The contest for the top spot among U.S. crypto exchanges is no longer as clear-cut as it once was.
For years, that position was closely associated with Coinbase. Now Robinhood is closing in, and in some areas it has already moved ahead.
In September, Robinhood Chain generated $15.85 million in weekly revenue, ahead of Coinbase and Hyperliquid, two leading U.S. trading venues cited in the source article. Robinhood Chain has also passed 750 million transactions. The pace has been unusually fast: the chain only went live on July 1, and by the end of July its cumulative transaction count had already exceeded 150 million, making it the fastest EVM chain in history to reach 100 million transactions.
Robinhood’s expansion in U.S. crypto is not confined to onchain activity.
In prediction markets, Robinhood’s second-quarter revenue from that segment surpassed both crypto and stock trading revenue, and CEO Vlad Tenev described it as one of the company’s fastest-growing businesses. In tokenized equities, Robinhood Crypto has become a central player. Since launch on July 1, the product has accumulated more than 328,000 holders and captured a 44% market share by holder count. The article says tokenized stock TVL stood at only $170 million, but Robinhood was already well ahead of Ondo and xStocks in user numbers. Onchain, the company has been even more aggressive: related DEX volume is approaching $50 billion, recent weekly revenue has topped $10 million, and, by the author’s count, more than six memecoins with market capitalizations above $100 million have emerged on Robinhood Chain since August.
If Coinbase’s path has been to start as a crypto exchange and expand toward an "Everything Exchange," Robinhood’s route runs in the opposite direction. It began as a mass-market trading platform and is now moving more and more financial assets onchain.
Tenev previously said Robinhood Chain crossed 100 million transactions soon after launch, making it one of the fastest chains to reach that scale.
This is no longer a traditional brokerage casually adding crypto. Robinhood is turning itself into a crypto infrastructure player.
Robinhood Chain has become its most aggressive bet
Leadership among Ethereum Layer 2 networks has shifted several times over the past few years, from Arbitrum to Base. Robinhood Chain is now emerging as a new disruptor.
What stands out is how little time it has needed.
After the mainnet launch on July 1, the chain quickly crossed 100 million transactions and later climbed to 750 million cumulative transactions, becoming the fastest EVM chain to reach that level.
That was only the start.
In July, daily fee revenue on Robinhood Chain was just $200,000. By early September, daily fee revenue had briefly moved above $4 million. Over the following week, onchain fees reached about $25 million. On Sept. 1, daily DEX volume was about $1.595 billion, DeFi deposits on the chain were about $738 million, and stablecoin supply was close to $800 million.
The meme token market has also expanded rapidly on the new chain.
According to the author’s tally, more than six meme tokens on Robinhood Chain have crossed the $100 million market cap mark since August, including PONS, Artificial Inu, CASHCAT, MEME, INDEX and FAMI. In early September, PONS, described as the largest launch platform on Robinhood Chain, briefly approached a $1 billion market cap and rose more than 200% in a single week, lifting both chain fees and DEX volume at the same time.
A Layer 2 that has been live for less than three months is already showing high fee income, multi-billion-dollar onchain trading activity and a batch of meme tokens valued above $100 million. That is what makes Robinhood Chain unusual.
Earlier Layer 2 networks typically launched infrastructure first and then tried to attract users, assets and liquidity. Robinhood Chain was not built as a general-purpose public chain. From the outset, it was aimed at bringing financial assets onchain.
When Robinhood announced the mainnet on July 1, it explicitly positioned the network as an Ethereum Layer 2 for financial services and real-world assets, with tokenized stocks, DeFi and access to global markets listed as core use cases.
In other words, Robinhood did not build a chain and then go looking for users. It already had more than 28 million funded customers and then moved the assets and financial products those users might trade onto the chain.
As of the end of August, Robinhood had about 28.60 million funded customers and $38.37 billion in platform assets. In the same period, its August crypto notional trading volume reached $17.5 billion, up 61% month over month, while prediction market contract volume hit 4.7 billion contracts, up about 15x year over year.
That makes Robinhood Chain important for a reason beyond the arrival of yet another Layer 2. For the first time, Robinhood has its own onchain trading venue, and that could materially change its business model.
In the past, Robinhood mainly made money from trading revenue, interest income and similar streams when users traded stocks and crypto on its platform. If users now trade, lend, provide liquidity, buy meme tokens or use stablecoins on Robinhood Chain, the venue where those transactions happen can itself become a source of revenue.
That is why the chain’s revenue growth matters.
According to DeFiLlama data cited in the article, Robinhood Chain’s daily revenue rose from less than $200,000 at the end of August to about $4.01 million on Sept. 2. Over the following week, chain fees climbed to about $25 million.
There is also a sharp contrast in how the launch played out.
Robinhood wants to build a financial-grade chain for financial assets and RWA, but the force that helped it get through the cold start was not traditional RWA. It was a group of meme tokens.
The breakout of PONS and other meme assets brought Robinhood Chain its earliest real trading activity, liquidity and fees. That traffic then pulled in more users and assets.
Seen from that angle, Robinhood is following a path that differs from the usual Layer 2 playbook: not infrastructure first and users later, but users and trading first, then infrastructure.
Traffic came first. Trading followed. Liquidity came after that. Financial infrastructure came last.
Prediction markets and tokenized stocks are where Robinhood is pulling ahead in spots
Robinhood’s real threat to Coinbase is not simply that it launched a chain. It is that the company is moving into several of Coinbase’s core businesses at the same time.
Prediction markets are the clearest example.
In the second quarter of 2026, Robinhood’s event contracts revenue reached $156 million, up more than 10x from a year earlier. That was the first time it exceeded crypto trading revenue, which stood at $100 million, and stock trading revenue, which came in at $129 million. In the same quarter, Robinhood’s total net revenue reached $1.308 billion, up 32% year over year.
By August, Robinhood was still posting 4.7 billion contracts in prediction market volume, up 15x year over year.
That suggests crypto is no longer Robinhood’s most important new business. Prediction markets have moved out in front.
Coinbase is entering the same market quickly. In the second quarter, Coinbase’s prediction market contracts and revenue rose 106% quarter over quarter, and annualized revenue had already moved above $100 million.
The two companies are now colliding on the same track.
Robinhood’s edge is that it can place prediction markets, stocks, options and crypto inside a single account. A user can trade Nvidia in the morning, buy BTC in the afternoon, place a World Cup-related wager at night and continue trading stocks over the weekend.
The boundaries between financial assets are fading. Robinhood’s strategy is to erase them inside one product experience.
The same logic applies to tokenized stocks.
On July 1, Robinhood expanded Stock Tokens to more than 120 countries and regions, giving global users onchain economic exposure to U.S. equities.
Within roughly a month, Robinhood’s tokenized stock holder count reached about 328,000, equal to about 44% of holders across the major tokenized stock platforms at the time. Across the broader tokenized stock market, the number of holders rose 92% in 30 days to about 752,000.
Still, leading in user count did not mean leading in capital.
At the time, Robinhood’s tokenized stock assets were about $44 million, well below Ondo’s $857 million and xStocks’ $487 million. Based on data from DWF Labs cited in the article, Robinhood’s average holding per user was only about $134, while Securitize’s average assets per holder were close to $4.9 million.
That points to Robinhood’s most distinctive strength. It may not be the best platform for serving whales, but it is highly effective at turning financial products into mass-market products.
That is a form of competition Coinbase cannot ignore.
Coinbase still holds strong advantages in crypto-native users, institutional clients, stablecoins and onchain infrastructure. In the second quarter of 2026, Coinbase’s crypto trading market share reached 10.3%, a record high. Average USDC balances tied to its products reached $20 billion, and Subscription & Services revenue came in at $555 million.
The strategic split between the two companies is becoming clearer. Coinbase is expanding from crypto into the broader financial world. Robinhood is expanding from retail finance into crypto and the onchain economy. The two paths are converging on the same destination.
The next battle is over a new exchange model
On Sept. 29, Robinhood announced another set of product plans: extending stock trading hours into the weekend, launching perpetual futures, adding prediction market products tied to corporate earnings and pushing further into AI trading agents. Some of those features still require regulatory approval.
If all of them go live, it will be hard to describe Robinhood simply as a brokerage.
Stocks, options, crypto, prediction markets, perpetuals, tokenized equities, onchain DeFi and AI agents could all sit inside one account.
That is the issue Coinbase now has to confront, because Coinbase is building toward a similar destination.
The company has already laid out its "Everything Exchange" strategy and continues to expand into derivatives, prediction markets, stablecoins, payments, RWA and onchain finance. In the second quarter of 2026, its trading revenue was no longer heavily dependent on BTC spot activity. The article says 88% of net revenue came from businesses tied to non-BTC spot trading, while Subscription & Services revenue reached $555 million.
So Coinbase has not stood still. What has changed is the dimension of competition.
In the past, comparing Coinbase and Robinhood mostly meant asking which company had the stronger crypto business. That framing no longer captures what is happening. The more precise question is this: when stocks, crypto, prediction markets and RWA all move onchain, who becomes the unified trading gateway?
Robinhood’s advantage is its user base. As of the end of August, it had 28.60 million funded customers and $384 billion in platform assets, according to the article. Coinbase’s advantage is crypto-native infrastructure: the exchange, wallet, Base, the USDC ecosystem, institutional custody, derivatives and an increasingly complete onchain financial stack. Its crypto market share also continued to hit new highs in the second quarter.
That is why it is still too early to say Robinhood has replaced Coinbase. Even the label "largest U.S. crypto exchange" is becoming less precise.
Robinhood may be changing the meaning of the term itself.
In the old model, an exchange was like a building. Users entered Coinbase, bought BTC or ETH, and left. In the model described by the article, an exchange starts to look more like a city. Stocks, crypto, prediction markets, stablecoins, tokenized assets, DeFi, derivatives and AI agents all circulate inside it, and users may not even need to know whether they are operating in Web2 or Web3.
That is where Robinhood Chain matters. It connects Robinhood’s traffic, products and users directly to open crypto finance for the first time.
Coinbase, meanwhile, is extending its crypto infrastructure toward traditional finance. The most important question in this rivalry is not who made a few hundred million dollars more in fees this year. It is what the next financial gateway will look like.
Coinbase wants to be the infrastructure linking crypto and traditional finance. Robinhood wants to be the unified entry point for ordinary users across the entire financial world.
When the two companies finally meet onchain, what gets redefined may not be Coinbase or Robinhood alone. It may be the very idea of what an exchange is.
