When Robinhood Chain first launched, its activity was dominated by speculative memecoin trading rather than the original reason it was built — tokenization.
However, the momentum has finally started to shift, less than two weeks later.
Real-world assets now carry an active market value of about $70 million, according to DefiLlama, a roughly fivefold jump from the low tens of millions of dollars, which was a small slice of the network at just 4%, while memecoins and stablecoins accounted for most of the activity. The tokenized equities for which the chain was designed are finally trading in larger sizes.
A tokenized GameStop share is doing $26.6 million in daily volume on the exchange, with Nvidia at $14 million and SpaceX at $6.4 million close behind. Twelve Robinhood-based tokenized stocks are now clearing more than $500,000 a day, with five above $1 million.
In its earliest days, the chain's busiest market was CASHCAT, a memecoin built around Robinhood's abandoned original name. The company was briefly "CashCat" before its founders settled on Robinhood. The token, which Robinhood has no part in, spiked more than 1,700% after CEO Vlad Tenev followed its account, then fell. It is now down about 75% from its peak, while a number of real equities trades in its place.
Total value locked has roughly tripled since mid-July to about $312 million, according to DefiLlama, and Robinhood Chain is now clearing more than $600 million in daily decentralized-exchange volume, putting it among the more active networks in crypto.
Its transaction count has also drawn attention, with more than 138 million in 30 days, per Token Terminal. But the chain's most-traded tokens are still overwhelmingly memecoins.
On DEX Screener, the top of Robinhood Chain's trending list is filled with tokens like “Hoodrat,” “Vladhood” and “Swole Doge,” not the tokenized equities the network was built for, which trade on Uniswap but rank well down the volume rankings.
The tokenized stocks generate roughly $55 million in daily volume, under a tenth of the chain's nearly $600 million in total DEX trading, the data shows. The rest is dominated by memecoins.
Stablecoins remain the single largest presence on the chain, with a combined market value in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and memecoins, such as the Robinhood mascot-themed CASHCAT, that defined the chain's first weeks, are still active and heavily traded.
The critique three weeks ago was that Robinhood had built expensive infrastructure and attracted only speculation, with little sign that the tokenized-stock business it pitched would materialize.
That business is now materializing, in the form of tens of millions of dollars in real-world assets and a dozen equities trading in real size. However, it remains small compared to the chain’s stablecoin and memecoin ecosystems, and it will need to keep growing to meet Robinhood’s original vision for tokenization.
But as the data indicates, the tokenized stock activity is moving toward the pitch rather than away from it as the company builds towards bringing millions of its retail customers onchain.
Read more: Inside Robinhood’s high-stakes bet to onboard millions of casual users onto decentralized finance