Ship or Die Accelerate 2025: Why Everyone Should Refocus on Mobile (Chris Maddern, Johann Kerbrat)

All right. Good morning. So our good friends at Solana gave us 15 minutes, and I thought, who would I like to pin down and talk to about mobile for 15 minutes? And I couldn't think of anyone better than Johan. And he very kindly has agreed to be here with us.

That's not true. It was probably number three on the list.

You're high on the list. You are high on the list. So it's pretty clear that consumer crypto is reaching its mainstream mode and Solana is reaching its mainstream moment. And for the next billion users, it seems pretty obvious that mobile devices are going to be where that happens, because half of the world is mobile first, even mobile only. And for the rest of us, it's where we spend a lot of our time. So, Johan, for people who don't know long and storied technology career, Airbnb created Iron Fish and then eventually ended up as CTO of Robinhood Crypto, and then now runs Robinhood Crypto as gm. And so a few years ago, you made a choice which was to leave kind of pure play crypto and bet on a mobile first view of crypto at Robinhood. Like, why did you bet your career on mobile being where crypto gets adoption?

Yeah, I think it's a combination of the two. Right. Crypto is 247 weekends, not just like during the market hours like the traditional finance system. And so when that's the case, people want to be able to access it from anywhere. And so obviously, mobile became our main focus. I think the second aspect was we want to target any type of customer, not just the people that are on a desktop with a Bloomberg terminal. We want to be able to get to anyone. And so again, what is the best way to do it? It was mobile. That being said, we don't want to just focus on mobile. We also want to offer powerful web advanced desktop platform. But at the end of the day, if you want to be in crypto, you need to be mobile first.

And so, wait, are you saying maybe there are some more powerful desktop crypto features in the future?

Yeah, we have a platform called Robinhood Legend. It's basically trading view on steroids with very advanced, powerful charts that you can actually scroll down, up and down, add.

Technical analysis, all this thing in a few seconds. Super fast, super powerful. And so far, people have been really excited about it.

I didn't even know that there wasn't even a plug. I literally had no idea that product existed. So, you know, fast forward a few years. Robinhood, traditionally brokerage crypto on the Side you guys are entering non custodial crypto now you're building a non custodial wallet. You had another moment there where you could choose do we go mobile first with this or do we build where kind of some of the more conventional crypto stuff happens, Make a browser extension, the web, all of that stuff. Why redouble down on mobile in the noncustodial crypto product?

So we thought at the time, you know, that the Chrome extension thing was kind of overdone at the time. Like, you know, there was many competitors of ours that were there very easy to pay online on our website using your Chrome extension. And so we felt like this use case was, was done. What we felt like that wasn't really.

Solve at this point was how people can use DeFi and Web3 and all this stuff without having to use this complicated extension. And also like 247 like I mentioned before. And so you know, at the time like when you look at Curve, when you look at all this platform where everything was very complex, let's put it that way, like we decided to bring this wallet where we, we were doing gasless transaction. You didn't have to worry about the gas. Right now with Gold you can get free Solana swaps. We try to remove a lot of the complexity to make sure that people can actually focus on doing what they're trying to do and not just trying to understand how to use crypto. And so I think for us that was the main focus. And then we start to see a lot of people playing games on their phone now they can actually pay the transaction with their wallet. And so that started to develop and we're pretty excited about that.

So what you're saying is Chrome extensions suck mobile rules?

I wouldn't say it sucks, it's just like it's a different use case. Right. And so I think for us we were more excited about the people that are actually using crypto on a day to day versus just using a one off on the Chrome extension. But you also build a mobile wallet. So tell me about why did you decide to do mobile?

Chrome extensions suck. But like seriously, like I think the, the bar of what has passed for UX in Crypto has been pretty sad for a really long time. And I think on mobile it challenges you to do two things. One, answer a clearer problem for the user because you need to capture that home screen space, be front of mind, be the icon that you go tap. And two, people just expect stuff to be fast and simple. And so I really, really enjoy that.

About mobile.

I have for 10 years and it's why pretty much everything I built has been mobile first. So stepping a little bit away from Robinhood, when you look on Chain and you see this rich tapestry of stuff that's happening, there's so many things being built. What do you see happening on Chain that's really exciting to you right now?

I mean there's so much. Right. You have all the tokenization of real world assets that is actually finally happening. I think for the past five years we've heard about it, but there was not a ton of action. Now you're starting to see action. You also see the decentralization of AI models and data. I think that's something that I'm really excited about right now. When we hear about how the big giants are training their model, they are doing this big partnership with Reddit and all the platform and so it's not clear yet how the people are being remunerated, the people that are actually creating the content that the model are trained on. And so there is a lot of projects that you see the intersection with AI that I, I'm pretty excited about because that was one of the main usage for, for crypto initially was small micropayments with like massive quantity. And so I think that's one way where we can train models in a lot more decentralized way that what's currently happening. And you know, if we want this model to work for, for everyone, not just like the people that are in the Silicon Valley on the, on the west coast of the US we will need to have this content that is from the entire world. And so I think crypto will be super useful there.

Yeah, it feels like anything right now that isn't bringing finance on chain isn't distributing compute for this revolution or isn't solving the counter problem of that, which is like how do we prove ownership and origination in a world where there is mass creation? Everything else is kind of just a little bit of a waste of time.

Okay, so bringing our eye back a little bit to mobile, what do you see playing out on our mobile devices over the next couple of years? What does it look like to be a mobile crypto product in like 2027?

I think we'll see a lot of development on the future derivative perpetual things, you know, for example, iProduct has been going pretty strong in the past few months. We've been starting to see a lot of usage on this. We're also starting to see a lot more usage of Dex overall. Like I think you know, a few years ago, volume on Dexs was maybe 5% of the total crypto volume. Now it's more like in the 20, 25%. So you're starting to see this, like, great adoption that, you know, we've all been writing for. And then I think, you know, the access to this, like right now, like there's only a few wallets that give you access to these Dexes, but I think you will see more and more centralized platform that will also give you access to that.

Yeah, cool. I totally agree. I think you actually have a really interesting viewpoint on this, which is you guys are actually kind of involved in this from both sides. There is two races happening. One to bring everything off chain on chain and one to bring everything on chain off chain in the form of ETFs and other ways of getting access to it. How does that race play out? Which wins? Like, which happens faster? Like does everything come on chain and that eventually wins or do we eventually wrap everything into traditional financial markets? Like, how does that play out?

I think you will see both. Right, so the ETF were pretty exciting. Not so much because now you could access the etf. Like I think everyone already had crypto before the etf. And you know, probably the people in this room didn't really care about it, but it brought a new wave of investor, new wave of institution. A lot of people that were staying on the sideline until now because they didn't want to get into it or were unsure about the regulatory framework. And so with that, you also brought stability in prices, less volatility. If you look at the Bitcoin price in the, not the crash, but in the correction that we saw on the stock market a few months ago, Bitcoin actually stayed pretty stable at 85 something.

And so I think that's one aspect that is interesting with this institution. We'll be able to develop more liquidity pools. We'll be able to create more product overall. And then everything going on chain, I think that's inevitable. People want access 24 7. They want fractionalization by default. They want price discoveries. They want to be able to access anything, not be limited by I created investor status or all these kind of things. And so I think everything will come on chain at some point. It's just a question of how and under which regulatory framework. But you will see it happening.

Yeah, agree. Okay, let's. We have about three minutes. I sent us some lightning questions. So besides Robinhood crypto, and let's say you can't say rally because Otherwise that obviously would have been your answer. What is the most delightful mobile crypto experience you've had recently?

One time I visited a country where I was able to use a wallet for about everything, the entire trip. And that was pretty exciting for me. Not just trading the asset for the speculation around it because you believe or whatever, but actually being able to buy a coffee, buy the restaurants. And so at the time I was like, oh, it's pretty cool the payments aspect. But I think what I didn't realize was at the time was the replacement of the banking system in these countries with stablecoins. So you know, they are able to get away from their high inflation currency and use stablecoin and then they're able to use that kind of to add an exchange. And you know, in the US we have a great banking system, didn't really evolve in the past 20 years, but still, still works. But over there like they actually just keep that entire foundation and they just build everything on wallet and so that's pretty exciting. I think when you think about what it will open to all these people everywhere in the world, it's pretty exciting.

What was the country?

El Salvador. Sorry, Salvador.

Ah, very cool. Okay. Biggest frustration and the biggest thing that holds us back from making better products on mobile.

What do you think.

For me? And actually it's very different for you. On ramp. On ramp sucks. Laws around on ramp are really, really hard. Even the best products are extremely inconvenient. And actually I think it really creates a massive advantage for incumbents like yourself because you can create an on ramp experience. It's really impossible for us to build without significant licensure and other hurdles.

Yeah, that's absolutely one thing where I think regulation has blocked a lot of these companies, like yours for example, to be able to use this fiat to crypto on ramp. But I think now with the competition happening in the on ramp space, if you look at all the competitors, you will see a lot more of this improvement that we've been waiting for and speed to transfer will also increase and price will go down. So I think it's just a question of a few months to be honest and we'll start seeing a lot of development on the onramp.

Your mouth to God's ears. Okay, that is all we have time for. Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for being with us. Johan, thank you for having us. Have a great day.