Brokerages building public chains, and exchanges selling shares—who will be the winner?

Author: Blockchain Knight; Source: X, @Knight_in_Block

This year, the crypto market has taken two sharply opposite paths of expansion: Robinhood, a brokerage whose core business is stocks, has moved into public chains, quickly climbing into the top tier of trading activity on the back of Memes.

Meanwhile, leading crypto exchanges have collectively shifted toward tokenized stocks and RWA assets, reversing into becoming distribution channels for Wall Street assets.

Although both sides are entering from different starting points, what they’re really competing for is the trading entry point for the next generation of assets.

Robinhood Chain has been live for less than two weeks, and its growth rate is far beyond market expectations.

DeFiLlama shows that its cumulative DEX trading volume has surpassed $3.98 billion, and its daily trading volume ranks second across the entire network, only behind Solana.

In the Ethereum L2 space, daily transaction count reached 10.4 million, already exceeding Base, which has been live longer.

What’s noteworthy is that users are primarily driving growth through an incremental market rather than a churn-and-burn of existing users: active addresses have risen by several multiples within a week, with the share of new addresses exceeding 45%.

Of course. The heat is not primarily driven by the official RWA narrative, but by Meme speculation—most of the time, Memes account for nearly 50% of trading volume across the whole chain.

But risks behind the boom are also emerging. Cross-chain platform Relay has warned about many honeypot tokens on-chain that disappear shortly after purchases. Malicious contracts bypass security checks and directly transfer users’ funds, while multiple projects show affiliated address clusters that may be attempting to control liquidity—so caution is warranted.

More importantly, the current on-chain active market value of real-world assets across the whole chain is only about $12.5 million, and real asset settlement is far from keeping up with the pace of speculation.

And on the other side, crypto exchanges are collectively moving toward “decrypto”ization, with tokenized assets becoming the new growth engine.

CryptoRank data shows that in the first half of 2026, tokenized assets made up nearly one-fifth of new listings by exchanges, whereas in 2025 the figure was below 7%. In the same period, overall new volume has declined for two consecutive quarters.

If you look at trading volume, the advantages of rushing into this track are already clearly visible. For exchanges, the acceptability of products linked to traditional asset users is quite high.

In June, CEX real-asset perpetual futures trading volume reached $311 billion, up 57% month-over-month to a historical high. Over the past year, the global tokenized stock market size has grown by more than 470%, and monthly on-chain transfer volume reached $8.4 billion.

But these products generally have inherent drawbacks: most are synthetic derivatives or debt instruments. Users do not have true shareholder rights, and regulatory constraints mean they are basically not available to old-school U.S. users, making it hard to enter the core market. But if you think about it the other way, why would U.S. retail investors use a crypto channel?

In the short term, the CEX “light-asset” model is moving faster, and the derivative business has already formed a scale advantage. But over a longer horizon, brokers like Robinhood—especially with licenses—may have more staying power.

The core of financial business is asset verifiability and compliance. Robinhood has full broker credentials, and its RWA assets are backed by real underlying support. Once securities accounts are linked with public-chain wallets, the user experience is something exchanges can’t easily replicate.

Although both sides are expanding within their own comfort zones, Robinhood has created a strong leading effect. If other brokerages follow suit, the story will get interesting—and maybe we’ll ultimately see competition across another dimension. Not sure what the CEX bosses think.