Most Influential: Vlad Tenev

Vlad Tenev, CEO and co-founder of Robinhood, has spent the year turning the trading app into a serious player in the crypto industry.

This feature is a part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2025 list.

Once known for commission-free stock trades, the company is now building its own blockchain, offering staking services, and expanding across Europe with tokenized stocks.

The biggest move saw Robinhood complete its $200 million acquisition of Bitstamp, one of the longest-running crypto exchanges. The deal brought in over 50 global licenses and opened the door to institutional trading and expansion in the crypto ecosystem.

Robinhood has since launched staking for ether and solana, enabled perpetual futures in the EU, and added more tokens for U.S. users, including XRP, SOL, and BNB. In Europe, users can now trade over 200 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs on Arbitrum-based infrastructure.

That infrastructure is a key part of the company’s future. In July, Tenev revealed Robinhood is building its own layer 2 blockchain, called Robinhood Chain, to power tokenized asset trading with lower fees and faster settlement.

Tenev’s focus on the crypto ecosystem is likely a reflection of his belief in the sector's future. At Token2049 in Singapore, he likened the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies to a freight train that can’t be stopped, noting that “tokenization is going to eat the entire financial system.”

As Robinhood expands its presence in the crypto ecosystem, it’s also expanding its prediction markets offering.

• As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
• GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
• Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.

• Spanish police have arrested five people and charged four others in Denmark for the kidnapping and murder of a man whose cryptocurrency was targeted by the attackers.
• The victim was abducted, shot and held for several hours while the attackers tried to gain access to his crypto wallets, ultimately leading to his murder.
• The case highlights a growing trend of physical attacks aimed at extracting access to crypto wallets, known as "wrench attacks", and demonstrates the increasing violence and brutality of such crimes.

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