Robinhood Sets 10x Leverage on Bitcoin Perps for US Traders

Robinhood is putting perpetual futures in front of American retail traders, with leverage capped at 10x on bitcoin and ether and 3x on six other tokens. The brokerage set out the product on Monday at its HOOD Summit in Houston, alongside weekend equities trading and a set of in-app AI agents that place orders. Eight contracts open the list: bitcoin, ether, Solana, XRP, dogecoin, cardano, chainlink and HYPE. Trades cost one basis point, 0.01%, through the end of 2026, and the company has not said what they cost after that. Contracts never expire.

When it opens is not agreed

Four accounts of Monday's announcement do not put the launch in the same place. The Block, publishing at 10:58 p.m. Eastern on Monday, describes perps as planned and arriving in the coming months, and crypto.news and The Crypto Times both read it the same way on Tuesday. Cryptobriefing writes that Robinhood began offering the contracts to select US users on 29 September. Robinhood's own summit post describes the product without fixing a date. We could not establish which account is current.

Ten times leverage, and the cost of being wrong

The arithmetic is unforgiving. At ten times leverage a 10% move against a position takes the entire margin, a point The Crypto Times and Cryptobriefing make independently and in almost the same words. Robinhood says traders get stop-loss and take-profit orders, live liquidation prices and risk alerts before that happens. The lower 3x ceiling on the six smaller contracts is a market-depth decision on CoinDesk's account, and the company says it can move the limits later. Chief executive Vlad Tenev called the contracts "America's first true perps" in a phrasing that reaches English three slightly different ways, and put the wider pitch like this.

"Ownership doesn't work without markets, and markets don't work without traders. We're making Robinhood the best place in the world for active traders by delivering tools once reserved for hedge funds, big banks, and quant firms," Tenev said.

The plumbing was bought last year

The contracts run on Bitstamp, the exchange Robinhood acquired in June 2025, and are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, a futures commission merchant already registered with the CFTC. A futures commission merchant is the broker that carries a customer's derivatives account and holds the margin behind it. Having one registered is what lets a retail app reach US customers without starting a licence application. Cryptobriefing puts the Bitstamp purchase at about $200 million and dates a European perps launch to April 2026; neither figure appears in the tier-1 accounts read here.

The regulator opened this door before Robinhood walked through it. The Crypto Times traces the path to the CFTC's approval of Kalshi's bitcoin perpetual contracts in May, a reading no other outlet in this sweep repeats. The agency has worked the product class from several sides this year, including its motion to throw out CME's lawsuit over perpetual futures. On Monday it also registered Coinbase's own clearinghouse with leverage excluded, which is the opposite trade-off from the one Robinhood is making.

Weekends come later, without a date

The equities half of the announcement has no calendar. Robinhood wants Saturday and Sunday trading in a curated list of liquid US stocks and ETFs, routed through Bruce ATS, an alternative trading system that Cryptobriefing says Robinhood owns jointly with PEAK6 Investments. Approval is pending. crypto.news puts the launch in early 2027; Cryptobriefing says no date is confirmed, and the company's own post gives none that could be checked. Steve Quirk, Robinhood's chief brokerage officer, gave the reasoning without the calendar: "Breaking news doesn't wait for an opening bell."

What none of Monday's material contains is a volume expectation. Robinhood has not said how much of its crypto book it thinks will move into perps, and no outlet read here published an estimate. The fee is set to zero-ish for three months and the leverage is capped below what offshore venues offer, so the first honest reading comes when the introductory pricing ends. That is 1 January, and the company has not said what replaces it.