Robinhood Chain (@RobinhoodCrypto) climbed to nearly $79 million in total value locked in its first eight days, up almost 69% in the past 24 hours, a strong start for a blockchain that a brokerage only switched on July 1. It also turned into something Robinhood did not plan for: a memecoin playground. The chain is pulling real liquidity and real attention, just not only in the shape the launch pitch suggested.
What Is Robinhood Chain?
Robinhood Chain is Robinhood’s (@RobinhoodApp) own Ethereum Layer 2, built on the Arbitrum Orbit stack and settling back to Ethereum for security. It uses $ETH for gas, runs block times of roughly 100 milliseconds, and is fully EVM-compatible, so standard contracts deploy without changes. There is no separate chain token. I covered the full technical picture in my earlier piece, What Is Robinhood’s New L2 Blockchain?, when the mainnet first went live.
The chain launched with products already bolted on rather than an empty developer sandbox. The headline feature is Stock Tokens, tokenized versions of shares like NVDA, GOOG, and AAPL that trade around the clock through Robinhood Wallet in more than 120 countries. Alongside it came Robinhood Earn, which lends the $USDG stablecoin for about 7% APY through Morpho, plus perpetuals via Lighter and AI-driven trading tools. Day-one partners included Uniswap, Chainlink, BitGo, and Alchemy.
How Big Is It, and How Fast?
The growth has been quick. The chain drew more than 141,000 new active wallets on July 8, pushing daily active addresses to around 193,000, per CryptoTimes. As of July 9, total value locked sits at $78.97 million, up 68.72% in a single day, which puts the chain near its high for the week.
Most of that value sits in one place:
- Lending on Morpho holds the majority, roughly $58 million.
- Uniswap is a distant second near $20.6 million.
- Everything else, from prediction markets to launchpads, trails far behind.
Much of that is DeFi-native capital chasing yield rather than 28 million Robinhood users piling in, and the chain is covering gas fees for the first 90 days, which flatters early activity. Stablecoin market cap on the chain is $267.98 million, with $USDG making up 68.87% of it. Those two figures are worth keeping apart, since stablecoins parked in wallets are not the same as value locked in protocols. The active real-world asset market cap is only $12.8 million. For a chain sold on tokenized equities, that RWA figure is the one to watch.
Trading has been the loud part. The chain’s decentralized exchanges saw $433 million in trading volume over the past 24 hours, led by Uniswap, one of the biggest single-day totals for any Uniswap deployment outside Ethereum. Apps built on the chain pulled in $1.47 million in fees over the past day, while chain-level fees stayed modest at $38,861, in line with a new and subsidized network.
The Memecoin Twist
The awkward part for Robinhood is what filled the space. The chain was pitched for serious real-world assets and AI-native finance. Traders used it to launch memecoins.
Tenev (@vladtenev) had spent weeks drawing a line between real-world assets and speculation, questioning the point of spinning up endless memecoins. Then the on-chain reality landed and his tone shifted. While Robinhood is building the chain for RWAs, he conceded, it “works great for memes too.” The frenzy centered on $CASHCAT, a token named after Robinhood’s old Cash Cat mascot, which ran to a $140 million market cap in a matter of days. It got a bigger push on July 8 when the Solana launchpad Pump(dot)fun added support for Robinhood Chain tokens, letting traders buy them without bridging. Memecoin trading now makes up a real share of that daily DEX volume. It is a familiar pattern for any low-fee EVM chain with fresh liquidity and a big audience, but it is not the story a public company wants leading its launch coverage.
Will Robinhood Chain Get a Token?
The chain uses $ETH for gas, Robinhood didn’t announce a native token, no points program and no airdrop. There is a structural reason for that. Robinhood is a public company listed on the NASDAQ as $HOOD, and a chain token, or even a points scheme that looked like one, would invite heavy SEC scrutiny that a private crypto-native project simply does not face.
There is also a clear precedent. Coinbase built Base, another major brokerage-linked Layer 2, and has deliberately avoided launching a token, instead leaning on ecosystem growth and developer incentives. Robinhood’s public messaging follows the same script, emphasizing product integrations and global reach rather than tokenomics.
Robinhood Chain runs on $ETH for gas, holds about $79 million in TVL that is still mostly lending, moved $433 million in DEX volume over the past day, and hosts a memecoin scene the company never initially planned for.
Sources
- Robinhood Chain Official product page for the chain, its architecture and launch products
- DefiLlama Live data on TVL, DEX volume, stablecoin market cap and RWA active market cap
- CryptoTimes Coverage of $CASHCAT, the record active-address count and Tenev’s memecoin comment
- The Defiant Reporting on the Pump.fun integration and the split between lending inflows and meme trading
