Robinhood launched its own blockchain on July 1, and much of the summer discussion around the network centered on a basic question: what is it actually for? Franklin Crypto head Chris Perkins offered one answer on Monday’s episode of Bits + Bips. A day later, Bernstein made a similar point in a note to clients.
"I wanna defend Robinhood Chain here for a second because I thought it was an incredible unlock," Perkins said on the show, recalling that he was in London for the launch. He praised the way the company built the network and described it as the "DeFi mullet" in action, an industry phrase for a mainstream front end with DeFi rails running underneath.
Bernstein says the chain is already contributing to earnings
In a Tuesday note, Bernstein analysts led by Gautam Chhugani said they were maintaining an Outperform rating on Robinhood Markets and a $160 price target.
The analysts wrote that the chain is now an earnings contributor, putting daily trading fees at $2 million to $4 million. Over the previous 15 days, Robinhood Chain generated roughly $33 million in fees, the highest total among chains in that stretch. Solana brought in about $11 million over the same period, and BNB Chain was close to $9 million.
According to the note, nearly 90% of that revenue stays with Robinhood. About one-tenth goes to Arbitrum, whose technology powers the chain, and less than 1% goes to Ethereum.
Most of the recent monthly fees were generated in the last week
The fee buildup happened quickly. DefiLlama data cited in the report showed Robinhood Chain recorded $23.8 million in fees over the past seven days, against $33.5 million over the past 30 days. That means roughly 71% of the month’s fees came in the latest week alone.
Over the same seven-day window, Solana collected $4.3 million.
Memecoins tied to thinly traded stocks drove much of the activity
Much of the flow was linked to memecoins paired against lightly traded equities. On the show, host Austin Campbell pointed to FARMI, a Nasdaq-listed Chinese dried mushroom seller with 15 employees. He said the stock jumped 350% on Wednesday and saw 720 million shares traded, about 90 times its average volume, after a memecoin using the same ticker began trading on Robinhood Chain.
Campbell compared the setup to bucket shops, saying that using thinly traded names during off hours to push prices amounted to the same behavior.
Perkins called it a game, not an investment
Asked directly about that activity in the next segment, Perkins did not defend it. "I think it’s a game," he said. "It’s not an investment."
He described the equities linkage as "GameStop 2.0," said anyone participating is probably going to lose money, and added that manipulating these markets is illegal where the assets are commodities.
On the broader question of why the chain permits such activity at all, Perkins said, "people can do what people feel like doing," and called that one of the realities of running a decentralized chain.