Sherwood Completes Agentic Finance Beta Ahead of Robinhood Chain Mainnet Launch
New York, New York, October 7th, 2026, Chainwire
More than 100,000 people opened agentic trading accounts in the two months after Robinhood let AI agents trade inside its app, yet most still have to build and supervise those agents themselves. Sherwood, the first agentic finance protocol on Robinhood Chain, is building the onchain layer where agents propose, guardians verify and contracts decide what runs.
Sherwood is expanding AI agent capabilities onchain, building on the growing adoption of agent-driven finance following Robinhood’s decision in late May 2026 to open its platform to AI agents. Robinhood gave the concept a mainstream entry point by allowing customers to connect an agent to a dedicated account through its MCP server, fund it with a set budget and let it place trades, with notifications for every order and the option to disconnect at any time.
The response was quick. On the company’s second quarter earnings call in July, chief executive Vlad Tenev said more than 100,000 people had already connected agents and opened agentic accounts, and that assets and trading volumes in those accounts were growing. He also suggested that a large share of activity on the platform, possibly the majority, could one day run through agents.
The Bottleneck Behind The Boom
The same call surfaced the constraint. Tenev acknowledged that adoption still faces friction, because getting value from the product takes technical sophistication and the underlying AI models are not yet accustomed to trading. Robinhood’s approach is bring your own agent, so the customer sets up the software, defines the strategy and keeps the whole system running.
As Sherwood cofounder Carlos Beltran has argued, that leaves the most important parts of the arrangement resting on trust. The strategy lives in the agent’s memory rather than in any binding rule, and the customer remains responsible for every trade it places. For a technically fluent minority, that is an exciting sandbox. For most investors, it is a project. That gap between demand and usability is where Sherwood has chosen to build.
A Question Worth Building Around
Sherwood describes itself as the first agentic finance protocol on Robinhood Chain, the brokerage’s own layer two network for financial services and tokenized real world assets. Its founding question is simple to ask and hard to answer: if AI agents are going to execute financial strategies onchain, how do you make sure they cannot make reckless or malicious transactions?
The team arrived at that question early in 2026, as autonomous agents built on OpenClaw were being wired into Polymarket trading bots and handed wallets and credentials to act on their own. The capability was striking, and so was the exposure: an agent that holds the keys can lose or misuse everything it touches. Sherwood starts from the opposite premise. The agent never holds the funds.
Protocol Overview
On Sherwood, capital sits in a standard onchain vault. Depositors pool funds and receive shares, and every share carries a vote. When an agent wants to act, it submits a proposal that commits the exact onchain calls it intends to run, locked in advance so nothing can be swapped or improvised later.
That proposal then faces two checks. Depositors can vote it down during a review window. At the same time, guardians who have staked the protocol’s $WOOD token replay the proposed transactions on a live fork of the chain, a simulated copy that shows exactly what the calls would do before any real funds move. Guardians who block bad proposals earn rewards, while those who approve something malicious have their stake slashed. Only a proposal that clears both checks can execute, and profits and losses settle back into the vault onchain.
The same discipline extends to outside venues. Once Sherwood is on mainnet, agents will be able to trade perpetual futures on Lighter, an exchange on Robinhood Chain, through an account whose key can place trades but never send funds to an outside address. Each agent also carries an onchain identity, so its track record builds in public and follows it between vaults. The contracts are open source and have been audited by Nethermind.
Lowering The Bar For Agentic Finance
That structure speaks directly to the bottleneck Tenev described. A depositor does not need to build, prompt or supervise an agent. They choose a vault, keep their shares and their vote, and can exit under the vault’s rules. Agent operators connect their agents through a published skill file, and a fund operator curates which agents may run a given vault. Several agents can work inside one vault, coordinating like a hedge fund desk and earning from the performance they help create.
Robinhood Chain supplies the raw material. Tenev has described supplying real world assets such as stock tokens as Robinhood’s key contribution onchain, and those tokens are now available in more than 120 countries. Sherwood is designed to put agents to work across that mix of tokenized stocks, real world assets and crypto, extending onchain the agentic trading Robinhood already runs inside its app.
“Robinhood proved the demand. In two months, more than a hundred thousand people chose to hand trading to an agent, and most of them still have to build and watch that agent on their own,” said Beltran. “The next step happens onchain, where agents coordinate like a hedge fund and execute strategies under mandates the contracts enforce, with a track record anyone can read. Robinhood Chain is the natural place to build that.”
The Role of $WOOD
The $WOOD token is the economic weight behind the review process. Guardians stake it as their credential to vote on strategies, earn it weekly for correct verification and lose it for approving harmful transactions. Vaults charge a management fee and a performance fee that applies only to gains above the vault’s previous peak, with both split onchain among the agent, the guardians who reviewed the strategy and the protocol. Supply is fixed at one billion tokens, and team tokens vest linearly over two years from launch with a one year cliff. Over time, the protocol plans to hand control of its parameters to token holder governance.
The Questions Ahead
The model still has open questions. Simulation shows what a transaction will do when it is checked, not how markets will move afterward, so guardians can screen out malicious or broken calls but cannot promise a profitable strategy. The strength of the guardian network depends on how widely stake is distributed across it. And regulators have yet to settle how existing rules apply to AI agents acting in financial markets, a question facing Robinhood and every other company in the category.
The Team And The Road Ahead
Sherwood was built by crypto natives with years of onchain experience. Beltran is a computer scientist who has built Solidity protocols across NFTs, DeFi and SocialFi since 2020, including as a core contributor at Moonwell and Mamo and a senior contributor at Lunar Labs. He cofounded Sherwood with Ana Julia, and Moonwell cofounder Luke Youngblood advises the project.
The team has just wrapped up a beta on a fork of Robinhood Chain, with more than 125 vaults created and operated by agents ahead of mainnet. Over the course of the beta, agents proposed 304 strategies across portfolio management, Morpho lending, concentrated liquidity and launchpads, most of them trading tokenized stocks on Uniswap or lending through Morpho. Every proposal went through a 24 hour guardian review. Across 1,116 guardian votes, the network blocked 26 proposals, roughly 8 percent, before they could run, while the 224 strategies that did execute went live with guardian stake behind every one.
Robinhood has shown there is real appetite for letting software trade. The harder problem is making that safe and simple enough for people who will never write a line of code. Sherwood’s answer is to take the trust out of the agent and place it in the contracts, the guardians and the public record. If agentic finance is heading onchain, that is the layer it will need.
About Sherwood:
Sherwood is an Agentic Finance protocol built on Robinhood Chain, built to answer one question: if AI agents manage people’s money, how do we make sure they cannot make reckless or malicious transactions? Agents propose trades but never hold funds, every proposal is simulated on a live fork first, and $WOOD staked Guardians are slashed for approving anything dangerous. Robinhood already runs agentic trading inside its app; Sherwood extends that capability onchain. The team comes from Moonwell and Mamo, with Moonwell co-founder Luke Youngblood as lead investor. Testnet is live and mainnet is expected within roughly two weeks.
Users can learn more at sherwood.sh X at @sherwoodagent and Carlos Beltran at @imthatcarlos.