Robinhood built its own blockchain two months ago, but an analysis by ARK Invest suggests its own customers are barely using it. Lorenzo Valente, the firm’s research director, published contract-level data on September 4 showing that swaps routed through Robinhood Wallet’s main mechanism made up less than 1% of activity on the network.
Valente identified the 0x Settler contract, which Robinhood Wallet uses to route swaps, as the clearest on-chain marker of genuine Robinhood user activity. Transactions through that route accounted for roughly 0.5% of everything he examined. Even under a generous assumption that some unidentified contracts also belong to Robinhood users, he put the share at about 5%.
He summed up his reading of the data as “same degens, new chain.”
Who is actually trading
The identifiable activity outside the Robinhood Wallet route came mostly through external trading terminals: GMGN, Axiom and OKX. Those platforms connect traders to on-chain markets without requiring a Robinhood Wallet or a Robinhood brokerage account, so their users behave on this chain much as they do anywhere else in crypto.
That matters because Robinhood Chain’s headline numbers have been remarkable. DefiLlama recorded a network record of about $6 million in daily fees in early September, a seven-day revenue run rate near $1.1 billion annualized, and $1.71 billion in decentralized exchange volume in a single day. The launchpad Pons alone generated $5.95 million in fees in one 24-hour period, more than the chain beneath it, and nearly 25,000 tokens launched through the app on September 2 alone.
The ARK analysis does not question those figures. It questions what they mean. Volumes from experienced crypto traders hopping to a new venue say little about whether Robinhood’s 28.4 million funded customers are actually moving on-chain, and whether the brokerage’s retail base is anywhere in the transaction flow.
A subsidy clock is ticking
There is a second caveat on the growth story. Robinhood has covered network fees through a 90-day gas subsidy that ends in late September. Free transactions flatter any usage metric, and once users pay full gas themselves, the activity levels become a cleaner test of whether the demand is real.
Robinhood’s newest chain is an open, permissionless Ethereum Layer 2 built on Arbitrum tech, launched in July with tokenized stocks as the flagship product. Instead, memecoins and token launchpads have become the dominant fee drivers. CEO Vlad Tenev conceded on the Q2 earnings call that outside developers were building on the network “in ways that we have not thought of.”
Gas fees on the network surged roughly 1,300% over seven days in early September to 0.55 gwei, another sign of how crowded the chain has become with speculative trading. A separate data point circulating the same week: native Robinhood Wallet transactions accounted for less than 1% of confirmed activity in that analysis as well, consistent with Valente’s findings.
Why the distinction matters
For investors, the gap between network growth and customer adoption is not academic. Robinhood’s stock has rallied partly on the chain’s early revenue, and the company reported $1.3 billion in quarterly revenue, up 32% year over year, in the period covering the launch. If the activity is mostly visiting traders rather than new users, the long-term value of the network as a customer funnel is thinner than the fee charts suggest.
There is also a reputational angle. Robinhood spent years polishing a mainstream, regulated image, and tokenized stocks were meant to be the bridge between brokerage customers and crypto rails. A chain whose dominant business is memecoin launchpads pulls the brand back toward the speculative end of the market, the very segment regulators watch most closely.
To be fair to the chain, open permissionless networks are supposed to attract outside usage, and GMGN and Pons revenue still flows partly to Robinhood through fee arrangements. The chain is earning money regardless of who trades. The open question is whether the strategy of onboarding a brokerage audience on-chain is working, and two months in, the on-chain evidence says the jury is still out.