Two Weeks After Its Engineers Were Charged Over HYPE Perps, Robinhood Says It Will Sell HYPE Perps to Every American

On September 15, federal prosecutors charged two Robinhood engineers with front-running their own company’s token listings using HYPE perps on Hyperliquid.

Two weeks later, Robinhood got on stage in Houston and said it will offer HYPE perps itself, to US retail, with leverage.

On that same Tuesday, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee sent Hyperliquid a letter asking how it catches insider trading.

What Robinhood Announced

At its HOOD Summit on September 29, Robinhood said eligible US customers will be able to trade perpetual futures “in the coming months.” According to Robinhood’s announcement and reporting from The Block and Bloomberg, here’s the setup:

• Assets: BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK and HYPE
• Leverage: up to 10x on BTC and ETH, 3x on everything else
• Fees: 1 basis point (0.01%) per trade through the end of 2026
• Infrastructure: run through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp, the exchange Robinhood bought last year
• Settlement: P&L settled every 15 minutes
• Tooling: stop-loss and take-profit orders, live liquidation price tracking, position risk alerts

CEO Vlad Tenev called it “bringing America its first true perps. No expiry, with P&L settled every 15 minutes.”

“First” is a stretch. In May the CFTC approved Kalshi’s bitcoin perpetual contract, and it issued Coinbase a no-action letter to route perps to US customers through its Bermuda affiliate. What Robinhood has that those two don’t is distribution. It has tens of millions of retail accounts, and the app already sits on their home screens.

Neither Robinhood’s announcement nor The Block’s coverage says which CFTC-registered venue will list the contracts. The launch window is still “coming months.”

The Rest of the Firehose

Perps were one item on a long list:

• 24/7 stock trading. Robinhood will route orders for a curated list of stocks and ETFs to Bruce Markets, an alternative trading system that Robinhood and Peak6 have backed. The plan is weekend trading, pending regulatory review. Bloomberg notes that New York markets last held Saturday sessions in 1952.
• Robinhood Agents. These are AI agents that analyze markets, build strategies, and “trade autonomously 24/7” from a dedicated account. You can choose models from leading AI labs, OpenAI among them. Trades need manual approval by default, but you can switch that off. An add-on store sells data feeds for $5–$30 a month, including Unusual Whales options flow, Quiver’s government trade tracker, and Token Terminal crypto fundamentals.
• Earnings contracts. These are binary bets on company KPIs such as earnings beats and revenue targets. They are listed on Cboe, with no fees through year-end.
• 4x intraday margin, up from 2x, starting next month for eligible customers.

Put it together and you get leveraged crypto perps, weekend stocks, binary earnings bets and an AI that can place the trades, all in one app and all advertised at near-zero fees.

The Awkward Timing

HYPE is on the listing sheet, and that’s the part worth pausing on.

The DOJ’s case against former Robinhood engineers Hefu Chai and Jerry Xiang says they had access to the internal Slack channel where Robinhood planned its crypto listings. Prosecutors say they bought Hyperliquid perps on tokens including HYPE minutes before listing announcements went out. Robinhood’s internal listing process was the leak, and Hyperliquid perps were how the trades were placed.

Robinhood is now running both sides of that trade: the listing announcements and the perps market.

The same day, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) widened his prediction-market insider trading probe. He sent letters to Hyperliquid, Crypto.com and PredictIt asking how they verify users, how they flag trades that could be based on nonpublic information, and what they have referred to regulators. The Hyperliquid letter focuses on a large leveraged short that was placed shortly before President Trump’s October 10, 2025 announcement of 100% tariffs on Chinese imports. Responses are due October 13.

“Some bad actors have exploited the platforms to make thousands of dollars by placing bets based on nonpublic information,” Comer wrote.

Neither story involves any allegation against Robinhood itself. Still, a US broker is launching leveraged perps on a token whose home exchange is under congressional scrutiny for insider trading, two weeks after its own staff were charged with insider trading in that token’s perps. Its surveillance team will be under a lot of scrutiny.

Coinbase Moved the Same Day

Robinhood wasn’t the only one making news on Monday and Tuesday. On September 28 the CFTC registered Coinbase Clearing LLC as a derivatives clearing organization. It is the first USDC-native clearinghouse, and it settles fully collateralized futures, options and swaps 24/7.

With that, Coinbase holds all three regulated pieces of a US derivatives business: an FCM, an exchange (DCM) and now its own clearinghouse. Robinhood has distribution and Bitstamp. Kalshi has the first approved perp contract. Hyperliquid has the volume, a pending congressional letter, and a president saying the CFTC wants it onshore.

Perps were crypto’s biggest product. They were built offshore, and Americans were locked out of them for years. Now the largest US retail brokers are competing to bring them onshore.

Why This Matters for Crypto Jobs

Onshore perps are a hiring event. Hyperliquid showed how much money perps make, and US firms want that business under CFTC rules. Here’s what that means for jobs:

• Market surveillance and trade compliance. This is the obvious one. The Chai/Xiang case and the Comer letters both show that regulators now expect exchanges to catch insider trading across venues, including onchain venues. Anyone who can build cross-venue surveillance (listing-event monitoring, wallet-to-account linking, pre-announcement anomaly detection) has a very strong pitch right now.
• Derivatives risk engineers. Settling P&L every 15 minutes, running a liquidation engine and setting margin for retail at 10x is hard engineering. Quants and backend engineers with perp DEX or CEX liquidation experience are the people Robinhood, Coinbase, Kalshi and Kraken all need.
• Regulatory and product counsel. No venue has been named yet. Someone has to fit a perpetual contract into a Commodity Exchange Act framework built for dated futures, and that work is billable.
• AI agent infrastructure. Robinhood says more than 150,000 users have opened agentic trading accounts, with about 30 million tool calls a day. Agents that trade real money need guardrails, permissioning and audit trails, and that is a new specialty.

The offshore perp shops trained a generation of engineers and risk managers. US brokers are about to hire them.

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