrum on say YouTube you'll find uh a video even before my involvement in arbitum from a fall 2014 semester uh on print at Princeton. Arbitum uh began as an idea in my co-founder Ed Felton's head uh very early on actually. The reason I like to mention that date is because that date actually is before Ethereum even went live. So before there actually was any smart contract platform in the world. Ed uh from an academic perspective understood that hey you know arbitra hey hey smart contracts are not going to be able to scale they look really powerful but they're going to run into scaling issues and uh had and basically thought a lot about this problem that was the early uh innovation uh that led to arbitum so uh I personally been building arbitrage first in the academic context at Princeton uh since 2017 we founded the company in late 2018 and then uh you know we've been building it side offchain ever since. Well, awesome. Thanks for sharing a really solid background and of course I believe that uh if not everyone in the industry but everyone watching us knows about Arbit Room and I believe that um everybody loves it and loves what you are uh doing there. So um of course going to dive deeper in what you are building and uh well let's begin with the programmable economy. So uh we've heard uh recently about arbitrum actually powering the programmable economy. Could you tell us uh a little bit about that just in general words?

[00:02:53]>> Absolutely. So there's this really interesting um shift that we've seen which is uh assets like money. You've seen that, you might have heard the term programmable money and stable coins are a great example of this where you can take uh money, you know, dollars often and then attach rules to them and really make them programmable. And we're actually seeing a shift where um you know, it's not just money, but we're seeing businesses join the programmable economy. And and what this means is not just money, but entire markets now are actually being defined uh by software, being defined on the blockchain, and increasingly uh being defined arbiters.

[00:03:28]What do we mean by this? It means that traditionally uh in markets there was a lot a lot of manual processes. So mediation, manual processes, but now you can actually go ahead and just define all of your rules uh in software. You say, "Hey, I'm a business that's looking to come on the blockchain. These are my rules. This is how I want my market to operate. These are the hours. These are the days. These are the thing the actions that users are able to take."

[00:03:50]And we can go ahead and basically customize all of that inside this global economy. And the reason why it's really powerful, it's not global economies, it's global economy, right? You can tap into arbitum liquidity. You can tap into Ethereum settlement and join this one massive unified economy, but it's programmable for you. What that mean is what that means is that you can go ahead and say hey I'm a business that has my own say compliance requirements or I'm a business that has my own privacy requirements and you can program your experience in a way that is very unique for your users and your need whether that's you know compliance regulatory privacy or otherwise but taps into the liquidity uh of arbitum taps into the settlements of Ethereum so you're able to join this large economy but ultimately do it in a way that a lot of the things that used to be manual they used to be not well defined are now defined and enforced as well uh inside software.

[00:04:42]>> Wow, that's great. I would say sounds like a fundamental contribution to the mass adoption everyone is speaking about. So, it's great to see that uh uh the builders of tier one projects are addressing to new markets and on boarding institutions uh in the industry. that's uh something uh important for the entire growth of uh all the web free industry and uh well thanks for for building and uh bringing this bright future a little bit closer to us and uh uh well there is a growing interest also around techiz stocks and uh our new digital digital sorry native financial products. uh why do you think uh institutions and uh platforms are starting to experiment with uh models now? I think institutions are beginning to see the power of what blockchain rails can can bring you right back to this idea of this programmable economy that you know today like stocks for example they're they're not on pen and paper anymore right they're digitized but ultimately they're often in siloed systems in systems that don't talk well to each other in systems where um you know you don't have the ability for users to join together and customize what I mean by customize customize things like settlement things like access control uh compliance requirement, even things like fees, governance, right? So, all these things, you know, market rules, basic business logic, you can go ahead and basically now define in software um what the rules of of your uh essentially your, you know, part of the economy are. And you can go ahead and just join this larger um uh you know, crypto um economy and uh you know, launch your product there. tap into the liquidity, tap into the settlement, uh, and the security that the blockchain has to offer. But one of the things and, you know, to to make this like, you know, I think very very concrete. Um, you know, say that you're an institution that, uh, wants to, um, make your, you know, wants to tokenize some asset and wants to see that asset live in arbitrum defi, you can go ahead, you can do that. You can add whatever compliance controls onto your asset that that you need. go ahead, you know, launch it, tokenize it on Arbitum, and now it can, you know, fully free inside arbitrum, you know, exchanges, DeFi protocol, per etc. And you can basically um have, you know, assign whatever limits you want to this asset, but whatever controls that you want, you need, but ultimately benefit from this shared infrastructure um and shared liquidity and ultimately tokenization brings like a host a host of benefits.

[00:07:14]There's transparency, there's the ease of accounting, right? rather than have to go and you know reconcile old books.

[00:07:20]It's literally like self- enforcing, self-accounting. Everything's accounted for uh on the blockchain and there is no room for uh error or or disagreement.

[00:07:29]And also even things like uh stable coin settlement, right? So um a lot of the funds, you know, the early funds that are that are launching are treasury backed funds. Today we're seeing, you know, other assets um like equity other equities and and other types of funds as well. But a lot of these funds have um a few things. They have very limited often market hours, right? So you have, you know, today's a holiday. We're recording this in the US, so the markets are obviously closed. But crypto markets do not close, right? So you can have 247 trading of their assets if you want to.

[00:07:58]Again, it's programmable. You can say, "Hey, I don't want 24/7 trading. I want this trading." You can basically define that however you want uh for your asset for your asset. But also things like stable coin settlement. Um ultimately, some of these funds often take five days to get your money out. So if you're an institution and you uh you know want to exit your position in say some treasury fund often you'll lose interest and actually wait for you know several days with stable coin settlement you can literally get your funds you know back in the the abs the next block. So we're talking taking something from days down to seconds and also having a lot of the accounting and feasibility uh you know accounting and efficiency u benefits as well. So ultimately there's a ton that the blockchain can offer you. But I think the the most interesting thing is this idea of again it's customizable.

[00:08:44]It's programmable. The idea that you can build a very unique experience. You can define your rules in software, launch them, tap into the liquidity of arbitum, tap into the security and settlement of Ethereum and do this in a way that uniquely is you and uniquely uh meets your requirements.

[00:09:02]>> Well, sounds amazing and pretty much detailed I would say. Thanks for that.

[00:09:06]And uh well let's discuss at least one uh exact example. So could you please tell us at least in general words uh uh about how uh Robin Hood is working with arbitum for their nice stock offering.

[00:09:20]>> Yeah, Robin is a great example. Um we see a lot of institutions that are doing something on the blockchain but ultimately to be honest uh often today at least you know for the vast majority of institutions they have like their their real thing you know their core bet which is not a blockchain product and then they have their you know 2% or 5% blockchain product and by the way I think that's fantastic because I think you know once blockchain systems get their foot in the door these institutions will appreciate all the benefits that they bring everything we just discussed and that will naturally grow and grow over time but Robin Hood is a very forward thinking company and they are you know basically allin today.

[00:09:56]They understand that the next evolution of infrastructure for equities the next evolution of trading is going to happen on the blockchain and they are embracing that head-on. So what we're doing with Robin Hood is uh you know they are tokenizing uh all sorts of assets. They have over 2,000 equities already tokenized today on arbitrum one. And interestingly enough, uh, Robin Hood has also announced that they're launching their own blockchain on the Arbitum platform called, uh, the Robin Hood chain. So, um, they will have they have again both 2,000 plus equities in Arbitum one. They're also shifting over to their own blockchain here. And what they're doing is they are basically bringing these assets, really high quality assets on chain. And uh if you go today in you know in Europe say that and you want to use Robin Hood um well if you're in America and you go ahead and use Robin Hood and you buy a share of Apple you'll get you know traditional uh share of Apple you know share of Apple held held in your behalf. If you go in Europe and you do the very same thing on Robin Hood you'll get the exact same flow but if you if you don't look closely you'll notice no difference. If you look closely you'll see that there's a little tokenization b token bubble there. What you actually get is a tokenized um share of that asset. say Apple on on Arbitrum one today and you know in this way Arbitrum is very much powering uh not only the core of you know Robin Hood's business internationally but also just allowing them to globally expand and doing this in a way where they have shared infrastructure and infrastructure that's able to basically replicate that exact same experience that users know and love for Robin Hood for the reason why Robin Hood's been so been so successful expand that internationally and do that in a way that not only do they do that they get all these benefits of the blockchain but the coolest thing is, and the thing that I love the most about this is your average user using this probably doesn't even know that they're using the blockchain. Again, they'll see that word tokenized. You know, they might think about it for a second, but ultimately, you don't need to think about uh your seed phrase. You don't need to think about, you know, uh paying gas, right?

[00:11:51]All this is abstracted for you. And I think one of the earliest questions that people had uh around blockchain systems was hey we see that there are a lot of enthusiasts that like like this a lot but is there a class of users that can benefit from this that's you know one step away from this that they don't understand the technology can just be broadly beneficial I think this is you know very very much an answer in the affirmative that uh you can have you know literally you'll have you know Robin Hood users throughout uh its global expansion that are directly benefiting from the blockchain uh from using the blockchain from using arbitrum directly benefiting doing doing things and getting experiences they literally wouldn't be able to get without it ultimately doing this in a way that's very transparent to them.

[00:12:32]They don't even know that they're using the software. Maybe it seems ironic that uh I'm happy to see us fade a little more into the background. I'm saying I'm happy that there are people that are using Arbiter and don't know that. But ultimately I think that if we zoom out and look for global expansion, the fact is most users in the world aren't going to become crypto enthusiasts. And in order to go mainstream and actually be a technology that's usable for everyone, we have to be able to extract those to um to um abstract those experiences away and ultimately I think that Robin Hood is a great example of of a platform that's doing that.

[00:13:05]>> Yeah, absolutely. That's a great case and a great example and thanks for uh this detailed I would say walk through uh well for me as for not a technical person just a regular uh web free enjoyer. It's always great to hear like uh real use cases and real examples. So everything is pretty much clear now and in order and addressing to our audience watching us right now. So if you guys have any questions left after today's discussion, please drop it in a comment section and uh well who knows hopefully we will meet with Stephen in more episodes uh in not in a while and we will discuss those things and uh well we're continuing and moving on to the next block of questions and the first one would be a little bit philosophical I would even say. So uh as more real world assets uh move on chain, what separates infrastructure that uh can support experimentation from infrastructure that can support financial activity on a global scale?

[00:14:05]>> It's a great question. So you know obviously the infrastructure is powerful. We've known that for many years and there have been many sandboxes or as you say experimentation experiments where people have said hey you know this is what you can potentially do with this technology. The hard part though is it's always the coordination problem and the network and the network problem like the network effect which is sure you know if you got a lot of people to move over and use this they can do something interesting right the blockchain technology is interesting but um how do we actually do that? How do we actually build something that's not just a cool experiment but actually has real world value and and the first thing is actually you know getting uh the institutions to move onchain right to actually getting the liquidity to flow through the chain that's like the core the core difference arbitum has extremely deep liquidity has a wealth of institutions from you know Robin Hood Black Rockck Franklin Templeton wisdom tree invesco I can go on and on and on that are actually building financial products on arbitrum one that you can go ahead and in many cases interact with their products and build with them and build alongside them and tap into some of the leading DeFi primitives in the world as well. That's number two which is arbitum not only has liquidity but it has a wealth of you know really strong applications of the most innovative DeFi applications out there often you know begin at arbitum. I like to say you know per obviously is one of the uh largest themes in crypto today and the most successful uh classes of protocols. PERPS took off first on Arbitum, right? When no one else was paying attention to PERPS, uh GMX, you know, launched an Arbitum in 2021 and dominated that market for a very long time. And just about every other uh per protocol in crypto since then has been deeply tied to Arbitum. Whether that's hyperlquid sourcing, it's USDC liquidity from arbitum or you know protocols like variational and osteium uh and edex today that are all built on arbitum and doing very very interesting things. So there's a ton that uh you know arbitum has a ton of DeFi innovation has a ton of liquidity and if you're an institution coming on chain you know you don't want you don't want your products uh you you know your assets to sort of live in a vacuum you want to say okay how do I take my asset you know and it lives offchain I tokenize it and I want it to be part of the most flourishing liquid uh active ecosystems in crypto. I think arbitum you know really brings that together right so arbitum brings together deep liquidity predictable execution you know that it will work you know how it will work it's all programmable mature financial primitives right so DeFi primitives together with uh you know really really strong assets and asset issuers global settlements and on top of that have customized environments right so you can take all of those building blocks and actually program and customize your unique experience on top of those that's what arbitrum has to offer and that's what makes it not experimental but because it has those assets. It has those asset issuers. It has that liquidity. It has those DeFi primitives that actually run today and can take those assets and bring unique experiences to users that make it not you know a hey this is a good idea and powerful but hey this is something that you can do today and that's why we're seeing so many different institutions increasingly doing this on arbitr.

[00:17:08]>> Got it. Thank you. And uh well uh let's continue diving a little bit deeper into discussing how companies work with arbitrum and uh using your solutions. So uh I'm completely sure there are real whales and company owners watching us right now. So especially for this part of our audience, could you please tell us in what ways do companies gain control when they build on Arbitum and uh what does this unlock for them?

[00:17:37]Yeah. So, companies have the ability to customize really just about anything, right? So, the idea is there's this, you know, as I just mentioned, this liquid, bustling uh active, innovative economy of protocols and other builders, but the idea is is that um that may be that's fantastic, but you may need have you as a company may have very unique and very specific use cases, right? And those can come in really many different flavors.

[00:18:04]Privacy is a good example. You might say, "Hey, I love this, but like I'm a bank, let's say, and my users have a certain expectation of privacy. My users expect that um when they pay their neighbor, you know, $5 uh as a reimbursement for uh, you know, some grocery item that they don't accidentally leak the entirety of their financial history there. For example, you might have some deep compliance requirements that says hey you know uh I as you know the banking issuer or the asset issuer whoever you know the I am in this example need to have certain controls certain level of protections or maybe it's reporting requirements and certain regulatory requirements right based on where you are who your regular who your regulator is who your users are etc. There are a lot of different things you might want to control. It could also be things like fees, right? So, you want your users to access the blockchain, but you don't want them to have to like uh deal with uh paying the blockchain fees or you want to customize the own fe your own fees that you take on top of that.

[00:18:56]There's a lot that you can actually customize on top of that. And what we give you to uh teams uh throughout the stack both at the chain level if you want to build your own chain but even if you don't want to build your own chain at the wallet infrastructure level we build that offchain something called zero dev which is the most powerful smart account and smart wallet platform.

[00:19:15]You can as you can actually have wallets that implement policies and rules defined in smart contracts but also defined in we tees right offchain in trusted hardware you can define a set of rules that basically interact the guard rails of how you interact with this border broader system. So the fact that you know people like to say the blockchains are final and uh you know they code is law that's true but you can actually you don't have to just say okay whatever code exists in this blockchain is my is my code and I have to abide by it. you can add to that code. You can program the experience uniquely for your users and you can tap into that environment with a very custom experience. So that's I think how you know to your question how users take control how institutions take control they can basically control any aspect of their aspect of their experience. And the goal that we have both as a business at offchain but as a platform on arbitum is this platform should work for everyone. It has to be customizable for everyone. It's one programmable economy, but it's programmable by everyone and everyone can have, you know, define their use use cases and their needs and they should be able to implement those in a way that still benefits from the shared liquidity and the global infrastructure that everyone can take part of.

[00:20:24]Well, sounds like an absolutely crazy level of customization and I believe it addresses to so many pain points of business owners and if I were a uh company owner, I would definitely consider building on arbitrum and uh well uh a few more things to know about uh this business side of the story. So switching gears uh to the broader company, how does offchain uh help solve uh the cold start problem for businesses and uh how are you approaching this?

[00:20:55]So this is a really an extension of of the previous thing I was saying which is what do businesses not want? Businesses just don't want to maintain their own market infrastructure right find their own liquidity source their liquidity from scratch. What they want to do is tap into some broader you know global system some existing liquid system that has you know existing markets that have existing infrastructures existing exchanges existing platforms where you can do all sorts of you know lending markets and do all sorts of things with the with your assets but ultimately um they will still have some very custom needs whether that's you know like I said execution fee control privacy compliance governance right all sorts of custom business needs that you'll need and that's what that's basically how we how we how we um how we help with the cold start problem where you can tap into this global infrastructure. You don't have to worry about sourcing your own liquidity. You don't have to worry about, you know, if you want to build a chain, you don't have to worry about finding your own consensus because you can tap into Ethereum's consensus and still launch a custom, you know, layer two with arbitrum. You can tap into arbitrum one and still launch a custom market that has your own rules, your own execution rules. And that's how we bridge these two things, which is you want a lot of customizability, but you also don't want to reinvent the wheel.

[00:22:07]You know, on the chain side, we see this all the time that if an institution wants to launch their own chain, they basically have one of two choices. They can either launch a layer one blockchain um and basically, you know, start from scratch, they can build the software, customize the software from scratch.

[00:22:20]Then they have to go and find their own consensus and, you know, maintain all that. But ultimately, what they really want often is just to change the rules on top, right? Change the execution environment. They don't really care about the consensus. That's one of the beautiful things about the whole layer 2 paradigm which is you say, "Hey, don't worry about the layer one consensus."

[00:22:36]You can piggy back on Ethereum's consensus. That's what arbitrum one itself does. You piggyback on Ethereum's consensus, but you can define an entirely new set of rules, right? And that can be fully compatible with Ethereum. You can have EVM compatibility, EVM support like arbitr.

[00:22:51]Or you can also add new languages and new software like arbitr allows you to program using stylus and rust and C and C++ a whole new set of languages that's not supported on Ethereum but you're still getting the security and the decentralization and the consensus from Ethereum. So when Ethereum for example moved from proof of work to proof of stake arbitum just automatically moved as well right because Arbitum just inherits that from Ethereum and this is not a new concept. The most successful protocol of all times uh something called the internet is built in a layered uh uh structure where there are you can you know when you build a website for example you're not uh rebuilding the entirety of the network stack right when you do some when you send someone an email you are using uh you know particular primitives at the top of the network stack that tap into lower py primitives of the network stack but ultimately you're benefiting a you know a lot from the network underneath you and you're saying hey I'm going to inherit all these layers below me that I don't actually have to change at all. So essentially um and that's true at the chain level and that's true even if you're using arbitum one and you're customizing things at the wallet infrastructure level or you're launching your you know tokenized asset in arbitum one and want to have certain controls about how that's transferred when that's transferred you know amounts etc. You can basically program anything you want but do it in a way that you're not starting from zero. You're starting from 100 and you can basically mangle that and change that and control that. put these programmable guard rails in place that define a very very unique experience that nobody else has uh previously decoded.

[00:24:20]>> Well, I cannot find a better word to describe how it all sounds than just exciting. Well, uh everything is really exciting for uh what I hear right now here today and uh of course unfortunately we cannot discuss uh literally everything but uh I believe it will encourage so many people to do their own research and uh if you guys once again have uh any questions, suggestions or whatever, I believe that uh following uh offchain and even following Stephen on socials on X would not be a bad idea. So uh have all the links are in description and uh we came up to the uh final part of today's podcast unfortunately for someone but uh uh well hopefully we'll meet once again as I said and uh the last question for today is um about the expectations from the future and uh looking forward a few years uh what do you think uh the programmable economy will uh ultimately change about how businesses operate from launching to scale in and uh and where does Arbitum actually fit into that future?

[00:25:32]>> Yeah. So, if you just like zoom out the world is moving onchain, the world is moving towards you know programmable everything. We've seen this obviously with money with stable coins but we're seeing now uh an increase in tokenization of all sorts of assets.

[00:25:45]We're seeing some of the largest players in the world um you know write about this. The Federal Reserve has written about programmable money. The World Economic Forum has discussed tokenized assets as programmable digital objects.

[00:25:57]So, we're seeing this shift happen where people understand that you can take, you know, basic financial primitives that have existed for forever like money or other assets and actually attach rules to them and make them programmable and make them, you know, programmable markets basically across settlement, access, compliance, fees, governance, whatever business logic you want to to run on top of this. And we're seeing this trend happen, you know, very very much. You're seeing some that are ahead of the curve like Robin Hood that are basically understand that this is not a side experiment. This is uh the future of money and the future of finance. And ultimately that's what we're going to see because as users reap the benefits uh of what you know settling uh on the blockchain building the programmable economy can give them. You see the free flowing of assets and the ability to build innovative experience that take assets from different issues from different issuers and protocols from different developers and you know merge these all together add new rules on top of them and create a whole new experience. I think it's going to revolutionize what we can do uh in finance and we're not going to be at a place anymore where we are today where today there's still very much a divide.

[00:27:02]there's traditional finance or you know what people call finance and then there's this DeFi thing which is uh you know the blockchain version of decentralized finance. Um but ultimately I don't think that those will coexist as two separate systems uh for very long. I think we're already beginning to see the merge of these two systems. Right? We're seeing people take blockchain native assets and package those up for institutional off-chain investors via ETFs or DATs. We're seeing people take non-blockchain native assets like real world assets or equities or dollars even and package those up onchain and ultimately I think if you zoom out what's happening is there's this cross-pollination but ultimately it's there's one system here and blockchain rails is not a separate system but it's a just a part of the global financial system and increasingly I think that's going to become more and more and more clear where there's not two systems you have to think about hey do I want to go over the line and bridge the gap and build something on the blockchain. No, it's I am building in finance.

[00:28:03]Blockchain infrastructure is a very important primitive for global finance.

[00:28:09]What can uh how can my system benefit from using blockchain infrastructure?

[00:28:12]And we when we succeed here, I don't think we'll use terms like DeFi anymore.

[00:28:16]I think it'll just be fi, right?

[00:28:17]Everything will just be finance and crypto and blockchain, what we call DeFi today, will be a part of that global system. And I also don't think we'll use terms like real world assets anymore.

[00:28:26]Really, these are just assets. and assets that can exist on the blockchain and exist not on the blockchain and ultimately they're all very beneficial and very useful for the real world.

[00:28:37]Well, I would say a really encouraging ending and of course the time will show and we will be here to track how the things are going and uh also tracking the role of arbitrum and all this uh picture of the bright future which is getting closer and closer day after day and uh well uh for today that's pretty much it. Thank you very much Stephen for joining in. I believe it was insightful and interesting for everyone and uh well hope to see you in more episodes.

[00:29:07]>> Thank you so much. Likewise.

[00:29:09]>> Well and of course thanks for our audience. I believe that everyone watched until the end guys. Stay tuned uh not miss the big things. Keep building, stay safe and uh well see you.

[00:29:19]Bye-bye.