CANNES — Fifteen years after flipping burgers at a McDonald‘s and teaching himself to code at night in a cramped apartment near the French Riviera, Robinhood crypto chief Johann Kerbrat is back.
The last time he lived around Cannes, he was 21 — with no connections, no funding, and no formal business training. But he had a knack for programming and a drive to solve real-world problems.
Kerbrat quit his job just before starting university in nearby Nice, and soon after launched his first fintech startup: a no-code payments company built from scratch to help small merchants create e-commerce sites without hiring developers.
“It was in my little studio — probably smaller than your bathroom,” he said. “Initially, we didn’t have any employees, but it was right at the beginning of e-commerce. Back then, if you were a merchant you didn’t really have an option, you had to hire an agency and spend tens of thousands of euros. The idea was to let people build their own thing without any technical knowledge — kind of what Shopify is doing now.”
But the timing was right. The early 2010s brought a boom in online commerce, and Kerbrat’s tool gave small merchants a chance to compete. It also opened his eyes to how fragile and expensive the global financial system really was.
A classmate from Greece told him how his family’s bank accounts had been frozen during the eurozone crisis. Around the same time, merchants using his platform were struggling with high fees, chargebacks, and fraud. And then the Bitcoin white paper landed.
“I was like, ‘Okay, that’s a solution for everything,’ ” he said
Now, from Château de la Croix des Gardes, a Belle Époque mansion perched along the same coastline where he once lived and worked the night shift in fast food, he’s part of the most ambitious crypto product suite in Robinhood’s history.
On Monday the company announced an expanded offering of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, crypto staking in the U.S., perpetual futures for eligible EU traders, and a new Layer 2 blockchain optimized for real-world asset settlement and 24/7 trading.
“It’s absolutely surreal,” he said, seated inside the iconic Carlton Hotel — a five-star landmark that once felt impossibly out of reach. “When I was younger, I used to walk past this place — and I could have never, never stayed here.”
The announcement coincides with the Ethereum Community Conference, hosted in Cannes for the first time, and Robinhood’s latest regulatory approvals across Europe.
Robinhood’s latest move is its most serious push yet to blend traditional finance with blockchain-based infrastructure.
Kerbrat said the goal isn’t to dazzle with features. It’s to make crypto disappear into the background. He likened it to plumbing.
“You don’t think about how water gets to your tap,” he said. “You just expect it to be there.”
But there is still plumbing to build out.
At the heart of Monday’s launch are tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, now available to customers in 30 EU and European Economic Area countries. The tokens — built first on Arbitrum — offer 24/5 access, dividend support, and zero commission or spread from Robinhood. Eventually, they’ll migrate to a custom Layer 2 blockchain built to support tokenized assets, seamless bridging, and self-custody.
In the U.S., Robinhood is debuting staking for Ethereum and Solana, allowing users to earn rewards by supporting network operations. In Europe, crypto perpetual futures will offer eligible users up to 3x leverage, routed through Bitstamp. Other upgrades include smart exchange routing, tax lot management, and advanced charting tools — all designed to make crypto feel as seamless and intuitive as trading stocks.
Shares of Robinhood are up over 100% this year.
“When we talk about mass adoption,” Kerbrat said, “This is what it looks like. A product people use — without needing to know how it works.”
For Kerbrat, who spent his adolescence between Cannes and Nice, the return isn’t just symbolic. It’s a measure of how far he’s come — and how much still feels the same.
His father worked in IT. His mother stayed home with him and his sister. One day, his dad brought home a clunky old Apple computer with a black-and-white screen and that was the spark. By 7, he was experimenting. By 11, he was programming regularly. And by 17, he was already trying to fix the broken parts of the internet economy he saw around him.
His parents, now living further inland, drove in just in time to watch the launch. They remember the early days, he said — the tiny apartment, the first lines of code, the endless conversations with merchants who didn’t quite believe his pitch — that anyone could build an e-commerce site without knowing how to code.
“We chose Cannes because of licensing, and because the conference was here,” he said. “But I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t feel good.”
He paused, letting the moment settle.
“I never thought I’d be back here like this.”
