Robinhood Chain Surges to $4.13M Daily Revenue with 17M Transactions in Weeks

Robinhood Chain is making noise. The Ethereum layer-2 network built by Robinhood hit $4.13 million in daily revenue by September 4, less than ten weeks after its mainnet went live on July 1, 2026.

The numbers are hard to ignore. The network logged $1.878 billion in 24-hour DEX volume and $834.5 million in DeFi deposits around that same early-September mark. In its first week alone, Robinhood Chain recorded over 17 million transactions and nearly 350,000 unique addresses. A big chunk of that early activity came from meme coins and tokenized real-world assets — two very different crowds, both showing up fast. The network runs on Arbitrum’s Dedicated Blockchains framework from Offchain Labs, uses ETH as its native gas token, and it’s fully EVM-compatible, meaning developers can plug in familiar Ethereum tools, programming languages, and JSON-RPC interfaces without much friction.

Meme coins came first.

Cash Cat led early trading before getting overtaken by PONS, the token tied to Pons, a meme coin launchpad built directly on Robinhood Chain. By late August, PONS had climbed to the top spot by market cap on the network. On September 3, Pons generated $5.95 million in fees, ranking fourth among all protocols tracked by DefiLlama. That’s a serious number for a launchpad that basically lets users spin up tokens with a fixed supply and drop them straight into trading pools. Uniswap ran a competing zero-fee launchpad called Pools.trade on the same network, which probably says something about how much appetite there was for this kind of activity right out of the gate.

Tokenized Assets Gain Ground Fast

The meme coin side got attention, but the tokenized asset story is arguably more interesting for what Robinhood is actually trying to build. Active real-world asset market cap on the network hit $219.49 million by September 4. Daily RWA trading volumes set records around $115 million — well above July’s peak of $60 million. That’s a meaningful jump in a short window.

Robinhood Chain supports what it calls Stock Tokens, instruments that give users exposure to stocks and ETFs without actually granting ownership rights. Worth noting: these aren’t available to U.S. users because of regulatory restrictions. CEO Vlad Tenev has been pretty vocal about wanting U.S. securities rules modernized to accommodate tokenized equities, pushing the idea that the global shift toward tokenization is already happening with or without Washington’s blessing.

More context: Hargreaves Lansdown Shifts Stance, Now Offers Bitcoin ETNs to Retail Clients

The network connects with Uniswap as its default exchange, and also works with Morpho and Lighter for trading and DeFi operations. Chainlink handles oracle data, feeding reliable price information into applications across the network. Infrastructure providers Alchemy, BitGo, and Paxos round out the ecosystem — developer tools, institutional custody, stablecoin support. It’s a fairly complete stack for a network that’s barely two months old.

The Gas Fee Question Looming in Late September

Here’s the thing that probably keeps Robinhood’s product team up at night. The company has been covering gas costs for swaps through its own wallet — a promotion that runs until September 29. Free trades move volume. That’s not a controversial take. But what happens when users actually have to pay fees themselves is genuinely unclear.

The gas subsidy has almost certainly inflated activity numbers, at least somewhat. Whether the network’s 350,000 addresses and millions of transactions represent sticky users or fee-sensitive speculators who’ll walk when costs kick in — nobody knows yet. Probably a mix of both. The September 29 cutoff will be a real test, and Robinhood’s Q3 results, expected in late October, will be the first clean look at whether the numbers hold.

The network’s sequencer orders transactions and posts batches to Ethereum for settlement, keeping fees lower than mainnet while inheriting Ethereum’s security guarantees. That’s pretty standard for Arbitrum-based chains, but Robinhood’s brand and user base give it a distribution advantage most new L2s don’t have.

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Pons, the meme coin launchpad, isn’t going anywhere soon. The protocol ranked fourth on DefiLlama by fees on September 3 — that’s not a fluke. And the RWA side keeps setting volume records.

Both things can be true: Robinhood Chain grew fast, and the sustainability question is very much open. Q3 earnings will probably answer part of it.