Robinhood is bringing crypto perpetual futures to U.S. customers, but the company isn't using Lighter, the decentralized exchange it invested in and made the exclusive perps provider inside Robinhood Wallet.
- Instead, Robinhood said in a Tuesday press release that its new U.S. perpetual futures will be offered through Bitstamp, the centralized crypto exchange it bought last year.
- Eligible customers will initially be able to trade BTC, ETH and several other crypto perps with leverage of up to x10.
Robinhood's relationship with Lighter
Robinhood participated in Lighter's $68 million funding round last year, which valued the decentralized exchange at about $1.5 billion.
Then in July, Robinhood directly integrated Lighter into its self-custody wallet. Users in supported countries got access to perpetual futures through Lighter, while the DEX committed 11 million LIT tokens to rewards for Robinhood users.
- In a July 2 interview with The Rollup, Novakovski said Lighter was the "exclusive Perpetuals partner for Robinhood wallet" for users outside the U.S.
- He also called it "the first of what we see as like various partnerships" with Robinhood and said the companies hoped for a "deepening level of partnership."
- In that same interview, he said the integration could later expand to "other parts of the Robinhood stack," including customers in the U.S.
For now, that expansion is going another way as Robinhood said its U.S. perps will run through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp, a crypto exchange Robinhood acquired in June 2025 in a deal worth roughly $200 million.
While the split doesn't necessarily mean that Robinhood has abandoned Lighter, the price of LIT dropped by more than 13% on the news, per data from CoinGecko.
- The Coinformer reached out to Robinhood for comments.