Robinhood Chain Mainnet Launch: Building an On-Chain Financial Super Gateway
On July 2, Robinhood held its 'The World is Flat' event in London, announcing the mainnet launch of its Layer 2 chain, Robinhood Chain. Built on Arbitrum Orbit, the chain is positioned as an institutional-grade, AI-native blockchain infrastructure optimized for real-world assets (RWA), directly connecting Robinhood's on-chain users and offering developers a plug-and-play DeFi environment. Following the announcement, Robinhood's stock rose 8.35% to $108.6, hitting a nearly six-month high.
Alongside Robinhood Chain, Robinhood expanded its on-chain product suite. For tokenized stocks, Robinhood Wallet added support across 120+ countries and regions, enabling users to trade tokenized equities via DEXs like Uniswap, Rialto, Lighter, 1inch, and Arcus, and use them as collateral for lending or in liquidity pools. In perpetuals, Robinhood Wallet launched on-chain perpetual contracts with 90 days of zero fees and gas subsidies, plus reward incentives. On the yield front, Robinhood Earn began rolling out to U.S. users, allowing them to deposit USDG stablecoins into self-custody wallets for an estimated ~7% APY, powered by Morpho’s lending infrastructure and supported by Steakhouse, Ethena, Spark, and Maple, along with insurance mechanisms. Robinhood also extended its AI trading capabilities on-chain via Agentic Accounts, enabling eligible U.S. users to set risk parameters and let AI autonomously execute market scans and strategies.
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. Globally, Robinhood serves ~28 million users and continues expanding in Canada, Singapore, Europe, and the UK.
dYdX's Divergent Path: Arcus on Robinhood Chain Triggers Community Trust Crisis
Leveraging its massive user base, Robinhood Chain quickly attracted leading protocols including Uniswap, 1inch, Lighter, Morpho, Chainlink, BitGo, Ethena, and EtherFi. The most controversial move, however, came from the dYdX Foundation, which announced a new DEX, Arcus, built on Robinhood Chain. On July 2, the dYdX Foundation revealed Arcus would support 95 tokenized stocks, perpetual contracts, and major crypto assets, with plans to allow tokenized stocks and crypto as collateral and to offer pre-IPO trading for private companies like OpenAI. Arcus is already in beta and expected to launch fully in late 2026.
What sparked community backlash was that Arcus was not deployed on dYdX Chain but as a standalone product on Robinhood Chain. dYdX founder Antonio explained in an open letter that operating dYdX Chain had forced constant trade-offs between performance, UX, and decentralization, while competitors gained market share with faster execution and simpler products. Choosing Robinhood Chain was largely driven by access to ~27.7 million funded accounts for built-in users and liquidity; Arcus also received a strategic investment from Robinhood Crypto.
Nevertheless, the community feared that the core team building a separate brand would divert development resources, product focus, and market attention away from dYdX, potentially cannibalizing its value. Given dYdX's history of one of the largest airdrops in the industry and Arcus's potential token launch, traders and liquidity could migrate, diluting DYDX's value. The dYdX Foundation reiterated its commitment to the dYdX protocol and governance, asserting that dYdX Chain remains fully operational. Antonio promised that any future Arcus token would allocate a portion to the dYdX community and that Arcus would prioritize dYdX traders for early access. These assurances failed to calm markets; DYDX fell ~40.7% intraday.