Robinhood Chain: Memecoins Are Beating RWAs at Their Own Game

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Everyone on the timeline seems to be delighted to have their mutuals interact with their tweets again. 

It feels like the good ol’ days are back, the days when our feed was actually filled with tweets of people we followed instead of endless rage bait and bot spam. 

Speaking of throwbacks, everyone is talking about memecoins again, thanks to Robinhood. 

So, what’s going on? 

Robinhood ships its chain

Robinhood launched its own blockchain network earlier this month with an explicit focus on real-world assets like tokenized stocks. 

It’s an Ethereum layer-2 network built using Arbitrum's Orbit technology, with Chainlink providing oracle infrastructure. It has also tied up with other ecosystems including Morpho, Uniswap, Lighter, Sushi, fomo, Allium, LI.FI and BitGo. 

The network has been mainly built to make it easier to transfer, access, and manage digital assets anywhere in the world by removing intermediaries and platform lock-ins. Here’s what they officially claim:

“At its core, Robinhood Chain is optimized for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) - including equities, ETFs, private assets, and other financial instruments - allowing them to be represented and traded onchain.” 

That said, degenerate gambloors have ended up using the chain for something less serious: speculative memecoin trading. 

Memes take over Robinhood Chain

Cash Cat (CASHCAT) was one of the first tokens to explode on Robinhood Chain. It had its reason to do so. 

Robinhood’s OG name was supposed to be Cash Cat. It was sort of an internal codename, but then they somehow rebranded it to Robinhood.  

At its peak on July 12, the coin reached a market cap of ~$222 million. 

However, living by the memecoin spirit, it has halved since then, and the daily sell volume ($20 million) has also started eclipsing the buy volume ($18 million). 

The silver lining (or maybe not) is that Hyperliquid listed the perps version of the token on its platform pretty early. If CEXs jump onto the bandwagon, the token’s fate might change in just seconds, who knows?   

The TVL, meanwhile, seems to be in its “up only” mode. From July 3’s $17 million, the figure is up to ~$188 million at the minute.

The composition of that TVL looks quite healthy too. Around 40% of the number is flushed in by asset managers. Lending and spot DEXs come next.

Ironically, RWAs (the OG use case of the chain) account for a bare minimum of 4.2%.  

This isn’t the first time we’re seeing memecoins takeover activity on a newly launched chain. The same thing happened when Base launched. In fact, even Solana’s largest activity spikes have often been driven by memecoins.  

Right now, Robinhood sits among the top five networks on the weekly DEX volume front, accounting for nearly 10% of all onchain DEX trading.

Infrastructure breaks

Noxa quickly became the first launchpad on Robinhood to carve out a name for itself. In fact, it was the one that powered the launch of the CASHCAT token, generating an all-time fee of around $12 million. 

Most other prominent memecoin launches on Robinhood Chain were happening via Noxa. 

As activity on the chain exploded, people started flocking onto Noxa en masse, and the platform simply couldn’t keep up. 

The platform’s domains eventually went offline. At first, the team called it a Cloudflare issue and later said the domains would redirect to ENS services while creator earnings would be available for withdrawal.

The team admitted, “The Noxa infrastructure was also never built to sustain such an unprecedented spam of new coins in the first place.”

They added,

“There is only one solution to avoid dilution of the tokens, the staples, and that is to keep new launches disabled.” 

In the meantime, competitors like Pons, Klik, and Arrow have been taking advantage of the void, and CT, which had once celebrated the rise of Noxa, has started questioning whether it indeed faced infrastructure scaling problems.

Nevertheless, in its latest post, the platform said that it’s no longer going to collect any fees as income, with all transaction fees being 100% allocated to creators.

Becoming the de facto launchpad for Robinhood Chain was a feat in itself, and choosing to wind down operations while printing millions in revenue is kinda wild. 

They killed the golden goose, indeed a generational fumble. 

Despite chaos, metrics explode 

In spite of all the controversies, Robinhood Chain has been breaking records left, right, and centre.  

Fascinating enough, in just one-and-a-half weeks, it overtook Base in terms of the number of transactions. 

The chain has also crossed 1.1 million cumulative addresses in just a fortnight after launch. On top of that, it has already generated more than $1 million in revenue. 

Those are solid numbers. They’re proof that activity is taking off on the chain. 

Plus, it gives the chain a leg to stand on: “We’ve overtaken networks like Binance Chain and Solana.” Imagine normies hearing headlines like this. They’ll love it, and at that point, it won’t really matter what the actual driving force behind it all is.

Is Robinhood Chain worth the hype?

I remember back in ‘23 when both Coinbase and Binance were juggling lawsuits in the US, their platform liquidity registered sharp drops. Around that same time, an analyst pointed out that Coinbase’s chunk of retail crypto traders was turning towards Robinhood.

While the blockchain network might be new, let’s not forget Robinhood itself isn’t. The company has spent more than a decade building one of the largest retail investment platforms in the US. 

It already has years of brand equity, millions of funded accounts, and a retail user base that's comfortable trading both stocks and crypto. Most new chains start with infrastructure and then go hunting for users. 

Robinhood is doing the opposite: it's bringing blockchain infrastructure to an audience it has already spent years building. Whether those users actually move onchain is secondary, but the distribution advantage is hard to ignore.

Stock tokens on Robinhood Chain

Leaving aside the memes for a second, let’s focus on Robinhood’s stock tokens. As the name suggests, they’re onchain versions of stocks like Nvidia and Apple that trade 24/7. 

Robinhood Chain has around 102 tokens deployed at the moment, with the total tokenized value hovering above $15 million.

The chain uses a ‘first-come, first-served’ sequencing model, where transactions are ordered strictly based on when they reach the sequence, making the trading environment transparent and predictable. It also means no one can jump ahead in line simply by paying higher fees.

Concluding thoughts 

The biggest question now is whether today’s speculators will end up becoming sticky users of the network. Given past trends, likely not. But Robinhood might be an exception. 

It is unrealistic to expect the chain to become an overnight success. Just look at Base. They’ve had to undergo multiple pivots to remain relevant. 

Amid all the recent backlash on the timeline, Jesse dropped a candid post a day back announcing that Cobie will be taking over the Base app, while he shifts his focus entirely to Base, the chain.

Memes have always been a part of crypto trading. They’re not going anywhere. In many ways, they draw people into this industry in the first place. Asymmetrical upside comes with asymmetrical risk, and memecoins are often the purest expression of that trade-off. 

Despite all the drama, trader Avast (who turned $10k to $230 million on CASHCAT) believes the Robinhood season is still very much on.  

Right now, Robinhood Chain is performing exceptionally well on the DEX activity front. In fact, it has the highest DEX volume-to-TVL ratio when compared to its ‘experienced, grey-haired, seen multiple cycles, battle-tested’ peers.

I don’t think this is going to end up becoming a battle between memes and RWAs. 

Most likely, the two will end up coexisting. Memes will help check the attention box while RWAs will bring in long-term utility, and together they could help put Robinhood Chain out on the map and eventually help drive mass adoption.