Robinhood Chain: How a Neobroker’s Blockchain Turns Into a Revenue Machine

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It makes obvious sense for a crypto exchange like Coinbase to run its own blockchain with Base. The same goes for Bitpanda, which followed with its Vision Chain. A neobroker whose core business is trading stocks and options building a network of its own looks, at first glance, like a side project.

Look closer, though, and a real cash cow starts to take shape. Robinhood Chain has at times ranked first among all networks by daily fees, and Robinhood earns from them directly. What complicates the picture is the criticism aimed at the very product the chain was supposed to carry: its stock tokens. That criticism has teeth, and it now comes from several directions at once.

What Robinhood Chain Is

Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum Layer 2 that the US neobroker built on the Arbitrum stack. It was unveiled at a London event billed as “The World is Flat,” and the public mainnet went live in early July.

Technically the chain is an optimistic rollup: transactions are processed off the Ethereum mainnet and posted back in compressed batches. ETH serves as the gas token, and there is no network token of its own. Block times run at roughly 100 milliseconds, which is meant to make the network attractive for trading applications. Transaction ordering is handled by a single sequencer operated by Robinhood, working on a first come, first served basis, so paying more does not move anyone up the queue.

Developers can deploy smart contracts without Robinhood’s approval, which makes the network permissionless in that sense. Launch partners included Uniswap with a dedicated automated market maker, the prop trading protocol Pleiades, oracle provider Chainlink, custodian BitGo, node infrastructure from Alchemy, and lending infrastructure from Morpho.

The Products on the Chain

Robinhood has assembled an entire product bundle around the chain:

• Stock Tokens: Tokenized securities that track a share price and trade around the clock. Legally they are debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited. They provide economic exposure to the underlying asset while granting no shareholder rights, no voting rights, and no legal claim against the underlying company. They are available in more than 120 countries through the Robinhood Wallet, though not to US persons, and with restrictions in the UK, Canada, and Switzerland among others. The first generation, now called Classic Stock Tokens, remains in the European app.
• Robinhood Earn: A decentralized lending product for US users, who can lend their dollar-backed USDG stablecoin from a self-custody wallet at an estimated seven percent APY. The infrastructure comes from Morpho, and insurance covering cyber and smart contract losses was procured through Lloyd’s of London and RELM.
• Perpetual Futures: Perps can be traded through the decentralized exchange Lighter inside the Robinhood Wallet. In Europe, the broker has extended the offering beyond crypto to commodities, ETFs, and currency pairs, with up to 10x leverage.
• DeFi Building Blocks: Lending and borrowing are integrated out of the box, and stock tokens can be deployed into lending pools or used as collateral across the wider DeFi ecosystem.

Then there is the agentic track. After launching agentic trading for equities and options, Robinhood is bringing the same technology to crypto. Through a trading MCP, users can connect the AI model of their choice to Robinhood’s data sources, while capital limits and guardrails stay with the human.

How the Chain Fits Robinhood’s Business Model

For Robinhood the chain amounts to more than a technology project: it is a revenue stream in its own right. The company operates the sequencer and therefore earns directly from network fees, on top of the revenue it makes from trading and products inside the app.

The numbers have been striking. According to DefiLlama, the chain leads all networks by daily fees, at times clearing more than six million US dollars in a single day, of which a good five million stayed with the network as revenue. Trading volume on the chain’s decentralized exchanges peaked above 1.7 billion dollars within 24 hours, and cumulative volume since launch has passed 47 billion dollars.

Analysts at Bernstein expect the chain to generate around 160 million dollars in annual fees by 2028, according to a report published just now. What stands out is that the forecast sits well below what current daily figures would imply if annualized, which suggests the analysts view today’s activity level as temporary. Bernstein recently raised its price target for Robinhood stock from 130 to 160 dollars, citing prediction markets alongside tokenization.

Within the wider group, the chain reads as a growth promise that has yet to become a load-bearing pillar. Robinhood posted 1.31 billion dollars in second quarter revenue, up 32 percent, with net income of 573 million dollars. Crypto trading was the one large segment where revenue fell, dropping 38 percent to 100 million dollars. The quarter was carried by equities, options, and above all event contracts, which grew tenfold to 156 million dollars. Robinhood says it now serves close to 28 million customers across 38 countries.

The Criticism

Memecoins Ahead of Tokenized Stocks

Most of the activity on the chain so far comes from speculative token trading rather than tokenized equities. At launch, memecoin pairs accounted for 100 percent of volume; that share has since fallen to 36 percent, while tokenized stocks reached roughly 27 percent. The fee stream comes largely from token screening and execution tools and from launchpads, with three applications responsible for around 93 percent of application revenue on the chain. Critics see a network that was announced as infrastructure for the real economy and currently operates as a casino.

Distorted Prices in Thin Markets

Because memecoins use stock tokens as their trading pair, both sides can amplify each other. In one documented case, a single memecoin pool absorbed more than half the circulating supply of a stock token, whose price then climbed to roughly four and a half times the actual closing price of the underlying share. A comparatively small injection of new tokens was enough to pull the price back, an illustration of how thin liquidity in these markets remains.

Pushback From the Companies Being Tracked

Adam Aron, CEO of AMC Entertainment, called the offering “outrageous” last Friday and made clear that tokens referencing AMC shares have no affiliation with the company. AMC intends to ask its outside securities counsel to investigate. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev publicly invited Aron to spell out his specific concerns. This is a familiar pattern: OpenAI had already distanced itself from tokens referencing its shares, and the Bank of Lithuania, Robinhood’s lead supervisor in the EU, requested clarifications on the structure and customer communication of the OpenAI and SpaceX tokens.

A Regulatory Gray Zone

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has made clear that tokenization leaves the application of securities law untouched, drawing a line between issuer-authorized tokens and third-party products that offer synthetic exposure. In Europe, ESMA director Natasha Cazenave warned that investors may mistake tokenized instruments for real shares, and called for clear communication and safeguards. Robinhood itself states in its documentation that using the chain provides no access to regulatory investor protections such as those of the UK’s FCA.

Questions About Reliability

The chain stopped producing blocks for more than 14 minutes last week, leaving transactions unconfirmed during that window. Roughly 8,400 expected block intervals were skipped. Robinhood gave no reason for the disruption. No balance losses became known, standard brokerage accounts were unaffected, and the stock briefly slipped by a good five percent that day. The incident drew attention to the centralized sequencer: as long as a single operator-controlled node determines ordering, the availability of a market advertised as always on rests with one instance.