Robinhood Chain Goes Live with Multi-Product On-Chain Finance
On July 2, Robinhood held its 'The World is Flat' event in London, officially launching Robinhood Chain, a Layer2 network built on Arbitrum Orbit. After months of testing, the chain is now live on public mainnet, positioned as an institutional-grade, AI-native blockchain infrastructure optimized for real-world assets (RWA). Following the announcement, Robinhood's stock rose 8.35% to $108.6, hitting a six-month high.
Robinhood expanded its on-chain product suite around the chain:
- Tokenized Stocks: Robinhood Wallet now supports trading tokenized stocks via DEXs including Uniswap, 1inch, Rialto, Lighter, and Arcus across 120+ countries. Users can use these assets as collateral in DeFi lending or liquidity pools.
- On-Chain Perpetuals: Investors can trade stocks, commodities, and other assets outside traditional market hours, with an initial 90-day fee and gas subsidy period plus loyalty incentives.
- Yield Products: Robinhood Earn for U.S. users is rolling out, offering ~7% APY on USDG stablecoin deposits via self-custodial wallets. The product is powered by Morpho with support from Steakhouse, Ethena, Spark, and others, and includes an insurance mechanism.
- AI Trading: Launch of Agentic Accounts for crypto, allowing eligible U.S. users to connect AI models with risk parameters for autonomous market scanning and execution.
These moves come as Robinhood's crypto business faces headwinds: Q1 crypto revenue fell 47% YoY to $134 million, and crypto notional trading volume dropped 48% to $24 billion. The company now serves approximately 28 million users and is expanding globally — launching in Canada, securing a Singapore MAS license, planning commodities/ETF perpetuals in Europe, and soon opening crypto trading in the UK.
Protocol Integration and dYdX Controversy
Major protocols including Uniswap, Morpho, Chainlink, BitGo, Ethena, and EtherFi have integrated with Robinhood Chain, covering trading, liquidity, lending, oracles, and custody. However, the partnership between dYdX Foundation and Robinhood to launch the DEX Arcus has sparked significant controversy. Arcus will support 95 tokenized stocks, perpetuals, and crypto assets, with plans to enable tokenized stock collateral and pre-IPO equity for companies like OpenAI. A beta version is now live, with full launch expected later in 2026.
The community backlash centers on Arcus being built on Robinhood Chain rather than dYdX Chain. dYdX founder Antonio explained in an open letter that building a dedicated chain requires constant trade-offs between performance, UX, and decentralization, while competitors gain market share with faster execution and better liquidity. Choosing Robinhood Chain was driven by its ~27.7 million funded accounts offering immediate user base and liquidity. Additionally, Arcus received a strategic investment from Robinhood Crypto.
Community members fear that development resources and market attention will shift to Arcus, potentially cannibalizing dYdX's brand value and diluting DYDX token utility. While the dYdX Foundation insists its support for the dYdX protocol and governance remains unchanged, and Antonio promised to allocate any future Arcus token to the dYdX community and prioritize dYdX traders, the market reacted sharply. DYDX token fell approximately 40.7% intraday. Ultimately, Robinhood is leveraging Robinhood Chain to transition from a broker to a next-generation global financial gateway, but market validation remains uncertain.