Robinhood Launches 24/7 Leveraged Futures on Gold, Oil, and Currencies for European Customers

Robinhood Markets Inc. unveiled perpetual futures trading for European customers at a London event on Wednesday, July 1, 2026, extending a product category that originated in cryptocurrency markets to gold, silver, crude oil, and the euro-dollar exchange rate, among other assets.

The contracts carry leverage of up to 10 times and have no expiry date, meaning traders can hold positions indefinitely without rolling them over. That structure is a direct lift from crypto markets, where "perps" have been standard for nearly a decade.

How Robinhood Got Here

Robinhood launched crypto perpetual futures in Europe last year. According to upday, citing Bloomberg, those products became one of the company's fastest-growing offerings. That growth is what pushed the Menlo Park, California-based firm to extend the model to traditional assets.

The products gained traction during volatile market periods, including the early weeks of the Iran conflict, when traders used decentralized platforms to bet on oil prices and other traditional assets over weekends while mainstream venues were closed.

Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood's senior vice president and general manager of Crypto and International, explained the logic plainly in a Bloomberg interview: "The weekend doesn't stop what is happening in the world." He added that customers wanted the ability to hedge positions outside conventional market hours.

Geopolitical events, central bank decisions, and commodity supply shocks do not wait for the New York or London open. A trader holding gold exposure who wants to adjust a position on a Saturday currently has no clean way to do it through a traditional brokerage. Perpetual futures solve that problem, at a cost.

What 10x Leverage Actually Means

Leverage cuts both ways, and 10x is not trivial. These are not instruments designed for passive investors. They require active monitoring, a clear risk-management strategy, and the financial cushion to absorb fast losses.

The strongest concern here is legitimate: retail investors who are drawn in by the round-the-clock accessibility of perpetual futures may not fully appreciate how quickly a leveraged position can deteriorate. Crypto perps have generated enormous trading volumes globally, but they have also produced spectacular retail blow-ups, particularly during volatile weekend sessions when liquidity thins out. Applying that same structure to crude oil or gold does not make it safer.

Robinhood would counter that eligible European customers means the platform applies suitability checks under whatever regulatory framework governs this product in each jurisdiction. The company has not publicly detailed those checks, and the source material does not specify which European regulators approved the product or under what licensing structure it operates.

The Broader Play

This launch is part of a deliberate international expansion by Robinhood, which built its U.S. brand on commission-free stock trading but has been pushing aggressively into derivatives and international markets as that core domestic product commoditized.

Perpetual futures generate revenue through funding rates, the periodic payments exchanged between long and short holders to keep the contract price anchored near the underlying asset's spot price. It is a different revenue model than commissions, and it scales with trading volume and position size rather than transaction count.

The London event featured several other announcements. Robinhood introduced Crypto Earn, a decentralized lending product allowing US users to lend dollar-pegged stablecoin USDG through a self-custody wallet, offering an estimated 7% annual yield. The company also unveiled AI-driven trading accounts for crypto investors in the US and a company-branded public blockchain. A new fee structure for professional crypto traders in the US was announced as well. Robinhood expanded its tokenized US stocks trading, which launched in Europe a year ago, introducing new versions and making them available in more jurisdictions. The company also shared plans to launch cryptocurrency services in the UK "soon," and its Singapore entity received capital markets services licenses from the local regulator.

For European retail traders, the perpetual futures launch opens access to a product that was previously the domain of crypto-native platforms or professional derivatives desks. Whether that democratization is a feature or a warning depends entirely on how informed the individual trader is going in.

What Comes Next

The unresolved question is regulatory durability. The source material does not confirm which national competent authority signed off on Robinhood's 10x commodity perps or whether any regulator has flagged concerns.

If trading volumes grow the way crypto perps did, scrutiny will follow. How Robinhood is structured to handle that scrutiny in individual EU member states is the practical test this product will face. The moves also come against a backdrop of cooling crypto markets: Bitcoin has tumbled more than 50% from last year's peak, making the push into traditional asset perpetual futures a deliberate pivot to leverage crypto market infrastructure for mainstream financial products.