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Robinhood adds 10x crypto perps and AI trading agents for US users
Robinhood pairs perpetual futures on eight assets, routed through Bitstamp, with in-app AI agents customers can leave running. Perps go live in the coming months.
Robinhood announced on September 29, 2026 that eligible US customers will get crypto perpetual futures on eight assets, in-app AI agents that can execute trades within user-set limits, and pending-regulator weekend equity trading. The three launches target the same audience — active traders. The perps venue is Bitstamp, the exchange Robinhood acquired in 2025.
Perps: 10x on BTC and ETH, 3x on the alt roster
The perpetuals cover BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK and HYPE. Leverage tops out at 10x on BTC and ETH; the six alts run at 3x per The Block's write-up. P&L settles every 15 minutes rather than continuously — a design choice that limits the cadence of liquidation waves but also caps how fast a losing position can be flushed. Trading fees are 0.01% per side through end of 2026.
Routing runs through Bitstamp, which lets Robinhood offer the venue to US retail without operating a CFTC-registered derivatives exchange itself. Vlad Tenev, CEO, framed the launch as "a new chapter for US derivatives." The product is US-only and gated to "eligible" customers; Robinhood did not publish the eligibility criteria in the launch material.
Agents: 150,000 accounts already open
Robinhood's agent framework — customers create their own agents, name them, and select an underlying model — has been in soft-launch since May 2026. The company disclosed more than 150,000 agentic trading accounts open, and its agents making ~30 million tool calls per day across the platform. Customers can pick models from third-party labs; OpenAI's GPT-Luna is free through end of 2026.
A new Loops feature lets an agent execute the same strategy on a repeating trigger — the design pattern that turns a one-off trade instruction into a persistent bot. Trades stay subject to user-set position, notional and drawdown caps.
Abhishek Fatehpuria, VP of product management, said Robinhood is "setting the standard for what agentic finance can be" — a claim the compliance side will get to test as retail turns loose LLMs on their own brokerage accounts.
Weekend equities: pending regulator sign-off
The third piece — extending select US equities and ETFs to weekend trading via Bruce ATS, the alternative trading system Robinhood already uses for its overnight session — is not live and is described as "pending regulatory review." It would sit on top of the existing 24 Hour Market (Sunday 8pm through Friday 8pm ET).
Numbers block
- Perp leverage: 10x (BTC, ETH); 3x (SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK, HYPE)
- Perp fee: 0.01% per side, through end of 2026
- P&L settlement: every 15 minutes
- Venue: Bitstamp (Robinhood subsidiary since 2025)
- Agentic trading accounts: 150,000+ since May 2026
- Agent tool calls: ~30M/day
- Free model: GPT-Luna (OpenAI), through end of 2026
- Rollout: perps "coming months," US-only; weekend equities pending
- Sources: CoinDesk, The Block
What to watch
- Eligibility gates. Robinhood has not disclosed which US customers qualify. State-by-state derivatives licensing will decide reach.
- Bitstamp funding rails. Perps live and die on funding-rate mechanics; Robinhood has not detailed the funding index or the interval.
- Agent-driven flow share. 150k accounts and 30M daily tool calls is soft-launch scale. The interesting question is what fraction of Robinhood's total order flow will originate from an LLM rather than a human by Q1 2027.
- CFTC posture. A retail broker routing US customers into 10x perps via a subsidiary exchange is the kind of structure that draws examination letters. None disclosed so far.
Context
Coinbase started rolling out US perps in 2025 through its own CFTC-registered exchange; Kraken and Bitstamp already ran non-US perp venues. Robinhood's route differs on one dimension: same product, same US retail audience, but framed as a brokered offering on top of Bitstamp rather than as a Robinhood derivatives exchange. The AI-agent pairing is the twist — it's the first mainstream US broker to build agentic execution into the primary trading UI rather than as a separate developer product.