Inside Robinhood’s high-stakes bet to onboard 10 million casual users onto decentralized finance
The company says its advantage lies in bringing retail customers onchain, but early activity remains dominated by memecoins, while its original tokenization vision remains small.
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Summary
- Robinhood says its new blockchain isn’t trying to compete with crypto-native trading venues like Hyperliquid — it wants to bring its 10 million active users into onchain finance for the first time. But the data so far tells a more complicated story.
- Despite generating $878 million in 24-hour DEX volume on July 12 and briefly overtaking Base and Ethereum, the chain’s activity has been dominated by memecoin speculation rather than the tokenized stocks and ETFs it was built for.
- Of the $734 million bridged onto the chain, only $211 million is actually deployed in lending or yield products, while the chain’s tokenized real-world asset market cap sits at just $12.66 million — dwarfed by CASHCAT, a cat-themed memecoin, which peaked at $156 million.
