Robinhood Chain has already surpassed $3 billion in DEX volume and at the time of writing, its 24-hour live trading volume was third among all networks just behind Binance Smart Chain and Solana, according to DeFiLlama. All of this is happening less than two weeks after the mainnet launch. The network reached another milestone during this time frame becoming the second busiest layer of Ethereum by daily transactions.
source: Growth
Data from Growthepie shows that the network surpassed 7 million transactions yesterday, beating the baseline of 6.32 million. Moving forward on a Coinbase-backed chain with two years of history is a meteoric rise for a network that had no track record at the beginning of the month.
The problem is how to pay for these transactions. Robinhood is covering gas for eligible wallet users through swaps, bridges and fraud for the first 90 days from launch through the end of September. Transaction costs are close to nothing at the moment, which exactly attracts high-frequency activity that can inflate the number of transactions.
The 90-day fee waiver is fueling the early numbers.
The gas waiver covers the first 90 days of the main grid and ends in late September. The network typically makes money from fees users pay to process their transactions, and on the Robinhood chain that revenue will flow to Robinhood as the operator. For now, Robinhood has this covered for its users. This incentive combined with the memecoin craze quickly boosted the network, briefly flipping Base to Uniswap’s #2 deployment behind the Ethereum mainnet and pushing Hyperliquid in daily DEX volume over the same period.
Memecoins outperform token stock thesis
Robinhood built the chain around tokenized stocks 24/7, which now lives in more than 120 countries. The activity shown so far does not look like this display. Since Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has treated memes as a legitimate pillar of the on-chain market His tweet on July 8The average number of tokens created across multiple launch platforms is around 18,600 per day. As of today, there are 20 meme coins with a market cap of over $1 million.
source: Sand dunes
The high fees show how event driven this is
The fee and subsidy figures can seem like they conflict, so it’s helpful to clarify this. Free gas doesn’t make fees go away. Each transaction still costs something to process and send back to Ethereum, and support only changes who covers that cost, and only for people who go through the Robinhood Wallet app. Everyone else in the chain pays their gas in ETH. So, when network fees jumped to more than $300,000 on July 11, that number was the total cost of the day’s resulting activity, part of which was paid directly by users and part of which Robinhood absorbed for its wallet users. The rally tracks the rise of the memecoin, not any fixed baseline. That’s the saying. The number of transactions measures how much is happening, not whether people would still attend if they had to pay for it themselves.
The real test comes after September
Everything related to the existing client is pre-loaded. Free gas, a new blockchain, a viral memecoin, and access to Robinhood’s nearly 23 million brokerage users all arrived in the same two weeks. The important number is not the peak seen in July, but what will remain constant once users start paying their own way. Base cleared its launch week speculation and kept a real developer base underneath it. Whether Robinhood Chain is doing the same, and whether its activity is shifting toward the tokenized asset flows it was meant to carry, is what the number of transactions cannot yet answer. Q2 earnings in early August will be the first report back on live mainnet activity, and September is when the support stops enticing numbers.
