- Robinhood Chain’s daily DEX volume has retreated from its mid-September record.
- Deposited capital has held up far better than trading activity.
- Memecoin launchpads, not tokenized stocks, generated most of the network’s turnover.
- Robinhood’s free gas period for wallet users ended on September 29.
Robinhood Chain, the Arbitrum-based layer-2 network that Robinhood launched on July 1, is losing trading momentum just as its 90-day gas subsidy for Robinhood Wallet users expires. Daily DEX volume fell from about $1.88 billion on September 13 to near $947 million on September 28, according to DefiLlama. Total value locked held at roughly $1.02 billion, so speculative turnover is fading much faster than capital is leaving.
A Shuttered Launchpad and 646,000 Pons Tokens Built the $1.88 Billion Day
Robinhood Chain’s activity came in waves rather than as one steady climb. Memecoins drove the first wave. Launchpad Noxa.fun created more than 60,000 tokens in its first days, and for five consecutive days its protocol revenue exceeded that of Solana’s Pump.fun. On July 11 it suspended token creation, citing infrastructure strain from copycat and automated launches. Pons took over the role and has facilitated around 646,000 launches since July.
Tokenized real-world assets accounted for well under 1% of DEX volume in the chain’s first week and stayed below 10% through late July. The product Robinhood built the network for was a side act during its busiest period.
Morpho and Ethena Deposits Kept TVL Climbing While Traders Pulled Back
DEX volume measures how often assets change hands. TVL measures how much sits in applications such as lending markets and liquidity pools. Stablecoin supply counts dollar tokens issued or bridged onto the network. All three can move independently of each other.
Memecoin trading generates enormous turnover on small capital. A new token can see thousands of trades in its first hours and then almost none once early buyers exit, so volume depends on a constant flow of fresh launches and fresh attention. Lending deposits behave differently. Capital placed in Morpho or Ethena products earns yield without being traded, and it stays put while speculation cools.
That second layer formed early. By August 5, TVL had reached $774 million, stablecoin supply $575 million, Morpho deposits at $332 million and Ethena assets at $236 million. By mid-September both TVL and stablecoin supply had approached $1 billion. The same split showed up in July, when trading turnover relative to TVL fell sharply while deposits kept rising.
Fees Fell From $8 Million to $230,000 Before the Subsidy Even Expired
The seven-day average sat roughly 25% below the 30-day average before the gas subsidy ended. The slowdown therefore began before Robinhood stopped paying fees, and no single event explains it.
Pons revenue halved in a week. Pons trading volume fell 37% to $616 million between September 10 and 16, and its protocol revenue dropped from $10.7 million to $5.8 million. Network-wide daily fees collapsed from about $8 million to $230,000 in roughly two weeks. Transaction counts did not fall at the same pace, which points to cheaper trades and thinner speculative margins rather than an exodus of users.
An onchain sleuth tied 53 launches to one operation. On September 27, onchain analyst Wazz published findings linking a suspected operation to at least $18.43 million extracted from 53 memecoin launches between July 10 and September 21. Wallet bundles of 70 to 200 addresses allegedly captured 70% or more of new token supplies. CRUMBS was the largest single case, at $3.12 million. Parts of the pattern have been confirmed onchain, but no one has independently replicated the full total, and no data yet ties the allegations directly to lower volume.
Free gas ended on September 29. Robinhood covered transaction costs for eligible Robinhood Wallet users for 90 days after launch. The expiry tests whether activity holds without subsidies, but much memecoin trading ran through third-party bots and launchpads that never used the subsidy. That limits how much of the decline the deadline can explain.
The traders never came from Robinhood’s app. Estimates cited by StoneX’s Mark Palmer put Robinhood app users at only 1%-2% of chain transactions. The traders who drove the boom came from DeFi terminals and Uniswap, and they move quickly to wherever the next launch cycle is happening.
StoneX and Morgan Stanley Bet on Robinhood’s Tokenization Push
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- StoneX (Mark Palmer): Attributes the growth to four factors: Robinhood’s consumer brand, the permissionless architecture, subsidized fees and the interplay between memecoins and tokenized equities. Two of those four, the subsidy and memecoin demand, are now weakening.
- Morgan Stanley: Sees Robinhood holding a “right to win” in tokenized finance, arguing that regulators are moving toward treating tokenized assets as a legitimate category rather than an extension of speculative crypto trading.
Stock Tokens Reached $100 Million While Memecoins Ran the Charts
Robinhood announced the chain as part of its 2025 tokenization plans. The network settles to Ethereum and uses ETH for gas, with Uniswap, Chainlink, Alchemy, BitGo, Morpho and Lighter among its launch partners. Robinhood Stock Tokens give holders price exposure to underlying securities. They do not automatically confer shareholder rights, which shapes how far regulators and investors will treat them as substitutes for the stocks themselves.
Tokenized RWAs had reached about $100 million in market value by early August. That amount is meaningful for a new chain, but it is small next to the memecoin turnover that dominated the charts.
October Data Will Show Whether Deposits Outlast the Free Gas Era
The October data will separate subsidized activity from organic demand. The useful signals are stablecoin supply, TVL in Morpho and Ethena, active addresses and the RWA share of volume. Daily DEX turnover on its own is less informative. If deposits hold while memecoin volume keeps sliding, the chain is shifting toward the lending and yield role Robinhood designed it for. If deposits start leaving as well, the September peak will look like a subsidy-era high.
The outcome also affects Arbitrum. Under the Arbitrum Expansion Program, Robinhood Chain sends 10% of net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem, with 8% going to the ArbitrumDAO treasury and 2% to the Arbitrum Developer Guild. The fee compression already recorded in September reduces that flow.
Robinhood is meanwhile pushing its centralized crypto products further. At its September 29 HOOD Summit, the company announced in-app perpetual futures for eligible US customers on eight cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and XRP. Leverage goes up to 10x for BTC and ETH and 3x for the others, with promotional fees of 0.01% through the end of 2026. The contracts run through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp rather than onchain, so they will not add to Robinhood Chain’s DEX volume. They do show where Robinhood currently expects its US trading revenue to come from while the chain works out its role.