TLDR:
Robinhood built “Robinhood Chain”, its own Ethereum L2. It went live 2 months ago on July 1st, joining Coinbase’s Base and Kraken’s Ink as exchange-led chains.
Its real differentiator is tokenized stocks trading 24/7 in self-custody and plugging into DeFi, though the stock token is a wrapper claim not the stock share itself.
Memecoins, not stock tokens, are actually driving the chain’s early growth, from the CEO’s own meme-posting to Uniswap’s first-ever token memecoin launchpad.
The activity numbers are impressive with Robinhood Chain’s daily DEX volume now exceeding DEX volume on all chains other than Solana.
The crypto market has picked up recently and the new ecosystem driving attention is Robinhood’s one with their recently released L2 chain, which has been doing surprisingly well and generating new types of activity in the space thanks to their tokenised stocks.
Robinhood is a huge company in of itself, and given they now have their own tokenised stock playground for DeFi participants it’s not surprising they’ve had a lot of interest, so I decided to make today’s post all about their new chain.
If this post resonates with you and you enjoy the content then please share it with a friend and get rewarded for doing so!
This blog goes out weekly to over 20,000 subscribers. Please message me if you’re interested in sponsorships or partnerships.
Robinhood Chain
Robinhood built its name on commission-free stock trading for retail investors. Over the last few years though it’s pushed hard into crypto, and this year it went a step further than just listing tokens as it built and released its own blockchain!
Robinhood Chain (RHC) is an Ethereum L2, built on Arbitrum’s “Orbit” technology stack, purpose-built for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) and round-the-clock trading rather than general purpose crypto activity.
Its public testnet launched February 10th this year and processed 4 million transactions in the first week alone, over 200 million before mainnet even opened. Mainnet then went live on July 1st, meaning that its been live for just 2 months so far.
Robinhood isn’t the first exchange to do this. Coinbase built Base on Optimism’s “OP Stack”, which went live in 2023. While Kraken built Ink also on the OP Stack, that went live on December 2024. Robinhood said one of the key reasons they chose Arbitrum’s stack instead was because it allowed them to use Rust alongside Solidity.
Current DeFi TVL on RHC sits around $734 million, while on Base it’s at $5.47 billion, which means Base still has a substantial lead, but that’s what you’d expect given that Robinhood is just 2 months old while Base is 3 years old!
However, 24-hour DEX volume flips that ranking entirely with RHC at around $1.67 billion and Base at $838.3 million. Robinhood Chain’s volume is also up 96% over the past week, while Base’s fell 35.6% over the same week.
Robinhood Chain’s DEX volume is in fact higher than all major chains other than Solana, beating out Ethereum, Base, Hyperliquid, and more, even though it holds a fraction of the capital that these do. This is ultimately a real show of the massive attention that the Robinhood ecosystem currently has.
Trading stocks like crypto
Robinhood built their chain around tokenised stocks. They have tokens tracking real stocks and ETFs, with a permissionless market that trades 24/7, including stocks like NVDA and AAPL among them. Onchain stocks settle in seconds and can be used as collateral or plugged into DeFi apps the same way any other onchain asset can!
Each stock token is a wrapper claim corresponding to a real share held in custody by a US broker-dealer, not the share itself. New tokens mint when a share gets tokenized, appearing onchain as a transfer from a zero address, and are burned on redemption. Holders are economic beneficiaries but they don’t get shareholder voting rights.
Dividends work in an interesting way. Nothing gets distributed onchain, Robinhood credits the USD-equivalent inside the Robinhood app instead. Which is a smart way to get their DeFi users to install and become users of the Robinhood app too.
None of this is “stocks but slower.” Trading 24/7 when real markets are closed, instant self-custody, and composability with DeFi using a tokenized stock position, are all things a traditional brokerage account simply can’t do.
Robinhood is taking the DeFi experience to the next level which is what they always promised they would do, and from recent announcements you can see that Coinbase are trying to follow suit with their own tokenised stocks. Yet Robinhood is already one of the biggest FinTech players providing stock trading so they have an advantage.
Memecoins ate the roadmap
Robinhood didn’t build their chain for memecoins. The entire pitch was tokenized RWAs. What actually happened in the weeks after mainnet though were that memecoins became the bulk of trading.
Interestingly on July 2nd, just after Robinhood Chain’s launch, Vlad Tenev the founder of Robinhood told CNBC that memecoins are essentially dead end assets with no practical use that create no real value.
However, a couple of weeks later after seeing how much trading activity was being generated on their chain from memecoins, Vlad seemed to change his mind and leaned into the memecoin activity he’d dismissed earlier!
CASHCAT was the first big memecoin to emerge on the chain, rallying over 1700% in 24 hours. Robinhood later officially listed it, a first for a memecoin that originated on the company’s own chain, and CASHCAT went on to launch its own token launchpad.
Pons is one of the chain’s major token launchpads, built for anyone to launch a token with trading fees flowing back into a treasury and ongoing burns for $PONS holders. And there’s already a lot of degen activity, a single wallet reportedly turned a $115,000 into $2.82 million in under two months!
Moreover, Uniswap’s move is the clearest sign this became a real ecosystem rather than just noise. Uniswap Labs chose RHC for their first-ever token launchpad, Pools.trade, which they released on August 5th. It recorded over 10,500 token launches on day one and more than 23,000 cumulative within two days.
One token, FRONG, did roughly $32 million in trading volume within 24 hours. Uniswap’s own presence on the chain has grown to $151.68 million in TVL, up 132% in the past month. I even covered a few weeks ago how Uniswap’s UNI buy and burn has gone into overdrive thanks to the volumes they are seeing on RHC.
StonkBrokers is the best example of Robinhood Chain’s collision between stocks and memes. It’s a collection of 4444 pixel-art “stockbroker” NFTs, minted July 17th, where each NFT has its own onchain wallet that can hold and trade real stock tokens.
Holders trade the NFTs themselves on an AMM and have collectively received over $400,000 in stock-token distributions paid directly into their brokers’ wallets. Its TVL is up more than 150,000% in the past month, which is a real sign of how fast this specific niche caught on.
And in this past few weeks the latest RHC craze has been to pair tokenised stocks with memecoins in AMMs like Uniswap in something that’s being called “MemeFi”. This is done such that trading the memecoin also pushes the stock up, one such example is shown below.
There’s already so many MemeFi memecoin-stock pairs that S4mmy’s even created a spreadsheet specifically tracking all the pairs he could find. This is all possible because of the token pairings between tokenised stocks and other tokens, something that we simply hadn’t seen before in the space.
Robinhood pitched a chain for RWAs and got a memecoin economy instead, at least in the opening months. That economy has turned out to be genuinely creative rather than just noise, and it’s shaped how Robinhood are moving along with the chain and what’s driving their significant activity numbers.
The numbers back it up
As I noted at the start, Robinhood Chain posted $1.67 billion in 24-hour DEX volume, more than Base’s $838.3 million on the same day. While RHC’s volume is up 96% over the past week while Base’s fell 35% over the same period. For a chain that didn’t exist two months ago it’s a genuinely remarkable trajectory.
Meanwhile DeFi TVL sits at $734 million and has nearly doubled in the past month alone. DeFiLlama places Robinhood Chain in 11th place among chains but with current trends it could soon surpass Polygon and Monad.
Importantly there’s no native Robinhood token and no airdrop announced. Robinhood’s own incentive was a 90-day gas subsidy plus access to its existing base of roughly 28 million customers, which is quite different to how most new L2s launch.
Given there’s no token or airdrop campaign, it makes the RHC numbers all the more impressive as they are not necessarily due to people farming the chain but rather from people engaging in the new RWA primitives and creative memecoin economy that’s formed.
Individual apps on the chain do run their own incentive programs though, with Lighter’s perpetuals points program as an example among them, which is one of the biggest apps pulling in activity on RHC.
Plus it’s not all been fully organic as early on roughly 90% of the chain’s first $100 million in TVL came from a single source, and nearly all its early DEX volume ran through one Uniswap pool. However with the creation of the Pons and Pools.trade launchpads those numbers have visibly broadened since.
In summary, Robinhood set out to build a chain for tokenized RWAs but got a memecoin economy instead and is currently winning on activity metrics and accelerating on TVL.
This is a company that built its name on making stock trading accessible to ordinary retail traders, and it’s now running a blockchain where those same users can buy a memecoin and a tokenized Nvidia share in the same wallet.
And now more people are actually doing that on Robinhood’s own chain than on Coinbase’s chain. Whether that holds once the memecoin wave cools and the RWA thesis has to carry more of the weight of the chain’s activity is what we’ll need to keep an eye on, right now though RHC’s on an impressive upward trend.
Whenever you’re ready, these are the main ways I can help you:
Want high crypto returns? Earn up to 14% APY with your own Yieldseeker agent!
Love Web3 & AI? Follow @afoxinweb3 on X for insights!
Entrepreneur using AI? Join our AI community to accelerate your results!