Robinhood Chain, the brokerage’s Ethereum Layer 2 built on Arbitrum technology, is approaching $1 billion in total value locked ten weeks after its July 1 mainnet launch, with daily decentralized exchange volume reaching $1.88 billion on September 13, according to a StoneX analyst report first covered by The Block. The figure puts the chain above half of Uniswap’s total daily volume and, at several points over the summer, ahead of Solana itself.
The growth has come faster than almost anyone in the sector expected. Robinhood Chain entered public testing in February 2026 and went live on July 1. In its first week it processed more than 17 million transactions across nearly 350,000 addresses and crossed $1 billion in cumulative DEX volume. By late August it set a single-day record of $989 million with total value locked at $708 million, roughly double the July level. Two weeks later that record had nearly doubled again.
The numbers behind the run
StoneX analyst Mark Palmer, who published the September 14 report, attributed the climb to four drivers: Robinhood’s brand reach, a permissionless design that lets anyone launch a token without approval, subsidized gas fees for wallet swaps above $5, and what he called a flywheel between memecoins and tokenized stocks.
That last driver is the unusual one. Launch platforms on the chain, mainly Pons and Long.xyz, pair community tokens with tokenized equities. Roughly 10,000 tokens launch each day through Pons, and about 25,000 were issued on September 2 alone. Long.xyz pairs memecoins with HOOD tokenized shares, and one project, Artificial Inu, launched paired with tokenized Nvidia stock and ran from a $1.5 million market cap on August 1 to a $135 million peak on August 30. Memecoins paired with tokenized shares account for roughly a quarter of all share-linked trading volume on the chain.
| Metric | July (launch week) | September 13-14 |
|---|---|---|
| Daily DEX volume | Over $1B cumulative, ~$433M peak day | $1.88B |
| Total value locked | ~$94M | Near $1B |
| Stablecoin supply | Over $260M | Over $1B |
| Tokenized stock TVL | Not tracked | $170M |
Stablecoin capitalization on the chain passed $1 billion last week, up 72% in a month. USDG accounts for 67% of it and Ethena’s USDe for 30%. Tokenized stock holdings reached $170 million in TVL, and Robinhood’s crypto chief Johann Kerbrat has said the company plans in-kind redemption and voting features for the stock tokens, moves that would bring the product closer to how real equities behave. In an August interview with Decrypt’s FOMO Hour, Kerbrat said the chain had already processed more than 200 million transactions since launch.
Most of the trading is not Robinhood users
One detail cuts against the marketing narrative. CoinDesk Research estimates that Robinhood app users account for just 1% to 2% of trading on the chain. Most activity flows through trading terminals, Uniswap and token launch platforms. The chain carries the Robinhood name, but its actual user base looks closer to a standard DeFi crowd than to the brokerage’s retail customers. That is not necessarily a problem for Robinhood, which collects fees either way, but it does mean the chain’s fortunes are tied to crypto-native speculation rather than to any gradual migration of brokerage customers on-chain.
Robinhood crypto chief Johann Kerbrat described the chain’s strategy as balancing “two wolves”: conventional financial products and the speculative tokens that attract crypto traders.
That split shows up in the product mix. Memecoins powered much of the early activity and still eclipse the tokenized stocks that were the centerpiece of Robinhood’s original pitch. Tokenized equities are growing quickly in percentage terms, with SPY on Robinhood Chain up 1,314% in 30 days to a $17.4 million market cap as of September 7, per Token Terminal, but the absolute numbers remain small next to the memecoin economy. The fastest-growing tokenized deployments elsewhere tell a similar story: rGOOGL on Arbitrum rose 531% to $18.8 million and HOODb on BNB Chain climbed 429% to $5.7 million over the same 30 days. Three synthetic versions of major assets, SPY, a Google token and a Robinhood token, accounted for $7.1 billion in DEX volume over 90 days, or 44.7% of the tokenized-equities market, according to Token Terminal data published September 7.
The revenue warning
There is a softer side to the curve. Gate News reported on September 14 that the chain’s daily revenue had fallen more than 90% to $436,306 since September 7, with DEX volume halving over the same window. Volume on these chains is heavily concentrated in launch windows and speculative bursts, and a week of cooling sentiment can erase a month of records. LIT, an early token on the chain, has gained 141.5% since launch with early holders profiting $15.5 million, the kind of asymmetry that draws the next wave of speculators, and the next wave after that, until it does not.
Solana’s own data team noted the same pattern from the outside. On September 12, DeFiLlama showed Solana back on top with $3.25 billion in daily DEX volume against Robinhood Chain’s $2.72 billion, reversing a summer trend in which the new chain repeatedly took the daily crown. Weekly and monthly aggregates stayed competitive for Solana throughout, which analysts read as evidence that Robinhood Chain’s daily peaks reflect concentrated speculation rather than sustained trading depth.
The tokenized stock test case
The broader significance sits in the tokenized stock experiment. Traditional finance has spent two years debating whether equities belong on public blockchains, and Robinhood Chain is now the largest live test. The chain supports round-the-clock trading of tokenized stocks that eligible users can lend or use as collateral, and the demand is not confined to one network. DraftKings’ tokenized stock cleared $39 million in volume on Solana within three hours of its September 12 launch. 1-800-Flowers listed on Solana through Backpack Securities and posted $22 million on its first day. Backpack has since added searchable earnings transcripts and analyst estimates to all 41 tokenized stock pages it carries, building out the infrastructure that serious equity traders would expect.
Competitors are moving in parallel. Coinbase and Moov announced a stablecoin integration with more than 1,000 community banks and credit unions on September 15, putting settlement rails inside traditional banking systems. Kraken, Bybit and Backed have expanded tokenized equity offerings in Europe over the past quarter. The tokenized-equities sector as a whole accumulated $15.9 billion in DEX volume after a 1,250% increase, according to the Token Terminal report, which means the market is still small enough that a single chain’s design choices can shape how the whole category develops.
Robinhood’s regulatory position gives it an advantage most crypto firms lack. The company is a registered broker-dealer in the United States, and its stock tokens are structured to be eligible for lending and collateral use, something offshore issuers cannot offer to US customers. If the SEC’s digital asset custody rule proposal, sent to the White House in late August, lands in a way that accommodates tokenized securities, the incumbent position Robinhood is building now becomes harder to displace.
What October will show
The next test is retention. A chain that did $1.88 billion in a day and $436,000 in revenue a week later has proven it can capture attention. Whether it can keep that attention, once the launch-window speculation normalizes and gas subsidies stop masking real costs, is the question the October data will answer. Two scenarios are live. In one, the memecoin flywheel cools, TVL drifts back toward the stock-token core, and Robinhood Chain settles into a mid-sized chain with a genuine equities niche. In the other, the launch platforms keep printing new speculative cycles and the chain consolidates its volume lead for good.
For now the numbers say one thing clearly: the fastest new chain in crypto grew on memecoins first, and the tokenized stocks it was built for are still catching up. Palmer’s report treats that as a strength, arguing the two segments feed each other. The revenue chart from last week suggests the relationship is more fragile than that. Both can be true at once, and the next six weeks of data should settle which one dominates.