Robinhood Chain: Memes can’t last long-term with RWA—only then is it real business

After Robinhood Chain went live, for several straight days it was building hype under the direction of its founder, and trading volume kept climbing.

Online, many users have described this chain’s ecosystem as meme + RWA.

When it comes to memecoins, some founders in mainstream ecosystem chains have very different attitudes: they either say nothing, or they keep things vague and obscured.

But Robinhood’s founder has personally stepped forward to express that he welcomes its development. It seems that founders openly voicing support like this are quite rare—at least, I don’t see it often.

I don’t necessarily think this means he genuinely loves memecoins from the inside; rather, he’s hoping to leverage the heat and energy around memecoins to attract more users into this ecosystem.

Think it through carefully: given a competitive landscape where there are chains everywhere, and your own chain shows no signs of issuing tokens, in that situation, if you want to quickly build popularity and attract users in a short time, it seems like—besides building a “casino”—it’s hard to find a second option that’s faster and more effective.

With the founder personally taking the microphone, in recent days several hot memecoins have indeed quickly emerged on-chain, and they’ve immediately drawn the attention and ongoing tracking of many KOLs on X (especially overseas).

Posts about Robinhood memecoins’ “allocation lottery” tips and intelligence-style information have started to become more common.

What’s interesting in this process is that many users who rushed in to chase these memecoins were actually using blockchain for the first time—and all of them were newcomers who came over from Robinhood’s traditional stock trading circles.

It looks like the 24 million users Robinhood has in its hands are a fairly promising reserve force.

Driven by this surge in popularity, the direct beneficiaries are the on-chain infrastructure that’s already matured—for example, Uniswap. On July 8, its trading volume hit a peak; within 24 hours, trading volume exceeded $500 million, surpassing all other chains except the Ethereum mainnet.

At the same time, this wave of hype has also sparked a round of “infrastructure-building” on Robinhood Chain: building new DEXs, new token-issuing platforms, new prediction markets, new perpetual contract exchanges, ...

Taking it as a whole, the main effect of this hype campaign right now is still limited to attracting attention and creating buzz.

Many ecosystems have done similar things in their early stages of launch, but many didn’t get as good results as Robinhood. Perhaps the root reason is that they simply don’t have the same innate user advantage as Robinhood.

However, a bubble of hype and popularity propped up by memecoins is hard to sustain long term. Ultimately, for an ecosystem to develop healthily and continuously, it still needs a solid business model and real application scenarios.

Earlier, we mentioned that some users have been positioning Robinhood Chain as meme + RWA. Memes are difficult to turn into a sustainable business model; only RWA has that potential.

Even though RWA is frequently discussed in Ethereum’s Layer 2 expansion ecosystem and is often seen, in reality its development hasn’t been drawing much attention among the broader retail crowd.

Within the existing Ethereum Layer 2 expansion landscape, there are even Layer 2 solutions that focus specifically on RWA (for example, Plume). But their main target customers are institutions and qualified investors, with little connection to ordinary users—and among ordinary users, you don’t really hear much about it.

There are also other Layer 2s (such as Base and Arbitrum) that have RWA platforms, but my impression is that they don’t particularly emphasize this area—or they only “emphasize” it in name.

A Layer 2 project like Robinhood, which directly develops RWA while facing retail users, should be the first such case in the Ethereum ecosystem. So you could also say this is a unique opportunity that Robinhood has found.

In addition, from what I’ve seen, besides the moment when NFTs broke out and went mainstream, I haven’t seen anything else like Robinhood that has the potential to bring traditional users outside of crypto into the crypto ecosystem—at least, not after that.

So can Robinhood next use the “casino-style” playbook to attract users and attention from outside the crypto circle, and then guide them toward RWA (stock tokens) that have a better chance of sustainable development?

That still faces major challenges.

First, I’m not really sure how many long-term users this kind of stock-token trading can actually attract.

Second, there’s an argument that stock-token trading can offer 24/7 uninterrupted trading, discover prices more effectively, and increase overall system liquidity—but is that really a must-have need for ordinary users?

Third, if it truly is a must-have need for ordinary users, but currently the largest group for stock-token trading—the U.S. users—is being blocked, how do you resolve that contradiction?