Robinhood unveiled crypto perpetual futures with up to 10 times leverage, AI trading agents built on OpenAI and Anthropic models, and weekend trading for US stocks at its HOOD Summit in Houston on Tuesday. The brokerage is betting that active traders want everything in one app, at every hour.
The perpetual futures offering goes to eligible US customers first, with leverage up to 10x on bitcoin and ether. Perps are the dominant trading instrument in crypto derivatives, letting traders take leveraged positions with no expiry date while paying or receiving a funding payment that keeps the contract anchored to spot prices. Bringing them into a mainstream brokerage app closes one of the last product gaps between Robinhood and the offshore exchanges that have historically captured that flow.
Perps volume in crypto dwarfs spot trading on most venues, and the funding mechanism is what keeps the contract price from drifting away from the underlying market. When longs outnumber shorts, longs pay shorts, and the reverse when positioning flips. That design has never been part of a US retail brokerage before, which is why the launch is being watched as much by regulators as by traders.
AI agents with standing orders
The AI feature, Robinhood Agents, lets customers create an agent inside the app, pick a model from OpenAI or Anthropic, and connect it to a separate trading account. The agent can analyze markets, build watchlists and trade stocks, options and crypto. Each proposed trade requires customer approval.
A feature called Loops pushes it further. Customers can give an agent standing instructions, conditions and commands that stay active over time. An agent could be told to buy more of a stock whenever it drops to a set price, or to sell when volatility spikes, and it keeps watching without a fresh prompt. Robinhood product vice president Abhishek Fatehpuria told CoinDesk the goal is simple: “One of our top priorities as a company is to be number one for active traders. We’re not focused on one particular asset class over another.”
The difference from older automation tools is scope. Recurring buys and rebalancing rules follow fixed schedules set in advance. An agent with Loops monitors live conditions and acts when they are met, which starts to look less like a standing order and more like delegation. Robinhood’s answer to the obvious risk is the separate account: whatever the agent does happens in its own balance, not the customer’s main one.
The choice of models is also worth noting. OpenAI and Anthropic sit at the top of the consumer AI market, and neither has lent its brand to a retail trading product before. Every bad trade an agent makes will now be attributed somewhere, and Robinhood has effectively signed up two of the most visible names in AI to share that exposure.
Weekend equities arrive in 2027
Robinhood launched its 24 Hour Market for weekday overnight trading in 2023, but that service stops at the weekend. The company now plans to fill that gap with Saturday and Sunday trading in a selection of US stocks and ETFs through Bruce ATS, an alternative trading system. The rollout is scheduled for early 2027, which the company framed as a first for US equities.
The practical case is straightforward. Jobs reports, election results and geopolitical shocks do not check the calendar before they land. A trader holding exposure into a weekend currently waits until Sunday evening or Monday morning to react. Weekend sessions through an ATS change that, at least for the names Robinhood includes in the curated list.
The package also includes extended options hours, more intraday margin, and event contracts tied to corporate earnings, built with Cboe. Those contracts settle against a company’s reported quarterly results, letting traders bet on whether a company beats or misses estimates.
The competitive math
Each piece of the announcement targets a different rival. Crypto perps compete with offshore exchanges like Bybit and with Coinbase’s derivatives push. Weekend trading pressures Charles Schwab and Fidelity, which still confine extended access to weekdays. The AI agents put Robinhood in direct competition with the wave of AI investing assistants building on the same foundation models.
There is a risk dimension too. Perps with 10x leverage in a retail app will draw scrutiny from regulators who have spent years pushing brokers away from leveraged retail products. Robinhood’s history with gamification criticism, from confetti screens to options order flow, makes the leverage feature the most politically exposed part of the launch. The company has kept the AI agents in a separate account with per-trade approval, which looks like a deliberate answer to the obvious question about handing trading decisions to a model.
Execution is the other open question. Robinhood has a record of announcing features that take months to reach all users, and the AI agent product was first floated earlier this year before Tuesday’s detailed rollout. The market reaction will depend on dates. Perps and AI agents are live or imminent, while weekend trading sits more than a quarter away. Traders get new tools now, and Robinhood gets a 2027 headline it can repeat until then.
For the crypto market specifically, the perps launch matters most. A regulated US venue offering 10x leverage on bitcoin and ether pulls activity that currently sits on offshore platforms back onshore, into accounts that report to US authorities. How quickly volume actually migrates is the number to watch over the next two quarters.