Robinhood Chain Mainnet Goes Live: From Brokerage to On-Chain Finance Gateway
On July 2, Robinhood announced the mainnet launch of its Layer2 blockchain, Robinhood Chain, at its 'The World is Flat' event in London. Built on Arbitrum Orbit, the chain is designed for institutional-grade applications and AI-native architectures, with specific optimizations for Real World Assets (RWA). Robinhood simultaneously introduced tokenized stocks, on-chain perpetual contracts, a decentralized lending product (Robinhood Earn), and an AI trading tool (Agentic Accounts), covering over 120 countries and regions. Following the news, Robinhood's stock surged 8.35% to close at $108.6, a near six-month high.
On the product front, the tokenized stock feature allows users to trade via DEXs including Uniswap, Rialto, Lighter, 1inch, and Arcus on Robinhood Chain. These tokens can be used as collateral for lending or added to liquidity pools. The on-chain perpetual contract service offers a 90-day fee and gas subsidy, plus reward points. Robinhood Earn, available to U.S. users, supports deposits of USDG stablecoin with an estimated ~7% APY, underpinned by Morpho's lending infrastructure and supported by protocols such as Steakhouse, Ethena, Spark, and Maple, with insurance coverage to mitigate risks.
Ecosystem Consolidation: Top Protocols Join, dYdX's New Venture Stirs Controversy
Leveraging its massive user base of approximately 27.7 million funded accounts, Robinhood Chain quickly attracted major crypto protocols including Uniswap, 1inch, Lighter, Morpho, Chainlink, BitGo, Ethena, and EtherFi, covering trading, liquidity, lending, oracles, custody, and cross-chain services. However, the dYdX Foundation's announcement on the same day of a new DEX named Arcus, built on Robinhood Chain instead of dYdX Chain, triggered significant community backlash.
Arcus supports trading of 95 tokenized stocks, perpetual contracts, and major crypto assets, with plans to allow tokenized stocks and crypto as collateral for perpetuals and to open pre-IPO equity trading for companies like OpenAI. dYdX founder Antonio explained that the choice of Robinhood Chain was driven by access to Robinhood's existing users and liquidity, and that Arcus received a strategic investment from Robinhood Crypto. Despite the dYdX Foundation assuring that dYdX Chain remains unaffected and that any future Arcus token would allocate a portion to the dYdX community, the market reacted negatively. DYDX token fell approximately 40.7% intraday.
Robinhood's Growth Pressure and Global Expansion Strategy
Robinhood's aggressive on-chain push stems from its slowing crypto business. In Q1 2025, crypto revenue declined 47% year-over-year to $134 million, and crypto notional trading volume fell 48% to $24 billion. To find new growth engines, Robinhood is not only deepening its on-chain product suite but also accelerating global expansion: officially launching in Canada, securing a MAS capital markets services license in Singapore, planning to offer commodities, ETFs, and FX perpetuals in Europe, and preparing to open crypto trading services in the UK. Robinhood now serves approximately 28 million users. Robinhood Chain aims to bridge traditional finance with DeFi, positioning itself as the next-generation global financial gateway. Whether this ambition will materialize remains to be tested by the market.