Robinhood Chain moved back ahead of Base in daily active users on July 21, three weeks after its July 1 mainnet launch, according to Artemis. The network posted 323,969 daily active users, versus 274,520 for Base, and hit a record $588.9 million in total value locked the same day. It had first pulled ahead on July 11, then lost the lead from July 16 to July 20 before reclaiming it. Other short-term activity metrics also tilted in Robinhood Chain’s favor. DefiLlama showed $624 million in spot DEX volume over the past 24 hours, slightly above Base’s $603 million, while chain fees reached $198,215 compared with $52,081 on Base. TVL has climbed sharply from under $5 million in late June, with Morpho, Ethena, Uniswap, Maple, Lighter, Stock Tokens, and Arcus making up the largest protocol positions on the chain. Even so, Base remains much larger across most broad scale measures. DefiLlama puts Base at $4.64 billion in DeFi TVL, $4.84 billion in stablecoin supply, and $255.5 million in 24-hour perpetuals volume, all well above Robinhood Chain. The report also notes that memecoin trading, rather than Robinhood’s tokenized stock product, has driven much of the chain’s early activity.

Platforms like Hyperliquid and Vertex unify spot, perpetuals, and options under one margin system, slashing collateral needs by 30–50% and driving massive user retention.

Since December 2024, Hyperliquid whales have shaped HYPE's price stability through staggered purchases and staking, boosting TVL from $2B to $6B with daily fees of $3M-$10M.

Perpetual futures now dominate crypto trading volume, and on-chain derivatives platforms are exposing more retail users to leverage, liquidation risk, and behavior-driven trading.

The CLARITY Act has been delayed again in the Senate as lawmakers continue negotiating stablecoin yield language, ethics rules, and tokenization provisions, with markup timing slipping toward late April or May.

Decentralized exchange Arcus said it has reduced taker fees on perpetual contracts by 50% for the duration of its beta test. Arcus was launched on Robinhood Chain through a partnership between dYdX Trading Inc. and Robinhood. The platform supports 24/7 trading in tokenized stocks, perpetual contracts, and major cryptocurrencies. The fee cut applies during the beta period, according to the announcement.

A broad set of regulatory, fundraising and market-structure developments shaped the crypto sector over the past 24 hours. South Korea formally opened discussions on the second phase of its Digital Asset Basic Act, with stablecoin oversight at the center of the agenda, while Hanwha Group emerged as the largest shareholder in tokenization platform Securitize. In Russia, lawmakers advanced and then passed a bill establishing rules for crypto market participants and cross-border trade, though the measure still requires presidential sign-off. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission cleared Ionic Digital’s registration statement ahead of its planned July 28 Nasdaq direct listing, received Grayscale’s registration filing for a Worldcoin ETF, and sued Mining Automatic and Zan Shaikh over an alleged $22 million crypto mining investment fraud. Elsewhere, spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs posted fresh net inflows, Nigeria set up a virtual asset coordination framework, Pakistan created a virtual asset investigation unit, and Arcus launched 24/7 tokenized stock trading and a perpetuals beta on Robinhood Chain.

Coinbase listed GRVT on its asset roadmap, signaling early due diligence passed. The GRVT token TGE is set for July 21 with a fixed supply of 1 billion, and the airdrop pool was raised to 18%.