What Robinhood Chain truly aims to solve is not simply adding another trading venue on-chain, but rather lowering the barriers to access U.S. capital markets as much as possible for the entire world.Article author and source: Conflux
Last week’s article, “Robinhood Built a Chain in a Week, and the First Wealth Effect Came from a Cat,” noted that CASHCAT surged to a market cap of hundreds of millions in just one week on Robinhood Chain, thanks to an abandoned old code name. Two weeks later, the chain hasn’t cooled down—it has only solidified its status as a “dark horse.” But the way the excitement has unfolded is even more surreal than last week.
Ranked in the top five during the first week. First, let’s look at the assessment provided by the institution.
According to a report by investment research firm Bernstein, within its first week of launch, the chain’s DEX cumulative trading volume reached approximately $3.1 billion, quickly ranking among the top five public blockchains globally by trading volume. In terms of 24-hour DEX trading volume alone, $809 million placed it third globally, trailing only Solana and BNB Chain. The chain now has over 65,000 users holding $300 million in stablecoins and $13 million in tokenized stocks; after just 15 days, the total value locked (TVL) in DeFi surpassed $100 million.
Tom Lee, Chairman of the Board at BitMine, which holds the largest Ethereum treasury among publicly traded companies, stated more directly: "One of the biggest crypto success stories of 2026 will be the explosive launch success of Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum-based Layer 2 mainnet, on July 1st." The fact that someone holding the world’s largest Ethereum treasury is willing to make such a public statement indicates that market enthusiasm for the narrative of "brokerages building their own chains" is higher than outsiders realize.
Bernstein also offered a cautionary note—the current biggest paradox of this chain: first-week trading volume was primarily driven by meme coin speculation, while Robinhood’s long-term goal remains the RWA narrative centered on stocks, commodities, and perpetual contracts. In other words, the impressive data背后 is not telling the story the company intended to tell.
Behind the hustle, predators have already arrived. The faster the traffic flows in, the faster the scammers move to target this surge of traffic.
The cross-chain interoperability platform Relay Protocol has recently issued a warning about a wave of scam tokens on Robinhood Chain. These tokens operate on a “buy-in, sell-out” scheme—after users place buy orders, the tokens vanish from their wallets, and their funds are unrecoverable. Relay clarified that this is not the result of hacked wallets; users’ private keys and other assets remain secure. The issue lies within the tokens’ own smart contracts, which contain hidden rules that restrict selling and can directly transfer users’ funds to the attacker’s wallet. Some contracts have also been found to exploit hidden storage fields outside the standard ERC-20 checks, bypassing conventional security scans to steal assets.
The on-chain analytics platform Bubblemaps has uncovered another suspicious operation: 80% of the ARROW tokens from the lending protocol ArrowFinance are concentrated in a group of interconnected addresses. One cluster of 200 wallets had no prior activity on any EVM chain, yet collectively accumulated their positions within the first three minutes of the token’s launch, with highly overlapping funding sources—clearly resembling a pre-planned sniper position. Similar clusters of related addresses have been identified on-chain beyond this single case.
The pace of token launches has also gotten out of control. On its busiest day, the leading launchpad NOXA.fun launched more new tokens than half the total number of new tokens issued across all chains. The platform has accumulated over 260,000 active addresses and generated more than $13 million in total revenue, with daily transaction fees peaking at $1.94 million. However, the problems of copycat tokens and bot-driven bulk token launches have become increasingly severe—NOXA.fun has since suspended its new token issuance feature, and the team is still working on a solution.
Using the founder as bait Even the founder of Robinhood has been caught up in this chaos.
TokenPocket’s Chief Business Officer, Michael, revealed on X that Robinhood’s founder, Vlad Tenev, accidentally leaked his wallet mnemonic phrase during a live stream. After obtaining the mnemonic, someone manipulated this address and a cluster of associated wallets to aggressively buy a Meme coin called "$1." As soon as the news spread, a wave of followers rushed in to buy—reasoning simply that if this truly was the founder’s wallet, the purchase amounted to an insider signal.
The token price surged immediately, with its market cap skyrocketing from approximately $500,000 to $14 million in a short time, only to plummet rapidly—trading volume during these two hours alone reached about $20 million. Retail investors who chased the rally were left trapped at the peak.
The involved address was later frozen, but the operators didn’t stop—they moved to BNB Chain and launched a new token using the same set of related wallets, artificially inflating trading volume through circular transactions before cashing out and disappearing. Currently, Robinhood’s RPC service has blacklisted the original address, and nodes no longer process any transactions from it—funds cannot be withdrawn or sold.
This claim currently relies solely on Michael’s source; neither Robinhood’s official channels nor Tenev himself have publicly responded or confirmed it, nor have any on-chain security firms or mainstream media provided independent corroboration. The action of freezing the address via RPC can be interpreted in two ways: it could indicate confirmation that this is the founder’s stolen wallet, or it could simply be Robinhood’s standard blacklisting of an address flagged as fraudulent—especially given that this chain has only been live for two weeks, and similar malicious tokens and manipulation tactics have already occurred multiple times. The truth remains to be verified through additional independent sources. But regardless of its veracity, it is certain that a token was withdrawn nearly 28 times its value within two hours and then dumped, prompting thousands of people to invest real money.
What does the founder say? The logic behind these disorders can actually be found in Tenev’s most recent public statement.
Last week, Tenev appeared on the Master Investor podcast, sharing his views on retail investors and Robinhood Chain. He repeatedly emphasized one point: "Retail investors are the real smart money." In his narrative, institutional investors are increasingly relying on macro narratives to make decisions, often selling off assets regardless of a company’s fundamentals; in contrast, retail investors are simpler and more direct, focusing solely on "how well the company is being run," making them more resilient in the face of macroeconomic shocks.
When discussing Robinhood Chain’s positioning, he draws an analogy between stablecoins and asset tokenization: the former addresses the issue of global users easily accessing the U.S. dollar, while the latter aims to enable global users to easily hold U.S. stocks. This is why the first phase supports approximately 2,000 U.S.-listed stocks, covering over 120 countries and regions. What this chain truly seeks to solve is never simply “adding another trading venue on-chain,” but rather lowering the barriers to accessing U.S. capital markets as much as possible for the entire world.
This narrative of “returning power to retail investors” partly explains the authorities’ ambivalent attitude toward on-chain speculative frenzies—as long as retail investors are playing and choosing for themselves, it aligns with their consistent values, even if the ways they play become increasingly risky.
From Data狂欢 to Security Alert Looking at what happened over the past two weeks, the rhythm is actually clear:
In the first week, a cat named CASHCAT achieved a textbook-perfect cold start for the new chain by leveraging a genuine company history, prompting real users and funds to begin flowing in.
In the second week, institutions lent their endorsement—Bernstein certified the top five blockchains, Tom Lee labeled it the "biggest success story of the year," and on-chain data surged dramatically. Yet at the same time, scam tokens, suspicious tokens with heavily concentrated holdings, and price-manipulation hacks exploiting leaked information emerged one after another, even implicating the founder’s own identity.
This chain now holds two report cards simultaneously: one showcasing impressive trading volume and user growth, the other revealing a high density of fraud and manipulation cases. Two weeks is far too short to answer the truly critical question—whether this surge of hype, built on meme coins and ambiguous rumors, can solidify into what the official team truly seeks: an infrastructure long-term adopted by institutions and real assets.
The content in this article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. The market carries risks; investments should be made with caution.