Robinhood Chain 上线两个月了，已经开始挑战 Solana

The brokerage that brought zero-fee trading to millions just did the same thing to Layer 2. In 60 days, Robinhood Chain has gone from launch to $791 million in TVL, flipped Base in daily active users, and is now generating more daily revenue than Solana. The question is no longer whether Robinhood belongs in crypto infrastructure. The question is how far this thing goes.

Summary Robinhood Chain launched July 1, 2026 as an Arbitrum Orbit L2 and reached $791M in TVL within 60 days, up from $4M at genesis.

Daily revenue hit $4.01M on Sept. 2, dwarfing Solana’s $78K on the same day, while cumulative DEX volume crossed $47B.

The Pons launchpad is driving $500M per day in memecoin volume, outpacing Pump.fun since Aug. 29, and Uniswap Labs acquired PONS for long-term alignment.

Tokenized stocks on the chain recorded $4.3B in 30-day volume with an $85M daily peak on Aug. 25, creating a product no other L2 offers at that scale.

With 24 million brokerage users, a native wallet, and zero bridging friction, Robinhood owns something Solana does not: a direct line to retail that requires no onboarding.

Two months is nothing in crypto time. Protocols spend years grinding toward product-market fit, burning through grant programs and ambassador campaigns, hoping that one cycle will be the one where users show up and stay. Robinhood Chain skipped the line.

NEW: Senator Lummis says the Clarity Act ensures America retains its lead in digital assets https://t.co/NFsjGXXeK9 pic.twitter.com/vOdivcfgaV — crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) July 3, 2026

Launched on July 1, 2026, as an Arbitrum Orbit Layer 2, the chain did not arrive with the usual “we are building the future of finance” blog post and an airdrop teaser. It arrived with 24 million brokerage accounts already connected to a wallet that already existed inside an app that already had regulatory approval to operate in all 50 states. That is not a go-to-market strategy. That is a cheat code.

Within three weeks, the chain flipped Base in daily active users. By the end of August, it had processed 576 million transactions across 12.3 million addresses. On Sept. 2, Robinhood Chain generated $4.01 million in daily revenue. Solana, the chain that was supposed to be the retail champion of this cycle, managed $78,000 on the same day. Read that comparison again. It is not a typo.

The numbers that made people pay attention

Raw transaction counts and TVL figures can be gamed. Everyone in crypto knows this. So the right move is to look at the numbers that are harder to fake: revenue, sustained DEX volume, and user retention across multiple product categories.

Robinhood Chain’s TVL climbed from $4 million at launch to $791 million by early September. That growth curve looks less like a typical L2 ramp and more like a product launch at a company that already had distribution sorted out before writing the first line of chain code. Cumulative DEX volume crossed $47 billion, with Uniswap serving as the dominant trading venue. The chain is not just moving tokens around. People are trading real size.

The revenue number deserves its own paragraph. $4.01 million in a single day is the kind of figure that L1s dream about. Solana has been running for years with thousands of applications, a massive developer community, and deep institutional partnerships. It recorded roughly $78,000 to $81,000 in daily revenue during the same window. Robinhood Chain, at two months old, is pulling in roughly 50 times more daily revenue. Even accounting for the gas subsidy distortions (more on that later), the gap is striking.

And then there is the DEX volume that slipped under the radar. Crypto Twitter was busy arguing about Solana memecoins while Robinhood Chain was quietly posting nearly $1 billion in daily DEX volume. The chain did not need a marketing campaign. The users were already inside the app.

Pons ate Pump.fun’s lunch

The memecoin launchpad wars of 2025 and 2026 produced a clear winner: Pump.fun on Solana. It was the fastest, cheapest, most viral token launcher in crypto. Until it was not.

Pons, the native launchpad on Robinhood Chain, started generating $500 million per day in memecoin volume. Since Aug. 29, it has been outperforming Pump.fun on raw throughput. The acquisition of PONS by Uniswap Labs was not a casual investment. It was a strategic move to lock in alignment between the dominant DEX on the chain and the launchpad driving the most speculative activity.

JUST IN: Clarity Act passes House 294-134 with bipartisan support and Trump backing as Lummis confirms stablecoin talks are 99% resolved and Senate vote is imminent https://t.co/NFsjGXXeK9 pic.twitter.com/EG5AXDnLJZ — crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) April 4, 2026

This matters because memecoin volume is, for better or worse, the clearest signal of retail engagement in crypto. Institutions do not trade dog tokens at 3 a.m. Regular people do. And regular people are choosing to do it on Robinhood Chain instead of Solana, which means something shifted in the plumbing of how retail users access onchain markets.

The reason is not complicated. A Robinhood user can go from checking their stock portfolio to launching a memecoin without downloading a separate wallet, without bridging assets from another chain, and without joining a Discord server to figure out how gas works. The friction is gone. And in consumer products, friction is the only thing that matters.

Tokenized stocks changed the math

Memecoins get the attention. Tokenized stocks might get the revenue.

Robinhood Chain recorded $4.3 billion in 30-day tokenized stock volume, with an $85 million daily peak on Aug. 25. This is not a concept paper or a testnet demo. Real users are trading tokenized equities onchain, at scale, through a platform that already has the brokerage license to make it legal.

No other Layer 2 can offer this. Base does not have it. Optimism does not have it. Arbitrum One does not have it. The reason is simple: building a tokenized stock product requires a brokerage license, regulatory relationships, and the willingness to put a company’s core business on the line. Robinhood already had all three. Everyone else would need years and tens of millions of dollars in legal fees to get there.

The tokenized stock product also explains why Robinhood’s stock price sits above $130, giving the company a market cap north of $40 billion. Wall Street sees what crypto natives are still processing: Robinhood is not just adding a chain to its product. It is turning its entire brokerage into an onchain platform. The chain is the product. The brokerage is the distribution.

Vertical integration is the moat

Tech history has a reliable pattern. The company that owns the user wins, even if its technology is not the best. Apple did not build the best phone. It built the best ecosystem. Amazon did not build the best cloud. It built the customer relationship that made the cloud inevitable.

Robinhood is running the same playbook. One company controls the brokerage (24 million users), the wallet, the chain, and the tokenized stock product. A user can go from seeing a headline about a memecoin to owning it in under 30 seconds, without leaving the Robinhood app. No wallet downloads. No bridges. No Discord. No seed phrases written on napkins.

You might also like: Robinhood Chain hit $945M in daily DEX volume and nobody noticed

Compare that to the Solana experience. A new user who wants to trade on Solana needs to create a Phantom wallet, fund it through a centralized exchange, bridge assets if they are coming from another chain, navigate to a DEX, and figure out slippage settings. Each step loses users. The crypto industry has spent years pretending these friction points do not matter. They do. They always have.

Robinhood’s vertical integration is not just a convenience feature. It is a structural advantage that compounds over time. Every new product Robinhood adds to the chain benefits from the existing user base. Every existing user who tries one onchain product is more likely to try the next one. The flywheel is already spinning.

Solana is still Solana

It would be dishonest to write about this competition without acknowledging what Solana brings to the table. Solana is not going anywhere.

The chain holds $5.9 billion in TVL, over $16 billion in stablecoins, and more than 1,000 live applications. Mastercard and Western Union are building on it. Firedancer, the second validator client from Jump Crypto, is coming and should improve throughput and resilience. The Solana Developer Platform launched in March and has been steadily expanding tooling. In August alone, Solana processed 5.2 billion transactions, roughly nine times Robinhood Chain’s total since launch.

NEW: Robinhood introduces mainnet for new chain designed for real-world assets pic.twitter.com/Q1ZUbuWZK1 — crypto.news (@cryptodotnews) July 2, 2026

These are real advantages. Solana has a deep developer community, years of battle-tested infrastructure, and institutional relationships that took a long time to build. Robinhood Chain is two months old. It has not survived a major exploit, a network outage, or a sustained bear market. Solana has survived all three and came back stronger each time.

The challenge for Solana is not that Robinhood Chain is better technology. It is that Robinhood Chain has better distribution. And in consumer markets, distribution usually wins. Solana’s response will matter. If the chain can simplify its onboarding, partner with consumer apps that bring non-crypto users onchain, and ship products like tokenized stocks that compete with Robinhood’s offering, it will hold its position. Solana has the developer talent and the ecosystem depth to do all of that. The question is speed.

The gas subsidy question

Every honest analysis of Robinhood Chain needs to address the gas subsidy. Robinhood launched the chain with a 90-day gas subsidy that eliminates transaction fees for users. That subsidy expires on Sept. 29. Critics argue, fairly, that the chain’s usage metrics are inflated by free transactions and that activity will fall off a cliff when users have to start paying.