Robinhood’s core business is still growing, but its crypto unit is moving the other way.
In a report by Blockworks Research manager AJC, translated by ChainCatcher, Robinhood’s revenue reached a record $1.31 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 32% from a year earlier and 92% higher than in the second quarter of 2024. Crypto was the exception. Revenue from crypto fell 38% year over year to $100 million, leaving the segment at just 8% of total company revenue, its lowest share since the third quarter of 2023.
Retail crypto activity on the Robinhood app also weakened. The report said second-quarter retail crypto trading volume fell 36% year over year to $18.2 billion, the lowest quarterly level since the third quarter of 2024. The drop was large enough that institutional volume executed through Bitstamp exceeded Robinhood’s retail crypto volume for the first time, though Bitstamp itself posted only $22.2 billion in quarterly volume, its second-lowest quarter on record.
Custodied crypto assets were flat in dollar terms but shrank as a share of the broader platform. Robinhood held $26.2 billion in crypto assets in custody in the first quarter of 2024, equal to 20% of total custody assets. More than two years later, the figure was nearly unchanged at $26.3 billion in the second quarter of 2026, but the share had fallen to 7%, a quarterly record low.
The report’s framing is straightforward: Robinhood is still expanding, but its crypto business is not. Crypto once accounted for more than one-third of Robinhood’s total revenue. By the second quarter of 2026, event contracts had overtaken crypto, bringing in $156 million versus $100 million for crypto.
Robinhood has not stepped away from digital assets. Instead, it has made its biggest crypto push so far with the launch of Robinhood Chain.
Robinhood Chain posted a fast start, but not one that can yet reshape the company’s numbers
Robinhood officially launched Robinhood Chain mainnet at its World Is Flat event on July 1, 2026. The company-built Layer 2 blockchain is meant to support a growing onchain ecosystem tied to Robinhood’s product stack.
In its first month, Robinhood Chain generated $3.6 million in real economic value, or REV. Annualized from that first-month run rate, the figure comes to $43.2 million. The report described that as a strong opening, but not enough by itself to reverse the slide in Robinhood’s crypto revenue.
Even so, the launch stands out among recent L2 debuts. In July, Robinhood Chain ranked first in chain revenue among L2 networks, ahead of Polygon at $2.7 million and Base at $2.1 million. It captured 38% of all L2 chain revenue tracked by growthepie.
That still leaves 62% of L2 revenue with other networks, which means Robinhood Chain could raise revenue further by gaining share even if the overall L2 revenue pool does not expand.
The larger problem is the size and direction of that pool. The report argued that network revenue across the sector is in structural decline. Block space used to be a highly profitable business for first-generation smart contract platforms, but as block space becomes more commoditized, it is getting harder for newer chains to build large fee businesses on that basis alone.
In July, blockchains tracked by Blockworks generated a combined $122.4 million in network revenue, the lowest monthly total in three and a half years. In July 2025, that figure was $333.7 million, implying a 63% year-over-year drop. The report added that the weakness cannot be blamed entirely on the current market backdrop, noting that chains still produced $300.1 million in network revenue in July 2023 during the prior bear market.
Robinhood already has 13 business lines generating more than $100 million in annualized revenue. The report said it is difficult to see Robinhood Chain joining that group through network revenue alone. Even if Robinhood keeps taking more L2 activity share, chain revenue would still be capped by the size of the market, with annual revenue likely topping out at about $100 million.
Meme coins, not RWA, drove early activity
The report said Robinhood Chain’s first wave of usage was powered mainly by meme coins rather than tokenized real-world assets, or RWA. Robinhood does not appear uncomfortable with that dynamic. Founder Vlad Tenev has publicly voiced support for meme culture more than once, according to the report.
In July, Robinhood Chain processed $6.93 billion in spot trading volume. Of that total, $3.55 billion came from meme coins, equal to 51%. RWA, which Robinhood Chain has promoted as a flagship use case, contributed $313.2 million, or 5% of total volume.
The report argued that meme coin influence may be understated even in those figures. It pointed to LONG(), a meme coin launch platform that promoted pools pairing meme tokens with tokenized stocks or ETFs. That structure links the meme coin’s price to the underlying RWA. In the report’s example, if the underlying RWA rises 5%, the meme coin can also rise 5% even without direct trading in the meme token itself.
From July 6 through July 31, 48% of RWA trading volume came from liquidity pools that paired meme coins with RWA.
The report did not dismiss meme coins as a source of REV. It did, however, note that meme-driven activity has rarely proved durable across prior cycles. Ethereum, Avalanche, TRON and Base all went through periods of intense speculative trading before capital and volume moved elsewhere.
Robinhood Chain may hold onto some of that activity. It is simply too early to say. One month of data is not enough to determine whether meme coins can become a lasting source of REV for Robinhood Chain or whether the network is just the latest stop in a rotation that eventually returns to Solana.
The infrastructure layer alone is unlikely to carry the economics
To make that point, the report widened the lens beyond Robinhood and looked at where value is being captured in crypto. The balance has been shifting from infrastructure to applications, with Solana offered as the clearest example.
In January 2024, when Solana’s rebound began, applications on Solana generated $40.9 million in combined revenue while the network itself produced $21.4 million in REV, a ratio of 1.9x. By January 2025, at the peak of the Solana bull market, application revenue reached $1.13 billion while Solana REV was $551.7 million, still about 2x.
After that, the gap widened quickly. By July 2026, Solana applications were generating $5 in revenue for every $1 in REV captured by the base network. The report’s conclusion was that applications are taking a larger share of the value they create while blockchains are retaining a smaller one.
If Robinhood wants Robinhood Chain to become its next business line with more than $100 million in annual revenue, it will need to participate directly in monetization at the application layer rather than relying only on fees produced by the chain itself.
USDG stands out as the clearest revenue lever
The report identified stablecoins as Robinhood’s most visible monetization path above the infrastructure layer.
Unlike many blockchains that lean on Circle’s USDC or Tether’s USDT as their main stable asset, Robinhood chose USDG as the native stablecoin for Robinhood Chain. That gives Robinhood an extra revenue stream through interest earned on USDG reserve assets.
As of the end of July, USDG market capitalization on Robinhood Chain stood at $333.1 million. Assuming the underlying reserve assets yield 3.5% and Robinhood keeps 90% of the related interest income, the report estimated that USDG can already generate about $10.5 million in annualized revenue for Robinhood.
The report said scaling USDG supply should not be especially difficult and would create a more stable revenue base. If USDG supply reaches $1 billion, which the report described as a reasonable target given that 11 blockchains already have at least $1 billion in stablecoin supply, annual revenue from USDG would rise to $31.5 million, nearly matching Robinhood Chain’s current chain revenue run rate.
In the conclusion, the report also ran a separate scenario under a full-retention assumption. At a 3.5% yield, every additional $1 billion of USDG supply would translate into $35 million in annualized revenue if Robinhood kept all associated interest income. At $10 billion in supply, that would rise to $350 million a year, close to Robinhood’s current annualized crypto revenue. The report added that such scale would not come quickly, but it is not impossible to imagine given Robinhood’s size and user base.
Lighter and Morpho show two very different distribution outcomes
Beyond stablecoins, the report pointed to two application-layer examples: Lighter and Morpho.
Lighter has deployed a customized perpetual futures DEX on Robinhood Chain and shares trading fees with Robinhood on a 50/50 basis. As part of that arrangement, Robinhood Wallet, the self-custody wallet that sits outside the main Robinhood app, offers direct access to Lighter perpetuals trading inside the wallet app.
Morpho is the second case. According to the report, Morpho reportedly paid a fee to enter the Robinhood app. That is the reverse of the pattern usually seen in crypto, where chains pay incentives to applications to attract deployments rather than applications paying the company behind a chain.
That leads to the central question in this part of the report: how much is Robinhood’s distribution really worth?
For now, protocols on Robinhood Chain appear to have two main ways to gain access to Robinhood users:
- enter the main Robinhood app, as Morpho did;
- integrate with Robinhood Wallet, as Lighter did.
The report said the value of distribution through the main Robinhood app has already been demonstrated to some extent. The value of distribution through Robinhood Wallet is much less certain.
Robinhood Wallet remains a relatively small player in the ecosystem
Looking only at activity on Robinhood Chain, Robinhood Wallet users generated $119.6 million in trading volume in July. Daily volume peaked at $11 million on July 8, then trended lower, averaging just $2.1 million per day during the final week of the month.
Average daily active wallets for Robinhood Wallet came in at just under 7,000 in July. The report noted that the analysis did not filter out sybil addresses, which means the real number of independent users could be lower.
Against the broader wallet and trading-app ecosystem on Robinhood Chain, Robinhood Wallet is still a small participant. Tracked wallet and trading applications generated a combined $3.08 billion in volume in July. Robinhood Wallet accounted for $119.6 million of that total, leaving it with less than 4% market share.
The report added one nuance. A large part of the volume in these applications comes from high-frequency and professional traders. By average daily active wallets, Robinhood Wallet ranked fourth among the tracked apps. By volume, it ranked sixth.
Lighter’s numbers point to the limits of wallet-only access
Lighter’s integration offers the clearest evidence so far of those limits. Since integrating with Robinhood Wallet, Lighter’s Robinhood deployment has contributed only 0.2% of Lighter’s total perpetuals trading volume. In July, that slice came to $86.8 million, even less than the spot trading volume generated through Robinhood Wallet during the same month.
The report stressed that even this modest amount of volume has been supported by incentives. Lighter is distributing 11 million LIT tokens, currently valued at about $25 million, to encourage Robinhood Wallet users to trade perpetuals.
That matters because it suggests current activity is not only small but also subsidized. Without those rewards, actual volume could be lower still. Based on the data available now, the report said it is difficult to argue that access to Robinhood Wallet alone delivers major value to protocols. Unless the wallet serves as a stepping stone into the main Robinhood app, it is hard to see why a protocol would give up substantial economics just to secure wallet-based distribution.
Morpho shows the stronger value of the main app
Morpho presents a different picture. Robinhood users can deposit stablecoins into Morpho directly through the main app and earn an incentivized 7% APY.
By the end of July, Morpho’s deployment on Robinhood Chain accounted for 5% of all Morpho deposits and nearly 6% of loans. Just one month after launch, Robinhood Chain had already become Morpho’s third-largest deployment by total value locked.
The report acknowledged that Morpho’s TVL was also helped by incentives. Even so, the contrast between direct access through the main Robinhood app and access through Robinhood Wallet was hard to miss. While the two examples are not perfectly like-for-like, Robinhood Chain’s share of Morpho deposits was 25 times larger than Robinhood’s share of Lighter perpetuals trading volume.
The early takeaway was sharp. For protocols that can enter the main Robinhood app, Robinhood’s distribution appears highly valuable. For those limited to Robinhood Wallet, the value proposition looks much weaker.
The report cautioned that this view is still based on only two early case studies. Robinhood has not formally said that application-layer distribution deals will become a larger company strategy, and it remains unclear how far the model will be pushed.
Still, the gap is already visible. The real value of Robinhood distribution does not seem to come from being associated with the brand or from deploying on Robinhood Chain by itself. It comes from direct access to users in the main Robinhood app.
Quantifiable Robinhood Chain revenue is still modest against Robinhood’s crypto business
The report returned at the end to its original question: can Robinhood Chain make crypto an important growth driver for Robinhood again?
For now, its answer is no.
As a blockchain launch, Robinhood Chain has been a success. As a business line inside Robinhood, it is not yet a financially meaningful contributor. Robinhood generated $100 million in crypto revenue in the second quarter, or roughly $400 million on an annualized basis.
Against that, the report said the currently identifiable Robinhood Chain-related revenue streams, including chain REV, USDG interest income and Robinhood’s share of Lighter fees, add up to about $54.8 million annualized. That equals roughly 14% of Robinhood’s annualized crypto revenue.
The report also warned that this comparison simply annualizes the first month of Robinhood Chain data and should not be taken as a definitive view of long-term revenue potential.
What does look clear is the underlying direction. Network revenue alone is unlikely ever to make a meaningful difference to Robinhood’s overall financials. Block space has become too commoditized, and the total L2 revenue market is too small.
What would need to happen next
The report laid out three paths that could matter.
The first is scaling USDG. Stablecoin reserve interest is already a proven, high-margin business, as Tether and Circle have shown. For Robinhood, it is also the cleanest and most measurable source of upside at this stage.
The second is monetizing distribution. Robinhood has something most blockchains do not: direct access to a large retail investor base. If protocols are willing to pay integration fees or share revenue in exchange for that access, Robinhood can sell its user entry points instead of depending solely on onchain transaction fees.
Early evidence suggests that model works when protocols can enter the main Robinhood app. It looks far less compelling when the only access point is Robinhood Wallet.
The third possibility is that Robinhood never intended Robinhood Chain to be judged purely as a standalone profit center. The chain could instead function as a funnel. Tokenized assets could bring users onchain first, then guide them into the wider Robinhood ecosystem where they trade stocks, options, crypto and other financial products.
Under that model, Robinhood Chain’s value would not necessarily show up in chain revenue. It would appear indirectly through higher user engagement and higher revenue in other parts of Robinhood’s business.
At this stage, though, the report’s answer remains unchanged: Robinhood Chain is not yet an important growth driver for Robinhood, and network revenue by itself will never be enough to make it one. If that is going to change, Robinhood will need to scale USDG, commercialize access to users in the main app through application-layer partnerships, or use Robinhood Chain as a funnel into the higher-value products that already support the company’s business.