Robinhood Chain Mainnet Launch: Building a Full-Suite On-Chain Financial Gateway
On July 2, Robinhood officially announced the mainnet launch of its Layer2 chain, Robinhood Chain, at its 'The World is Flat' event in London. Built on Arbitrum Orbit, the chain is 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 nearly six-month high.
Robinhood expanded its on-chain product ecosystem alongside the chain. Tokenized stocks became available via Robinhood Wallet in over 120 countries, enabling trading on DEXs like Uniswap, 1inch, and Lighter, and use as collateral in lending pools. On-chain perpetuals also launched, with a 90-day fee and gas subsidy for early users. For U.S. users, the decentralized lending product Robinhood Earn is rolling out gradually, offering approximately 7% APY on USDG deposits, powered by Morpho and supported by Steakhouse, Ethena, Spark, and others. Additionally, Robinhood introduced Agentic Accounts, an AI-powered trading tool for crypto, allowing users to set risk parameters and delegate execution to AI models.
These expansions come amid slowing crypto revenue: Q1 crypto revenue fell 47% year-over-year to $134 million, while notional trading volume dropped 48% to $24 billion. Robinhood now serves approximately 28 million users and continues its global push, including launching in Canada, obtaining a Singapore MAS license, and planning commodity perpetuals in Europe.
Ecosystem Assembly and dYdX Controversy: Arcus Brand Stirs Community Unrest
Leveraging Robinhood's vast user base, top protocols including Uniswap, 1inch, Morpho, Chainlink, BitGo, Ethena, and EtherFi have announced integration with Robinhood Chain. Among them, dYdX's new DEX, Arcus, drew particular attention—launched on Robinhood Chain rather than dYdX Chain, it will support 95 tokenized stocks, perpetuals, and crypto assets, with future plans for pre-IPO equity trading. Arcus is in beta, targeting a full launch in late 2026, and has received strategic investment from Robinhood Crypto.
dYdX founder Antonio explained that operating dYdX Chain highlighted trade-offs between performance, UX, and decentralization, while competitors gained ground with faster execution and simpler products. The choice of Robinhood Chain was driven by access to ~27.7 million funded accounts for liquidity and user base. However, the community fears that diverting development resources and liquidity to Arcus could dilute DYDX token value. Antonio, as the largest DYDX holder, pledged that a portion of any future Arcus token would be allocated to the dYdX community. Despite this, market reaction was severe: DYDX dropped approximately 40.7% within the day.