Robinhood bets on ten-million retail users going on-chain: although Meme coins have sparked trading volume, the RWA vision still needs to be realized

PANews, July 17—According to CoinDesk, Robinhood is betting on the decentralized finance (DeFi) market by using its self-built blockchain, Robinhood Chain, with the aim of bringing more than 10 million active users into the on-chain ecosystem. However, at present, trading activity on this network is still mainly driven by speculation in Meme coins, and the original real-world assets (RWA) tokenization vision has yet to take shape at scale.

Robinhood Chain’s trading volume has recently surged rapidly. On July 12, its 24-hour DEX trading volume was about $878 million, briefly surpassing Coinbase Base and Ethereum, propelling it to the top ranks in decentralized exchange trading volume and drawing attention from the crypto community.

Seong Seog Lee, Product Lead at Robinhood Crypto, said the company’s goal is not to steal users from existing crypto trading platforms, but to leverage Robinhood’s massive retail user base to bring ordinary investors—who previously had not engaged with on-chain finance—into the tokenized-asset and on-chain derivatives markets. Robinhood currently provides on-chain financial services via Robinhood Wallet, covering assets such as gold, silver, foreign exchange, and crypto perpetual contracts, and users can access the relevant products directly through the wallet. However, Robinhood Chain is still in an early stage. Data shows:

On July 13, the chain’s perpetual contract trading volume was only about $5.90 million, while Hyperliquid, a leading on-chain derivatives platform, reached $8.9 billion over the same period; Robinhood Chain shows bridged TVL of about $734 million, but the actual on-chain locked value (TVL) is about $211 million—some assets are still sitting in wallets and have not entered lending or yield protocols; the market value of RWA tokenized assets is currently only about $12.66 million.

At present, most of the trading momentum on Robinhood Chain comes from Meme coins. Recently, the CASHCAT token issued on the chain surged more than 2100% in a week; its market cap reached as high as $156 million at one point—12 times the size of the entire on-chain RWA market—prompting market discussion. Previously, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev had said that Meme coins are “assets with no real utility,” but after CASHCAT exploded in popularity, he also said that Robinhood Chain is “likewise suitable for the growth of Meme coins.”

Analysts believe Robinhood Chain’s development path is similar to the early stage of some new public chains: in the initial launch phase, it relies on speculative trading to generate traffic, and then needs to prove whether it can convert into long-term users, a developer ecosystem, and real financial applications. In the future, the key will be whether Robinhood can transform the short-term Meme coin boom into a continuously growing on-chain financial ecosystem by leveraging its massive retail user base.