RobinhoodChain exploded into fame overnight—who won among DeFi protocols?

Robinhood Chain’s TVL doubled to $96 million within a week, and DeFi picks like LIT, ARB, MORPHO, UNI, and others have become the core routes for betting on a new chain’s growth.
（Background recap: Are the webpages made by AI always ugly? This project has 73 brands included in its DESIGN.md, and its GitHub blew up with 100k stars）
（Additional background: The “all-in” crypto-betting male lead Wang Dalu, who allegedly attempted to kill someone, got charged for arranging people to beat up a driver and was transferred for prosecution）

Table of contents

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• Robinhood Chain data surge
• Breakdown of four major DeFi picks benefiting
• Long-term path after the meme wave

If you rank the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap based on the past 7 days’ gains, some DeFi heavyweight projects stand out especially. Specifically, the top gainers this week include Lighter (LIT, +16%), Morpho (MORPHO, +15%), Arbitrum (ARB, +13%), and Uniswap (UNI, +9%).

These projects are, of course, in different tracks, but their recent rise has a very clear shared main thread: they have all benefited substantially from Robinhood Chain’s explosive launch.

That said, you might remember that in my Wednesday article discussing Robinhood Chain’s “meme narrative,” I pointed out that when this Layer 2 launched, it actually had big ambitions for tokenized assets; but in the early days, the real traffic it generated was almost entirely driven by memes like CASHCAT.

Robinhood Chain data surge

In other words, this looks more like a familiar kind of on-chain speculative frenzy. We haven’t seen scenes like this before. But what’s truly notable in 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. In addition, this L2 has already generated about $900 million in DEX trading volume this week, with more than $500 million happening within the past 24 hours.

This early momentum suggests that real durability is starting to show here, and it may even allow this meme-ignited rally to spill over into more vertical areas, such as RWA and perpetual contracts. That’s also why many traders this week continue to accumulate assets that could benefit long-term as Robinhood Chain rises.

Breakdown of four major DeFi picks benefiting

So we’ve seen the outperformance over the last 7 days from LIT, ARB, MORPHO, and UNI. At least in the current phase, these tokens have already been folded into Robinhood Chain’s potential upside narrative. Specifically:

Lighter — Can Lighter become the next Hyperliquid? We can’t draw a conclusion yet, but the fact that it was selected as the default perpetual contract platform for the Robinhood Wallet is undoubtedly a big step in that direction. Although perpetual trading volume on Robinhood Chain isn’t large at the moment, if it later really ramps up quickly, Lighter could gain more revenue, which would then translate into more LIT buybacks and burns.

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

Long-term path after the meme wave

Morpho — The newly launched Robinhood Earn product is routing USDG deposits into the Morpho vaults, offering around 7% annualized yield (APY). That’s why, within Robinhood Chain’s current $96 million TVL, roughly $65 million is currently sitting in Morpho. Like ARB, MORPHO is still mainly a governance token right now; how this new lending and routing channel will affect the coin price remains to be watched. That said, MORPHO has fundamentally become a proxy bet on whether the Morpho engine succeeds, and Robinhood Earn is the catalyst for that engine.

Uniswap — This DEX, after going live on Robinhood Chain for one week, has already facilitated around $1 billion in total trading volume. This level of activity surge brings substantial protocol transaction fees, and those fees can further be converted into UNI burns. Therefore, if Robinhood Chain can continue maintaining strong trading volume, its success would be favorable for UNI’s long-term performance. Besides that, Uniswap has served as the network’s mainstay DEX since day one, which also sends a signal to other companies: if they plan to launch their own L2 in the future, they can follow this playbook as well.

From a more macro perspective, yes—Robinhood Chain’s top meme right now, CASHCAT, has surged 5,000% over the past 7 days, leaving the gains of these blue-chip DeFi tokens far, far behind. But for CASHCAT’s future, it depends more on sentiment and atmosphere; and as we already learned after the first round of large-scale meme coin hype, “atmosphere” itself cannot last endlessly.

What can truly keep going is solid fundamentals and the infrastructure that provides capacity for broader on-chain activity. Therefore, one week after Robinhood Chain’s launch, LIT, ARB, MORPHO, and UNI have already become a few routes for betting on this chain’s core logic—you don’t have to bet on whether a specific 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.