Robinhood and Kraken Super App Convergence

This race is no longer brokerage versus exchange, it is a fight to own the user’s full trading wallet. Robinhood started with stocks and options, then pulled crypto, cash balances, and prediction markets into one app for mass retail. Kraken started with crypto liquidity and is adding stocks, futures, options, payments, and tokenized equities for active traders. Both are trying to keep user money inside one account, one login, and one trading interface for every asset.

• Robinhood’s path is cross sell. It already has 26.8M funded accounts and a revenue mix spread across net interest income, options, crypto, stocks, subscriptions, and prediction markets, which lets it use low crypto pricing as a feature to pull more activity into the app instead of relying on crypto fees alone.
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• Kraken’s path is vertical expansion from a pro crypto base. It is using acquisitions and launches to add commission free stocks, futures and options through NinjaTrader, tokenized equities through xStocks, and payments through Krak, turning an exchange account into a broader trading account for high frequency users.
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• The end state looks less like a pure crypto venue and more like a 24 hour global market app. Tokenized equities matter here because they make stocks behave more like crypto, with fractional trading, longer hours, and blockchain settlement underneath, which narrows the gap between a brokerage app and a crypto exchange.
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From here, the winners are likely to be the platforms that combine the broadest product menu with the lowest friction to move cash across products. Robinhood is pushing crypto native economics into brokerage. Kraken is pushing exchange infrastructure into stocks and derivatives. That convergence points toward a smaller number of multi asset consumer trading hubs, with Coinbase being forced to follow the same path.