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, who is now senior vice president and crypto GM at Robinhood, 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.

Full report : Robinhood announces an expanded offering of tokenized US stocks across Europe, crypto staking in US, a Layer 2 blockchain for real-world asset settlement, more.