ROBINHOOD UNVEILS BLOCKCHAIN: Robinhood debuted the public testnet for its Ethereum layer-2 blockchain with plans for broader introduction later this year as the brokerage app aims to move more trading activity onchain. The new network, called Robinhood Chain, is built on Arbitrum and is designed to support tokenized real-world assets, including equities and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Developers will be able to publicly build on the network for the first time after six months of private testing, ahead of a future mainnet launch, the company announced at CoinDesk's Consensus Hong Kong conference. With the chain, Robinhood aims to allow users to trade 24/7 and self-custody their assets in Robinhood's own crypto wallet. Users will also be able to bridge across different chains and into decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on Ethereum, the company said. The timing comes as Ethereum’s core roadmap shifts more attention back to the base layer. Certain upgrades have already lowered transaction costs, and further improvements are expected to continue easing congestion, a development that weakens the case for layer 2s as a pure scaling necessity. Robinhood’s approach suggests it is already operating under that assumption. “I think Vitalik [Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum] was always pretty clear on this, that L2s were not just here to scale Ethereum,” said Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto, in an interview. “For us, it was never really about scaling Ethereum or doing faster transactions.” — Margaux Nijkerk & Krisztian SandorRead more.
CITADEL BACKS LAYERZERO BLOCKCHAIN: LayerZero Labs unveiled Zero, a blockchain aimed at powering institutional-grade financial markets, alongside a strategic investment from Citadel Securities into ZRO, the network’s native token and governance asset. ARK Invest is also investing in LayerZero’s equity and ZRO token, with CEO Cathie Wood joining a newly formed advisory board alongside ICE executive Michael Blaugrund and former BNY Mellon digital assets head Caroline Butler, the company said. The size of the investments was not disclosed. The announcement signals a deeper push by traditional market infrastructure companies into blockchain-based trading, clearing and settlement as scalability and performance constraints have long limited real-world adoption. Tether Investments, the investment arm of the largest stablecoin issuer, also made a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs, it said. Citadel Securities said it is working with LayerZero to evaluate how Zero’s architecture could support high-throughput workflows across trading and post-trade processes. The firm’s investment in ZRO adds to growing institutional interest in LayerZero, which is best known for operating one of crypto’s largest interoperability networks. Zero is designed around LayerZero's first-of-its-kind heterogeneous architecture, which uses zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to separate transaction execution from verification. The company claims the design can scale to roughly 2 million transactions per second across multiple zones, with transaction costs approaching a millionth of a dollar and effectively unlimited blockspace. — Will Canny Read more.
MEGAETH MAINNET GOES LIVE: MegaETH, a high-performance blockchain built to make Ethereum applications feel nearly instant, debuted its public mainnet, entering an ecosystem mired in a fundamental debate over how Ethereum should scale. The project, which had pitched itself as a layer-2 “real-time blockchain” targeting more than 100,000 transactions per second (tps), would make onchain interactions feel closer to traditional web apps than today’s crypto networks. Ethereum works at less than 30 tps, according to Token Terminal. The release caps a rapid rise that has drawn both technical curiosity and major financial backing. The project’s development arm, MegaLabs, raised a $20 million seed round in 2024 led by Dragonfly. Last October, it announced a $450 million oversubscribed token sale backed by some of the most recognizable names in crypto, including Ethereum co-founders Vitalik Buterin and Joe Lubin. The sale was one of the largest crypto fundraises of that year. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
ENS SCRAPS LAYER-2 PLANS: ENS decided not to move forward with Namechain, a planned layer-2 rollup, marking another high-profile shift away from the once-dominant narrative that Ethereum’s future would be built primarily on L2s. Instead of its own rollup, ENS will now deploy the long-awaited ENSv2 upgrade exclusively on the Ethereum mainnet, citing dramatically lower gas costs and a broader change in Ethereum’s scaling philosophy. According to ENS founder and lead developer Nick Johnson, the original rationale for launching a bespoke rollup no longer holds. “The landscape has changed between when we first decided to pursue an L2,” Johnson said in an interview with CoinDesk. Two years ago, high gas prices made rollups the “official trajectory,” but Ethereum’s base layer has since scaled to the point where transaction costs are sustainable. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.