Robinhood Chain is all the rage: why are these projects the ones getting the benefit?

Author: William M. Peaster; Compiled by: Baihuo Blockchain

If we rank the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap by their past 7-day performance, a few DeFi heavyweight projects stand out especially clearly. Specifically, the top gainers this week include Lighter (LIT, +16%), Morpho (MORPHO, +15%), Arbitrum (ARB, +13%), and Uniswap (UNI, +9%).

These projects, of course, belong to different tracks, but their recent surge has a very clear common thread: they have largely benefited from the explosive launch of Robinhood Chain.

However, you may remember that in my Wednesday article about Robinhood Chain’s “meme narrative,” I mentioned that this Layer 2 launch actually had big ambitions for tokenized assets; but in its early days, the real flow that got it running came almost entirely from meme-driven traffic like CASHCAT.

In other words, this is more like a chain-wide, familiar speculative frenzy. We haven’t seen scenes like this before. But the change that’s truly worth noting over the past 48 hours is that the scale of this activity is rapidly expanding.

For example, just over the past few days, according to DefiLlama data, Robinhood Chain’s TVL (total value locked) has doubled from $46 million to $96 million; at the same time, the stablecoin market cap on this network has also risen to more than $270 million. Also, this L2 has already generated about $900 million in DEX trading volume this week, with more than $500 million happening in the past 24 hours.

This early momentum suggests that real sustainability is starting to emerge here—possibly even meaning that this meme-fueled rally could spill over into more vertical sectors in the future, such as RWA, perpetual contracts, and more. That’s why many traders this week are continuing to add positions in assets that could benefit long term as Robinhood Chain rises.

So we’ve seen the outsized performance of LIT, ARB, MORPHO, and UNI over the last 7 days. At least in the current phase, these tokens have already been woven into Robinhood Chain’s potential upward narrative. Here’s the breakdown:

Lighter — Will Lighter become the next Hyperliquid? We can’t conclude that yet, but the fact that it was chosen as the default perpetual contract platform for Robinhood Wallet is undoubtedly a big step in that direction. While perpetual trading volume on Robinhood Chain is not yet large, if it later ramps up quickly, Lighter could gain more revenue—then that would translate into more LIT buybacks and burns.

Arbitrum — Robinhood Chain is built on the Arbitrum Orbit tech stack, and 10% of the chain’s net protocol revenue flows back to the Arbitrum ecosystem. How those revenues ultimately map to the ARB price is another matter; but Robinhood’s early success has further highlighted the possibility that more large companies will deploy Orbit chains in the future. In that case, revenue flowing to Arbitrum could also continue to increase, which is obviously bullish for ARB.

Morpho — The newly launched Robinhood Earn product is routing USDG deposits into the Morpho vault, offering an APY of about 7%. That’s also why, out of Robinhood Chain’s $96 million TVL, around $65 million is currently sitting in Morpho. Like ARB, MORPHO is still mainly a governance token at the moment, so how this new borrowing-and-flow channel will affect the token price still needs to be watched. Still, MORPHO has essentially become a proxy bet on whether the Morpho engine succeeds, and Robinhood Earn is the catalyst for that engine.

Uniswap — Within its first week on Robinhood Chain, this DEX has already facilitated about $1 billion in total trading volume. This level of activity surge can generate substantial protocol fees, which can then be further converted into UNI burns. Therefore, if Robinhood Chain can continue to sustain meaningful trading volume afterward, its success will be favorable for UNI’s long-term performance. Beyond that, Uniswap has been the network’s main DEX since day one, sending a signal to other companies as well: if they plan to launch their own L2s in the future, they can follow the same playbook.

From a broader perspective, yes—Robinhood Chain’s top meme for now, CASHCAT, has surged 5000% over the past 7 days, far outpacing the gains of these blue-chip DeFi tokens. But CASHCAT’s future depends more on sentiment and atmosphere; and as we already understood after the first round of large-scale meme coin mania, “sentiment” itself can’t last indefinitely.

What can truly sustain is solid fundamentals and the infrastructure that enables broader on-chain activity. Therefore, just one week after Robinhood Chain launched, LIT, ARB, MORPHO, and UNI have already become several paths to bet on the chain’s core logic—so you don’t have to bet on whether any single meme can stay hot forever to participate in Robinhood Chain’s growth narrative.

Next, it remains to be seen what kind of performance these tokens can still deliver under this new paradigm.