On a brisk day in early December, Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood, and his head of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, sat on a blue sofa in the penthouse of a lower Manhattan office with wall-sized windows. It was two days before Tenev, wearing Nikes with a purple swoosh, and Kerbrat, dressed in a navy button-down, would officially announce the expansion of Robinhood's crypto business into the European Union—one of the online stock brokerage’s most significant blockchain moves of the past two years.
Depending on one’s level of skepticism toward the broader industry, the expansion abroad was either perfect timing—Bitcoin’s price has almost tripled since the beginning of the year—or too little, too late. Many have written the customary “crypto is dead” obituary in the past year amid broader regulatory scrutiny.
