Robinhood brings millions of ordinary users into centralized finance

Robinhood (HOOD) said its new chain isn’t meant to compete with native crypto trading venues like Hyperliquid, but to bring 27.6 million funded-account users into on-chain finance for the first time. However, the data so far suggests reality is far more complicated than that story.

Although the chain set a $878 million 24-hour DEX trading volume on July 12 and briefly surpassed Base and Ethereum, on-chain activity is still mainly driven by Meme coin speculation rather than the tokenized stocks and ETFs it originally pitched.

Of the $734 million in assets bridged onto the chain, only $211 million has truly been deployed into its borrowing-and-yield products. Meanwhile, the market cap of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) on this chain is just $12.66 million—far below even the $156 million peak reached by the cat-themed Meme coin CASHCAT.

Robinhood Chain briefly surged to the No. 2 spot in decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume over last weekend, leading many to compare it with some of the biggest networks in the crypto market. But Robinhood believes this comparison misses the point.

The popular trading app believes its real opportunity isn’t about stealing trading volume from existing native crypto trading platforms. Instead, it’s about using Robinhood’s 27.6 million “funded-account users” to bring a new batch of investors into the tokenized assets and on-chain derivatives market.

Robinhood Crypto product head Seong Seog Lee told CoinDesk: “Our opportunity isn’t about taking volume away from existing crypto traders. Most people have never accessed perpetual contracts—not necessarily because they don’t want that kind of exposure, but because there was never an on-ramp to these products. We’re changing that.”

He added: “Now, users in more than 120 countries and regions can directly trade Lighter (gold, silver, FX) and crypto perpetual contracts inside the Robinhood Wallet.”

Robinhood’s bet seems to be that, with its distribution power, consumer relationships, and wallet integration, it can move users who might never use on-chain finance into the blockchain market—without requiring them to actively seek out more professional crypto platforms.

The problem right now, however, is that activity on this network is still highly concentrated in speculative Meme coin trading, while the scale of its original narrative around real-world asset business remains small. According to DefiLlama data, Robinhood Chain’s 24-hour DEX trading volume on July 12 was about $878 million, briefly surpassing Coinbase’s Base and Ethereum. This ranking sparked plenty of discussion in the crypto community.

However, the absolute scale is still quite limited.

On July 13, the total perpetual contract trading volume on the chain was only $5.9 million. By contrast, Hyperliquid—the DEX that has become the benchmark for on-chain derivatives—did $8.9 billion in trading that day. At the same time, this chain’s bridged total value locked (bridged TVL) reached $734 million, far higher than its actual TVL of $211 million.

This gap suggests that many assets are just sitting in wallets and haven’t truly been deployed into the chain’s borrowing pools and yield products.

A similar situation has occurred before on another network, Blast. Blast attracted more than $2 billion in bridged assets due to an incentives program, drawing many “farming points” yield chasers who rushed in only to wait for future air drops. After the incentives program ended, its TVL eventually collapsed dramatically.

Robinhood’s situation may not be entirely the same, though, because it doesn’t have this kind of yield incentives.

Even so, the contrast highlights that this mass-market trading platform’s blockchain business is still in a very early stage. While the network briefly saw a spot trading frenzy, it hasn’t yet developed into mature, deeper on-chain trading activity and capital deployment—the kind of thing common on more established chains.

“Perfect for launching Memes”

The chain’s initial core use case is tokenized real-world assets (RWA), including narratives stemming from Robinhood’s equity-raising products with unlisted companies such as OpenAI and SpaceX. But at least so far, this segment hasn’t formed a clear scale.

The active market cap for tokenized real-world assets is only $12.66 million, which is nearly negligible compared with the recent trading surge. By contrast, a larger share of activity comes from Meme coin traders, who have poured into a new Token called CASHCAT—named after Robinhood’s early company mascot.

In its first week, this Token rose by more than 2,100%. Its market cap briefly hit $156 million—12 times the total market cap of tokenized real-world assets across the entire chain.

Of course, it’s also worth noting that Meme coins are inherently a highly volatile, emotion-driven asset class that often lacks a foundation for sustainable growth.

That lack of sustainability already showed up by Wednesday: Noxa, the Token issuance platform that incubated CashCat, announced it would stop operating and said it would transfer all revenue to the creators. Noxa’s shutdown doesn’t determine Robinhood Chain’s fate, but it underscores one point: activity built around issuing Meme coins may disappear very quickly.

Ironically, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev had told CNBC on July 2 that Meme coins are a dead end—these assets have no utility and no real use. Yet just six days later, he posted on X saying that Robinhood Chain is “also very suitable for launching Memes,” clearly reacting to CASHCAT’s breakout.

When asked about these seemingly contradictory remarks, Lee said that while Meme coins aren’t the team’s core strategic focus, the chain is indeed built with the goal of an “open financial system.”

Lee said: “I don’t think there’s a contradiction. If you’re creating an open financial system, then of course it should support Meme coins. The most exciting part of Robinhood Chain is that today we can’t yet fully predict everything that will happen in the future.”

“Financial democratization”

Robinhood Chain officially opened to the public earlier this month. Before that, it had been testing for months since February. The network is built on Arbitrum and is an Ethereum Layer 2 designed primarily to carry tokenized real-world assets—especially stocks and ETFs—rather than Meme coin trading.

This rollout reflects Robinhood’s broader strategy: bringing traditional financial assets on-chain through its own blockchain infrastructure built for retail users.

What Robinhood Chain is going through right now looks quite similar to the path that most new chains take when they launch. The market always compares it immediately with past networks that were the most talked-about, such as Blast—whose TVL fell from $2.2 billion to $29 million over two years.

For Robinhood Chain, a more relevant comparison is Base, launched by Coinbase in 2023. Base initially also came with an institutional narrative, but later, driven by Meme coins, it gradually grew into real scale.

The difference is that Base ultimately became a consumer-grade chain with real developer activity and a broader user footprint.

The key question in the coming months is whether this wave of speculative activity will eventually crystallize into long-term usage—or whether once traders move on to the next hot concept, the attention here will fade quickly.

Lee said: “We expect users to discover various possibilities that Robinhood Chain can bring, including putting real-world assets on-chain, 7×24 token trading of stocks, and on-chain borrowing, and more.”