Robinhood Bets on Millions of Retail Users Going On-Chain: On-Chain Trading Surges, but RWA Vision Still Unproven

2026-07-17 15:39

Odaily reported that Robinhood is betting on the decentralized finance (DeFi) market by building its own blockchain, Robinhood Chain, aiming to bring over 10 million active users into the on-chain ecosystem. However, current trading activity on the network is still primarily driven by meme coin speculation, while the initial vision of tokenizing real-world assets (RWA) has yet to gain traction.

Trading volume on Robinhood Chain has seen rapid growth recently. On July 12, the chain’s 24-hour DEX trading volume reached approximately $878 million, briefly surpassing Coinbase’s Base and Ethereum to rank among the top in decentralized trading volume, sparking interest in the crypto community. However, Robinhood Chain is still in its early stages. Data shows:

1. On July 13, the chain’s perpetual contract trading volume was only about $5.9 million, while leading on-chain derivatives platform Hyperliquid recorded a trading volume of $8.9 billion during the same period;

2. Robinhood Chain’s bridged TVL is reported at around $734 million, but the actual on-chain total value locked (TVL) is approximately $211 million, with some assets remaining in wallets and not entering lending or yield protocols;

3. The market capitalization of tokenized RWA assets currently stands at just about $12.66 million.

Currently, most of the trading activity on Robinhood Chain comes from meme coins. The CASHCAT token, recently launched on the chain, surged over 2,100% in one week, reaching a market cap of $156 million at one point—12 times the size of the entire RWA market on the chain.

Robinhood stated that early on-chain activity is meeting expectations, with developers building out the ecosystem and users actively engaging with the network. The company emphasized that the long-term goal remains to bring real-world assets like stocks and ETFs on-chain, enabling services such as 24/7 trading and on-chain lending.

Analysts believe Robinhood Chain’s development trajectory mirrors the early stages of some new public chains: gaining initial traction through speculative trading before proving whether it can convert this into long-term users, a developer ecosystem, and real financial applications. The key going forward will be whether Robinhood can leverage its massive retail user base to transform the short-term meme coin frenzy into a sustainable on-chain financial ecosystem. (CoinDesk)