Robinhood Chain processed $3.1 billion in decentralized exchange trading volume in its first seven days after the public mainnet went live on July 1, placing the network among the top five chains by DEX activity. As of July 13, it ranked third in daily DEX volume at $808 million, behind only Solana and BNB Chain according to DefiLlama data. Total value locked on the chain reached approximately $135 million, up from $17 million on July 3.
The network is an Ethereum Layer-2 built on Arbitrum's Orbit stack. It settles transactions on Ethereum and uses ether for gas fees. Robinhood positioned it as infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets, with stock tokens as the anchor product. Those are on-chain versions of equities such as Nvidia and Apple that trade around the clock and are structured as tokenized debt securities barred to US persons.
The early numbers are large. The composition behind them is not what Robinhood originally described.
Memecoins drove most of the opening volume
A cat-themed token called CASHCAT, named after Robinhood's former mascot before the company rebranded, surged 2,158% over seven days and reached a market cap of $156 million. On Monday, approximately 25,000 wallets held the token, according to Blockscout. CASHCAT spawned a full ecosystem of Robinhood-themed tokens including Cash Dog in Hood, Little John, Hoodrat, and Arrow. A launchpad called NOXA.fun and a trading bot called basedbot now have dedicated tracking dashboards on the network.
🚨 cash-cat:native on RobinhoodChain tops the memecoin gainers, up 82% in the last 24 hours.
— HodlFM (@Hodl_fm) July 10, 2026
After the recent dip to $80M, it quickly touched $200M Market Cap. https://t.co/nAaA4cvekU pic.twitter.com/YJNxdmvxcm
Against that backdrop, tokenized real-world assets on the chain were worth approximately $12.81 million as of Monday morning, with $10.68 million in stocks, the rest split across commodities, tokenized ETFs, and a $410,000 position in US Treasuries. According to Dune Analytics data, real-world assets account for just 4.1% of total value locked. Asset management accounts for 40.5% of locked value, lending 38.3%, spot exchanges 11.9%, and perpetual futures 5.2%.
Bernstein analysts led by Gautam Chhugani acknowledged the gap in a Monday research note.
"Early trading volumes on Robinhood Chain were led by meme coins, but shows strong liquidity and traction from crypto-native traders," they wrote, while pointing to the firm's growing focus on tokenized real-world assets.
How the network compares to what Robinhood built before it
The pattern echoes Coinbase's launch of its own network Base in 2023, where memecoins and speculative activity arrived well before the applications the network was designed to support. Robinhood Chain surpassed Base in daily transaction count within two weeks of launch. Token Terminal posted the comparison on X:
"Robinhood Chain overtook Base in just 1.5 weeks. Yesterday, Robinhood Chain processed 10.4 million transactions versus Base's 6.4 million."
Total lifetime active addresses approached 800,000. The chain processed 3.6 million transactions in a single day. Fees run a fraction of a cent per transaction.
Stablecoins account for much of the remaining non-memecoin activity. Global Dollar, the USDG token issued by the Paxos-led consortium that Robinhood helped found, holds approximately $200 million of the roughly $299 million stablecoin market cap on the chain. Ethena's USDe makes up most of the rest.
Bernstein maintained its $130 price target despite the mixed composition
Bernstein kept its outperform rating on Robinhood shares with a $130 price target. Shares traded at approximately $111 on Monday, down 0.6% in early trading. Over the past month the stock climbed 19%, nearly erasing year-to-date losses. In June, Robinhood reduced its workforce by 10%.
The analysts highlighted Robinhood's integrations with Uniswap, Morpho, Lighter, Chainlink, and BitGo as central to building liquidity and expanding the utility of tokenized assets over time. Bernstein wrote that "strong early adoption highlights the growing convergence of tokenized real world assets with the broader DeFi ecosystem, as industry participants continue to innovate across multiple business models for regulated asset tokenization."
The broader tokenized RWA market has grown to more than $51 billion, up approximately 50% year to date. Tokenized equities specifically have expanded roughly 170% this year to $1.9 billion, according to the Bernstein note.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev's public comments on the memecoin activity drew attention. On July 2, he told CNBC that assets without utility do not serve a lasting purpose and that tokenized real-world assets were the durable direction for crypto. Six days later, as CASHCAT climbed, he posted that while the company built the chain to be the best for real-world assets, "it works great for memes too." He later followed CASHCAT's X account.
While we’re building robinhood chain to be the best chain for RWA … it works great for memes too
— Vlad Tenev (@vladtenev) July 8, 2026
Nearly a year before the chain launched, Tenev had predicted on an earnings call that "criticisms about crypto assets being sort of like not tied to anything of fundamental value or mostly meme-based" would go away because of tokenization's potential to link tokens to assets with fundamental utility.
Alex Shepel
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