Robinhood Public Chain Launch: L2 Mainnet Officially Activated, UK Crypto Trading in Sight

Robinhood, a stock trading startup, announced that its Layer 2 blockchain, Robinhood Chain, has officially launched its mainnet, and introduced a DeFi earning product called Robinhood Earn. The company also previewed that it will soon open cryptocurrency trading services in the UK.
(Background: Robinhood, which started out as an anti-Wall Street brokerage, is turning to serve wealthy clients)
(Background supplement: The “open conspiracy” behind U.S. stock tokenization—siphoning “global liquidity” with “regulatory dividends”)

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• Not Just One Public Chain: DeFi Earnings and UK Expansion Advance in Parallel
• Mainnet Launch After 10% Layoffs
• Competition Intensifies: Base Is the Biggest Rival

Robinhood, which started out as an anti-Wall Street company, is accelerating its rollout of crypto infrastructure. On Wednesday, the company announced that its Layer 2 public chain, Robinhood Chain, has officially launched on the mainnet after approximately four months of testing.

According to Robinhood’s official press release, this Arbitrum-based L2 public chain is positioned as “a blockchain built natively for AI and tailored specifically for real-world assets (RWAs).” The testnet began in February this year, and now the mainnet is officially enabled—meaning developers can start deploying applications.

Not Just One Public Chain: DeFi Earnings and UK Expansion Advance in Parallel

Robinhood also launched Robinhood Earn, a decentralized deposit product. Through its own self-custody wallet, users can lend the USD stablecoin USDG, with an estimated annualized yield of about 7%. This yield comes from interest generated by the underlying RWA assets.

In addition, the company confirmed that it will roll out cryptocurrency trading services in the UK. Currently, Robinhood’s tokenized U.S. stock products are already available to users in more than 120 countries via its Wallet app. CEO Vlad Tenev said in January this year that tokenized stocks are “inevitable,” and can avoid trading-freeze issues that sometimes occur on traditional exchanges.

Mainnet Launch After 10% Layoffs

The backdrop to this mainnet launch is far from easy. Tenev announced a 10% reduction in employees a few weeks ago as part of an organizational restructuring. Robinhood’s April report said that crypto trading revenue fell nearly 50% year over year, from $252 million to $134 million. The second-quarter financial results will be released on July 29.

Market reaction has been positive. After the news was released, Robinhood’s share price rose by about 8%.

Competition Intensifies: Base Is the Biggest Rival

The L2 market that Robinhood Chain is entering is dominated by Base, which is backed by Coinbase. Base currently ranks as the second-largest L2 network with a total value locked of about $11 billion. In June, Base experienced two consecutive outages within a span of hours, and the engineering team attributed the issue to a programming error in the sequencer.

Robinhood Chain is taking a different approach: it not only provides on-chain infrastructure, but more directly embeds RWA products (tokenized stocks and stablecoin deposits) into the ecosystem, forming a “chain → product → users” closed loop.