Robinhood Chain Mainnet Goes Live: From L2 to On-Chain Finance Gateway
Robinhood held 'The World is Flat' event in London on July 2, officially launching its Layer2 chain Robinhood Chain built on Arbitrum Orbit. After months of testing, the mainnet went live, positioned as an institution-grade, AI-native blockchain infrastructure optimized for real-world assets (RWA). Following the announcement, Robinhood's stock rose 8.35% to $108.6, a six-month high.
Alongside Robinhood Chain, Robinhood expanded its on-chain product suite. For tokenized stocks, Robinhood Wallet added support in over 120 countries and regions, allowing users to trade via DEXs such as Uniswap, 1inch, Lighter, Rialto, and Arcus, and use tokenized stocks as collateral for lending or liquidity pools. For perpetual contracts, Robinhood Wallet launched the feature with 90-day fee and gas subsidies. In yield products, Robinhood Earn gradually opened to U.S. users, offering ~7% APY on USDG stablecoin deposits, powered by Morpho's lending infrastructure and supported by Steakhouse, Ethena, Spark, and Maple. Additionally, Robinhood introduced Agentic Accounts, an AI-powered trading tool allowing users to set risk parameters for autonomous market execution.
Robinhood's crypto revenue fell 47% YoY to $134 million in Q1, with notional trading volume down 48% to $24 billion. The new product launch aims to find new growth drivers. Globally, Robinhood covers ~28 million users and is expanding into Canada, Singapore, Europe, and the UK.
dYdX Spinoff Sparks Controversy: Arcus on Robinhood Chain, DYDX Token Plunges 40.7%
Robinhood Chain quickly attracted top protocols: Uniswap, 1inch, Lighter, Morpho, Chainlink, BitGo, Ethena, and EtherFi, covering trading, liquidity, lending, oracles, custody, and cross-chain. However, dYdX Foundation's new DEX Arcus ignited community backlash. Arcus supports 95 tokenized stocks, perpetuals, and major crypto assets, with plans to allow tokenized stocks and crypto as perpetual collateral and offer Pre-IPO equity trading for private companies like OpenAI. Arcus is in beta, targeting a full launch in late 2026.
The community's main grievance: despite being built by the dYdX team, Arcus does not run on dYdX Chain but on Robinhood Chain as an independent product. dYdX founder Antonio explained in an open letter that operating dYdX Chain revealed constant trade-offs between performance, user experience, and decentralization, while competitors gained market share with faster execution and better liquidity. Choosing Robinhood Chain gave access to ~27.7 million funded accounts and immediate user base and liquidity. Arcus also received strategic investment from Robinhood Crypto.
Community members fear that splitting core team resources toward Arcus could cannibalize dYdX's brand and value. Given dYdX's historic largest airdrop and Arcus's potential token launch, traders and liquidity may migrate, reducing dYdX Chain activity and diluting DYDX token value. The dYdX Foundation stated its commitment to the dYdX protocol and governance remains unchanged. Antonio promised that if Arcus issues a token, part of it will be allocated to the dYdX community, and Arcus will prioritize access for dYdX traders. Despite reassurances, DYDX fell ~40.7% intraday.
Overall, Robinhood is leveraging Robinhood Chain to expand from an internet broker into a next-generation global financial gateway, but market acceptance remains to be seen.