Robinhood launches its own chain, no longer wanting to be a tenant on others' chains | Robinhood, DeFi - ChainCatcher

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

On July 1, Robinhood held a press conference and unveiled a series of new products all at once.

Layer 2 public chain Robinhood Chain's public mainnet officially launched. It is a network built on Arbitrum, targeting tokenized real-world assets and DeFi applications.

Users can trade tokenized stocks on decentralized exchanges like Uniswap, Rialto, Lighter, and 1inch on Robinhood Chain, and use these assets in DeFi scenarios, including as collateral for loans or depositing into liquidity pools to earn yields.

With the mainnet launch, Robinhood's Stock Tokens are now fully available. Users can access related products in over 120 countries via the Robinhood Wallet, with availability varying by jurisdiction.

At the same time, Robinhood also launched Robinhood Earn. This product allows users to lend USDG stablecoins through self-custody wallets, with an expected annualized yield of approximately 7%. The underlying lending infrastructure is provided by Morpho, with DeFi protocols such as Steakhouse, Ethena, Spark, and Maple participating. The official statement also mentions the introduction of insurance mechanisms to reduce risk exposure.

In addition, Robinhood announced the expansion of its European perpetual futures product to cover commodities, ETFs, and forex markets, and plans to launch crypto trading in the UK. After acquiring WonderFi, Robinhood's services have also entered the Canadian market.

Image source: RootData

In the U.S. market, Robinhood launched Agentic Accounts for crypto users. Eligible users can connect AI models to Robinhood's trading infrastructure while retaining control over fund allocation and trading parameters.

On the day of the press conference, Robinhood's stock closed up 8.35%, and continued to rise during U.S. trading hours tonight.

This is not an ordinary crypto product update. Robinhood is gradually integrating stocks, cryptocurrencies, tokenized assets, stablecoin yields, perpetual futures, and AI trading tools into a single financial account system. The company's core identity used to be a zero-commission broker. Now, it seems to be moving closer to becoming an everything exchange.

That's also the significance of Robinhood Chain. It's not just another Layer 2. More importantly, Robinhood doesn't want to remain a frontend on someone else's blockchain in the long run.

In recent years, a common approach for financial companies entering the crypto industry has been to connect to existing public chains. The platform handles users, interfaces, and product packaging, while underlying settlement, gas, liquidity, and DeFi applications occur on external networks.

This model offers fast launch speed and allows leveraging existing ecosystems. However, for financial platforms with large user bases, a long-term issue arises: users' assets and settlements happen on someone else's turf while they operate within the platform's app.

For Robinhood, this issue is particularly sensitive. It has nearly 28 million funded accounts, and users are already accustomed to trading stocks, options, and crypto. This means Robinhood is no longer just a stock trading app but is evolving into a comprehensive financial gateway covering multiple asset types and trading forms.

Against this backdrop, launching a chain becomes a natural extension. If Robinhood only directs users to external DeFi, it remains a mere distribution channel. If tokenized stocks, USDG lending, AI agent trading, and future RWA products all run on its own chain, it can gain deeper control over trading, settlement, collateral, yields, and asset flows.

The platform transforms from an interface provider to an owner of financial rails—a more profound shift.

After Robinhood Chain launched, protocols such as Uniswap, 1inch, Lighter, Morpho, Chainlink, BitGo, Ethena, and EtherFi have successively integrated, covering trading, liquidity, lending, oracles, custody, and cross-chain functions.

More notably, dYdX's new DEX, Arcus, chose to deploy on Robinhood Chain rather than on dYdX's own chain. This decision sparked controversy in the dYdX community and highlights that the battle for institutional chains is not just about end users but also about protocols, liquidity, and product attention.

This is why more financial companies are launching their own chains. Circle launched Arc, as a stablecoin issuer wanting tighter control over USDC circulation and settlement rails. Coinbase launched Base, aiming to keep users, assets, and developer activity within its own ecosystem. Robinhood Chain represents brokers and retail trading platforms beginning to compete for the on-chain settlement layer of tokenized assets.

Their asset endowments differ, but they face the same problem. Without building their own settlement layer, they risk going from being the master of user and asset entry points to a tenant on someone else's chain.

This wave of chain launches is also different from the previous public chain craze. In the previous wave, the market focused more on TPS, ecosystem incentives, and fundraising narratives. Now, when financial companies launch chains, the focus shifts to paying gas with stablecoins, compliance privacy, RWA issuance, on-chain collateral, AI agent trading, institutional settlement, and internalizing yields.

However, for Robinhood, what's truly worth noting may not be just Robinhood Chain.

Just last month, Robinhood announced a 10% workforce reduction, approximately 290 employees, expecting to incur about $20 million in severance and benefit restructuring costs, plus roughly $8 million in stock-based compensation expenses. CEO Vlad Tenev stated that the company's business conditions are very strong, but it must avoid excessive organizational hierarchy and keep the team lean and highly focused.

While trimming organizational costs, Robinhood is intensively launching new businesses. The signal is clear: it doesn't want to be just a zero-commission broker or just a crypto trading gateway. It wants to keep more trading, issuance, settlement, and yield generation within its own system.

The backdrop to all this is that due to shrinking institutional trading volume, Robinhood's crypto trading revenue is declining sharply—nearly halving to $134 million in Q1, and expected to drop further below that figure in Q2. Currently, the company's revenue growth is mainly driven by a surge in prediction market revenue.

According to calculations by analyst Dr. Crossroads, as of June 25, Robinhood's Q2 event contract trading volume had reached approximately 12.3 billion contracts. With a commission of $0.01 per contract, this business is expected to generate at least $123 million in single-quarter revenue, with an annualized revenue potential of $500 million—likely marking the first time this business revenue surpasses its crypto trading business.

Its newly launched prediction market platform, Rothera, saw trading volume exceed 900 million contracts in its first week, contributing nearly 60% of the company's potential incremental contract trading. Additionally, the company plans to cut its fee rate from $0.02 to $0.006 per contract, using price advantage to keep trading volume and earnings within its own ecosystem.

Ultimately, the press conference was about ambition, while the financial results are about reality. How many developers Robinhood Chain can attract is important, but whether prediction markets can sustainably fill the revenue gap left by spot crypto trading will also affect how the market re-prices the company.

For Robinhood, the real question is no longer just whether it can launch a chain, but whether it can turn stocks, crypto, prediction markets, tokenized assets, stablecoin yields, and AI trading into a sustainable business within a single account system.