Robinhood Chain has been live for only about two months, and activity on the network has picked up fast. Four Pillars research lead 100y said the chain’s daily revenue recently rose above $4 million at one point, roughly twice Hyperliquid’s level, 5 to 6 times that of Tron and Solana, and for a period contributed about two-thirds of all Ethereum Layer 2 revenue.
The more unusual part is how that growth took shape. According to the article, Robinhood Chain is not following the standard public-chain sequence seen in earlier cycles.
Robinhood Chain put tokenized real-world assets at the center from day one
A new blockchain usually follows a familiar path. It first attracts core DeFi infrastructure such as DEXs and lending protocols, then builds out NFTs, gaming and other native apps, and uses funds, grants and hackathons to subsidize developers and liquidity. As users and capital gather, meme coins and other highly speculative assets tend to take off. Only later, once native crypto growth starts to slow, does the focus shift toward real-world assets, institutional DeFi and traditional financial products.
Robinhood Chain has almost inverted that order.
When Robinhood launched the public-chain mainnet in July 2026, it positioned tokenized real-world assets as the core use case, with stock tokens as the flagship product. The platform currently offers more than 190 Stock Tokens linked to U.S. equities and ETFs, including NVIDIA, Google, Apple and QQQ. These tokens use the ERC-20 standard, can be transferred directly, and can also be composed into on-chain applications for trading, lending and collateral use.
Robinhood also plugged in mature infrastructure immediately. Uniswap became the main public AMM on the first day of mainnet, with support for v2, v3, v4 and UniswapX. Lending underneath Robinhood Earn is provided by Morpho.
Meme coins arrived later, but they were the catalyst
On-chain activity did not explode right away. The real spark came later, when meme coin trading picked up. CashCat was one of the early examples, but on its own it was not very different from the meme coin speculation seen on Ethereum, Solana or Base.
What started to give Robinhood Chain its own culture was the mix of meme coins and stock tokens. Four Pillars said meme coins on Ethereum and Solana have usually traded against native assets such as ETH and SOL. On Robinhood Chain, by contrast, projects such as LONG introduced a structure where meme coins were paired directly with stock tokens. Launchpads including Pons then pushed that trend further.
That brought two very different kinds of exposure into the same on-chain venue: traditional financial assets such as Tesla and NVIDIA on one side, and classic crypto degen meme coins on the other.
Pons quickly became one of the clearest winners
Pons emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Robinhood Chain boom. In early September, its 24-hour fees reached about $5.95 million at one point. That was above pump.fun at about $4.64 million, and also higher than Robinhood Chain itself at about $4 million and Hyperliquid at about $2 million over the same period.
Bitquery’s analysis of on-chain data from Aug. 3 to Sept. 3 showed that Pons generated more than 200,000 tokens within one month. Trading volume tied to its bonding-curve activity was about $736 million, while volume after those tokens moved into the secondary market exceeded $2.1 billion.
In that sense, a chain originally positioned as RWA infrastructure ended up being ignited by meme coin speculation.
Why Four Pillars thinks Robinhood could reverse the usual script
100y said one direct reason is timing. Many earlier public chains were launched before RWA became a mainstream crypto narrative, so they had little choice but to build economic activity first around ETH, stablecoins, DEXs and NFTs, then gradually bring stocks, bonds and other off-chain assets on-chain.
Robinhood Chain was born in 2026, when stock tokenization was already much more mature. That allowed it to treat stock tokens as foundational assets from the beginning instead of adding them later as an extra product line.
A second difference comes from Robinhood’s brand culture. Robinhood is a regulated traditional finance company, but it has long been closely tied to U.S. retail speculation. From the GameStop meme-stock era and zero-commission stock trading to options and later crypto expansion, the company has stayed near the center of retail-driven, high-risk trading culture in the U.S.
That is why the combination of stocks and memes looks less contradictory in Robinhood’s case. As 100y framed it, meme stocks in 2021 turned equities into memes inside traditional finance. On Robinhood Chain, that culture has taken a different form by putting meme coins and stock tokens inside the same DeFi market.
A third advantage is harder to copy. Robinhood is not building from zero. A brand-new chain usually has to subsidize developers first, encouraging teams to create wallets, DEXs, lending apps, NFT marketplaces and other products, then use airdrops and liquidity mining to bring users in.
Robinhood can reverse that order. It already has a large base of securities and crypto users, an established brand and distribution channels, and the ability to bring familiar stock exposure on-chain. Most public chains are closer to building the apps first and searching for users later. Robinhood Chain is closer to having the users and assets first, with apps following behind.
There is also no need to rebuild core infrastructure from scratch. Robinhood Chain uses the Arbitrum tech stack and is EVM-compatible, which lets developers reuse existing Ethereum tools. Mature infrastructure providers such as Uniswap, Morpho, Chainlink and Alchemy can also move in quickly. Pieces that take some chains years to assemble were available to Robinhood from the first day of mainnet.
The next test comes after the meme frenzy
So far, Robinhood Chain has reversed the order in which RWA, traditional finance users and crypto speculation usually show up on a network. First came stock tokens and established DeFi infrastructure. Then meme coins brought liquidity. What remains is whether native on-chain applications specific to Robinhood Chain can develop on top of that base.
That final step is also the main open question. Pons and similar meme-driven apps show that Robinhood Chain can attract heavy trading and fees in a short period. What is still unclear is whether that capital is only chasing a new narrative for the moment, or whether it can settle into stock-backed lending, structured products, derivatives and other RWA DeFi applications over time.