CANNES — 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.
"I was like, 'Okay, that's a solution for everything,' " he said
Now, from Château de la Croix des Gardes, a Belle Époque mansion perched along the same coastline where he once lived and worked the night shift in fast food, he's part of the most ambitious crypto product suite in Robinhood's history.
On Monday the company announced an expanded offering of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, crypto staking in the U.S., perpetual futures for eligible EU traders, and a new Layer 2 blockchain optimized for real-world asset settlement and 24/7 trading.
"It's absolutely surreal," said Kerbrat, seated inside the iconic Carlton Hotel — a five-star landmark that once felt impossibly out of reach. "When I was younger, I used to walk past this place — and I could have never, never stayed here."