Robinhood Chain Mainnet Goes Live: Self-Built L2 and Multi-Product Expansion
Ahead of its Q2 earnings report, Robinhood held a 'The World is Flat' event in London on July 2, officially launching the mainnet of its Layer2 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). The announcement drove Robinhood's stock up 8.35% to $108.6, a six-month high.
Alongside the chain, Robinhood expanded its on-chain product suite. Tokenized stock functionality is now available in over 120 countries, allowing users to trade via DEXs like Uniswap and 1inch, and use the tokens as collateral in DeFi lending or liquidity pools. On-chain perpetual contracts also launched, offering a 90-day fee and gas subsidy along with积分 incentives. For US users, Robinhood Earn (powered by Morpho) offers ~7% APY on USD stablecoin deposits, backed by Steakhouse, Ethena, Spark, and others, with insurance coverage. Additionally, Robinhood introduced AI-powered Agentic Accounts for crypto trading.
This expansion comes amid slowing crypto revenue: Q1 crypto revenue fell 47% YoY to $134 million, and nominal trading volume dropped 48% to $24 billion. Robinhood now has ~28 million funded accounts and is expanding into Canada, Singapore (MAS license), Europe, and the UK.
Ecological Assembly and Controversy: dYdX's Arcus Sparks Community Backlash
Capitalizing on its massive user base, Robinhood Chain onboarded top protocols like Uniswap, 1inch, Lighter, Morpho, Chainlink, BitGo, Ethena, and EtherFi. But the most controversial integration came from dYdX: on July 2, the dYdX Foundation announced a partnership with Robinhood to launch Arcus, a new DEX on Robinhood Chain. Arcus supports 95 tokenized stocks, perpetuals, and major cryptocurrencies, with plans to allow tokenized stocks and crypto as collateral for perps, and even Pre-IPO shares of private companies like OpenAI. A beta version is live, with full launch expected in late 2026.
The community was outraged because Arcus was built on Robinhood Chain instead of dYdX Chain. dYdX founder Antonio explained that operating a standalone L1 required constant trade-offs between performance, UX, and decentralization, while competitors with faster execution and deeper liquidity were gaining market share. Choosing Robinhood Chain gave Arcus access to ~27.7 million funded accounts and strategic investment from Robinhood Crypto.
However, community members fear that the core team's focus will shift to Arcus, potentially cannibalizing dYdX's brand value and diverting liquidity away from dYdX Chain, thereby diluting DYDX token value. Despite assurances from the dYdX Foundation that dYdX protocol governance remains unchanged, and Antonio's promise that any future Arcus token would allocate a portion to the dYdX community, DYDX plunged ~40.7% intraday.
In the bigger picture, Robinhood is positioning Robinhood Chain as the gateway to on-chain finance, leveraging its retail brokerage user base and global regulatory compliance to compete with traditional finance. Whether this ambition materializes remains to be seen.