Today, we are coming out of stealth to announce Rialto. Capital markets, rebuilt onchain.
For the past year, we've been building a new onchain spot exchange: a PropAMM-driven venue for the convergence of crypto and traditional finance. Working closely alongside @RobinhoodCrypto, @Offchain and @arbitrum, Rialto will offer one of the deepest onchain venues to trade spot crypto, equities, ETFs, commodities, pre-IPOs, and every asset in between.
In doing so, Rialto will enable a new generation of finance for the modern age. Because these assets are composable and programmable, the infrastructure they sit on opens a design space that closed systems cannot: an equity token held in self-custody and posted as collateral on a third-party lending market; stablecoins streaming into a broad-market index token by the second rather than in monthly lots; Pre-IPO assets that trade at 3 AM on a Sunday because the market never closes. This is what capital markets look like when they're rebuilt as open infrastructure.
For most of its history, onchain trading has been open but not competitive. The venues were transparent and composable, yet they consistently delivered inferior execution relative to centralized exchanges, and users paid the difference. It was widely assumed that decentralization and execution quality were fundamentally in tension, and that the latter could only be recovered by retreating to permissioned infrastructure.
Permissionless blockchains have now reached a stage where the market structures built on top of them can rival centralized and traditional financial exchanges on execution, and ultimately surpass them. With 100ms blocktimes, multi-language support via Stylus, and composability with Ethereum, Robinhood Chain and the Arbitrum Platform serves as the natural ground for these new market structures to be built. Well-designed PropAMMs are among the most important innovations in market microstructure in decades. By embedding book construction, inventory management, and defensive logic directly onchain, market makers gain a wider design space for active trading, helping them fend off toxic flow and quote tighter spreads. The case for PropAMMs in Stock Tokens goes beyond porting existing markets onto blockchain rails: their structural properties on a permissionless chain bear on several of the same problems Reg NMS set out to solve.
Rialto will operate "Rivo Altus", our own PropAMM that will provide a baseline of liquidity to all listed markets, while we also connect market makers and Robinhood Chain’s institutional liquidity providers. Initially, Rialto will be live with 90+ Robinhood Stock Tokens and major crypto assets on Robinhood Chain. If you are interested in market making on the Rialto exchange, you can find more information here. If you want to offer Stock Tokens to your users, you can join our partner program here.
On the journey to build the canonical exchange for the Arbitrum Platform and Robinhood Chain, we're working closely with both teams on chain-level design and Stock Token mechanics, and with their institutional partners to ensure deep liquidity. Together, we will build the best trading environment for the programmable economy.
The Rialto in Italy was one of the greatest open marketplaces of the known world: a sovereign city-state that served as the port between East and West, where merchants of any faith, nation, or creed could trade freely as equals.
We're rebuilding it, onchain. Trade now on rialto.xyz.
