ARK Invest researcher Lorenzo Valente said on Sept. 5 that his contract-level analysis of Robinhood Chain indicates most of the network’s current trading activity may not be coming from new crypto users brought in by Robinhood.
He said the only flow that can be clearly identified as coming from Robinhood users is swaps executed by Robinhood Wallet through 0x’s Settler contract, and that share is below 1%. If long-tail transactions with unclear origins are included, Valente estimated Robinhood-related activity at roughly 5%. The rest, he said, mainly comes from trading terminals such as GMGN and OKX, with behavior that resembles the same type of Degen trading seen on other public chains. His summary was that Robinhood Chain currently looks more like 「the same group of Degens, just on a new chain」.
Transaction sample showed a similar pattern
BlockTempo said it connected directly to Robinhood Chain’s public RPC endpoint for a spot check. Over a 152-second window on the morning of Sept. 5, the chain processed 19,959 transactions, or about 131 per second. During that period, 5,377 addresses sent transactions and funds flowed to 1,650 different contracts.
By receiving transaction count, the top contract handled 16.26% of activity and exposed a swap function, indicating routing activity. The second-largest share went to Arbitrum system contract ArbOS at 7.52%, which reflected chain-level operations. The third was a contract tied to cross-chain and trade aggregation service Relay at 6.65%.
Below those were the terminals highlighted by Valente. OKX DexRouter, which is currently promoting a limited-time zero-fee offer, accounted for 1.78%. Uniswap’s UniversalRouter, SwapRouter02, and PositionManager together made up about 4.46%. Token contracts from meme coin launch platform PONS appeared six times among the top 30 contracts. Several high-frequency contracts also exposed functions named buy and sell, which the report described as the standard interface for meme coin bonding curves.
That distribution matched the direction of Valente’s conclusion: Robinhood Chain is mostly carrying swap activity and meme coin trading, not the tokenized stock settlement narrative Robinhood has emphasized.
A permissionless Layer 2 means anyone can connect
Robinhood Chain is a permissionless Layer 2 built on Arbitrum technology. It uses chain ID 4663, has a 100-millisecond block time, no native token, and charges gas directly in ETH. Any EVM-compatible wallet or application can connect without needing approval from Robinhood.
That design is central to Valente’s argument. High on-chain activity does not necessarily mean Robinhood has added the same number of new users, because traders on the network do not have to come through Robinhood’s own products.
0x said in an announcement that it has provided on-chain swap infrastructure for Robinhood Wallet for years. On Robinhood Chain, it is supplying both its Swap API and Cross-Chain API, with Tokka Labs serving as the main market maker for RFQ pricing. The deployment configuration for 0x Settler also lists chain ID 4663. The report said that is why Valente was able to isolate and measure the share tied to Robinhood Wallet swaps.
Revenue has grown, but the source is the existing on-chain crowd
Robinhood Chain went live on July 1 and was positioned as a network for bringing tokenized real-world assets on-chain. After more than two months of operation, tokenized RWA represented just 0.28% of decentralized exchange trading on the chain, while nearly 90% of chain revenue came from meme coin trading.
Valente had also examined the chain’s revenue split the week before. According to the report, Robinhood Chain has generated about $816,000 in cumulative revenue. Robinhood kept 89%, Arbitrum took 10%, and Ethereum, which handles settlement, received about $1,538.
Taken together, the two analyses point to the same conclusion: trading volume and revenue on Robinhood Chain are growing, but that growth appears to be driven by existing on-chain traders moving to the network rather than Robinhood bringing its stock users into crypto at scale. Valente did not dispute the chain’s performance. His point was that chain growth and Robinhood user growth should not be treated as the same thing.
What the report says about user growth and traffic sources
On whether Robinhood Chain’s transaction volume represents new Robinhood users, the answer in the report was no. Because the network is permissionless and any EVM-compatible wallet can connect, activity on the chain cannot be equated with user additions inside Robinhood. Valente’s estimate put clearly identifiable Robinhood-user activity below 1%, or around 5% after adding long-tail flows.
As for where most transactions are coming from, Valente pointed to third-party trading terminals including GMGN and OKX. BlockTempo’s sample of 19,959 transactions showed that the leading contracts were mostly swap routers, Relay, Uniswap, and PONS-related meme coin contracts.