Don't time the market, bet on the trend: Whose curve is Robinhood Chain replicating?

特邀专栏作者

2026-09-16 18:00 (UTC+8)

This article is about 6503 words, reading the full article takes about 10 minutes

Benchmarking against Solana and Base's early days: Trading volume has already caught up, stock on-chain rate is below 0.05%, and three major catalysts are still at the starting point.

AI Summary

Expand

Core View: Robinhood Chain and tokenized stocks are at an extremely early stage, with growth potential similar to Solana in 2023. The focus should be on long-term trends rather than short-term timing, and the core opportunity lies in the gap between future growth expectations and current undervaluation.
Key Elements:
1. Robinhood Chain has been live for only 11 weeks, yet core metrics such as DEX trading volume and total value locked have already caught up to Solana's performance at week 11 during its explosive growth phase, though total asset market cap remains far below the Solana ecosystem.
2. On-chain tokenized stocks total only $81 million, accounting for less than 0.05% of Robinhood's stock assets and 3.2% of global market share. The U.S. market has not yet opened, leaving enormous room for growth.
3. The 24 native tokens have a combined market cap of only $1.35 billion, just 38% of BONK's peak, and the holding structure is hollow in the middle—small wallets account for a high proportion, while mid-sized wallets are 40% lower than successful meme coins.
4. All three major growth drivers (tokenized stocks, existing user onboarding, and cross-chain capital inflows) remain at an early stage. Bridged TVL and DeFi TVL rank 10th, while stablecoin market cap ranks 13th.
5. Robinhood's crypto business revenue share once reached 41%, but currently sits at only 7.6%. Leveraging its own public chain and tokenization strategy, it is poised to break 50% for the first time this cycle.
6. Robinhood has 27 million active users, yet only 3.5% of international users currently have access to tokenized stocks. Once U.S. regulatory exemptions are implemented, this will unleash significant incremental growth.

Author: Coulou

Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News

You've probably heard this saying: Time in the market beats timing the market. I believe Robinhood Chain and the rise of tokenized stocks are exactly such a case. You can't precisely predict every pullback and every tedious range-bound grind, but you can judge that the trend isn't exhausted and upside still remains, so you should stay exposed until you see clear signs of overheating.

There have been quite a few charts circulating recently showing that Robinhood Chain fees have probably peaked, that trading terminal volumes have hit all-time highs, and so on. I don't think these metrics are suitable for judging where the trend is headed.

These trading terminals didn't exist in the previous cycle, so using them as a comparison is like comparing 2021 DEX trading volume with that of 2017. Robinhood Chain fees were elevated because activity suddenly surged, causing network congestion. Now that fees have been lowered, core metrics like trading volume have continued to climb so far.

Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi believes that Robinhood Chain proactively raising the gas limit and lowering fees, which caused chain revenue to decline while DEX trading volume stayed strong, is a strategy focused on the long-term development of RWA and on-chain finance rather than a mistake — though the community has plenty of disagreement over this business model.

Below, I'll analyze where Robinhood Chain currently stands through a range of data. Again, on this matter, time in the market will be more rewarding than timing the market.

What stage of the cycle are we in?

Two cycles need to be considered: the broader crypto cycle, and Robinhood Chain's own cycle.

Looking at the broader cycle, the overall market isn't that far from its lows. Bitcoin is up more than 30% from its low, and the June low of $58,000 was only two and a half months ago. It's fair to say the broader market is still within a large-scale oscillating range between the low and $82,000.

Unlike the previous cycle, virtually all indicators are now significantly elevated. The floor levels for on-chain supply and on-chain activity are even far higher than in October 2023 — back then Bitcoin broke $30,000, ten months after the bear market bottom, with the price already up 75%.

Global DEX trading volume is 5x that of the previous cycle's launch point, equivalent to mid-2024 levels.
Stablecoin supply is 2.5x that of October 2023 (when the Solana ecosystem began to explode).
Tokenized stocks did not exist at all in the previous cycle.

This crypto cycle is only 2.5 months in, yet DEX trading volume and total DeFi TVL have already reached the levels of months 17-18 of the previous cycle, while stablecoin scale far exceeds the previous cycle's all-time peak — the starting strength is markedly stronger than the last bull market.

Before this bull market officially began, DEX trading volume, DeFi TVL, and stablecoin scale had all reached 2.3-5.1x their levels at the start of the last bull market, plus tokenized stocks were added as an entirely new market segment that did not exist before.

Add in more mature infrastructure brought by cross-chain applications like Fomo, plus Robinhood's massive built-in brand traffic, and this public chain's current activity level is already very close to Solana's in Q4 2023.

Just 11 weeks after launch, Robinhood Chain (RH) has already matched or surpassed Solana's week-11 performance during its breakout period across multiple core on-chain metrics — TVL, daily DEX trading volume, global DEX market share, and new stablecoin inflows — despite starting from a far lower base than Solana did.

On the other hand, the total market cap of all assets on-chain is still far below that of the Solana ecosystem at the time. The asset structure also differs: the best performers on Robinhood Chain are mostly cross-chain infrastructure tokens like Uniswap, Morpho, and Lighter, all of which have posted multi-fold gains from their cycle lows.

Robinhood Chain directly imports mature external infrastructure and has almost no chain-native infrastructure tokens, so on-chain speculative demand can only concentrate on local themes like Meme coins, AI, and PONS; whereas when Solana exploded, capital would speculate on native infrastructure tokens and Meme coins simultaneously.

But the market cap of Robinhood Chain's native assets amounts to only a fraction of BONK's peak size within the Solana ecosystem. (The chart proportions do not reflect true scale; the Robinhood Chain segment should actually be smaller than the other two segments.)

The combined market cap of all 24 native tokens on Robinhood Chain is just $1.35 billion — only 64% of BONK's market cap at launch, 38% of BONK's all-time high, and just 4.8% of the total size of Solana's Meme sector at its peak. The overall market cap base for native tokens is very small.

Looking further at the holdings structure of native assets like AI and PONS: although the total number of holding addresses and the number of high-net-worth wallets above $1 million have reached levels seen just before past billion-dollar token breakouts, the share of mid-sized wallets in the $100-$100,000 range is very low — the vast majority are small-balance wallets.

At around a $300 million market cap, whale holding density (Y-axis) is the dividing line between success and failure for Meme coins: every successful coin had a whale density above 14.4, and every failed coin was below 14.4. RH's AI and PONS pass on whale density, but retail holding breadth (X-axis) is insufficient — whether they can fill out the retail base is the key question going forward.

AI and PONS meet the whale holding thresholds, but the number of mid-sized ($100-$100,000) holding wallets is notably low — 40% below the median for successful Meme coins — meaning a large mass of middle-class retail buyers is still missing.

This missing group of mid-sized capital wallets is very likely the force that will drive the next leg up for these assets. In many respects, the holdings structure resembles the small-address share before Virtuals exploded, while also having the high-net-worth holding base of something like WIF.

AI and PONS have whale shares on par with successful Meme coins, but with a hollowed-out middle: small wallets make up an extremely high share, while holders in the $100-$10,000 tier account for only about 10%, far below the 25-32% range of historical winning coins — a solid retail middle class is missing.

This situation stems from the fact that this new ecosystem is still in its early stages, capital inflows are limited, and there isn't enough effective liquidity on-chain to position into. Trading terminals bring in a large number of new users, and these users tend to invest smaller amounts per trade, with their numbers growing faster than high-net-worth users.

Also, Hood itself is not a crypto-native asset like SOL, and stock tokens haven't launched yet. There's no wealth effect here like in 2023 where SOL's price rise drove prosperity across the entire chain. Solana's logic was: SOL rises → on-chain activity increases. Robinhood Chain relies on three drivers:

Growth in the tokenized stock business (the most core catalyst)
Onboarding its own existing users into the chain ecosystem
Capturing capital from other public chains, as well as chain-agnostic capital from trading terminals. Cross-chain capital diversion is pronounced right now, with Sol, Base, BSC, and various trading terminals all splitting the liquidity.

And all three of these drivers are still at a very early stage.

Catalyst One: Growth in the Tokenized Stock Business

The total scale of tokenized stocks on-chain right now is less than 0.05% of Robinhood's stock book assets.

The total on-chain scale of tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain is currently just $81 million, accounting for only 0.03% of Robinhood's platform stock assets — under any future scenario, there is enormous upside growth space.

To put it in perspective, the current stage is equivalent to where the stablecoin industry was in 2019. Over the following two years, total stablecoin supply grew 6.5x and 6x year-over-year in an explosive surge.

Global tokenized stocks currently stand at $2.55 billion, in the early takeoff stage of the stablecoin S-curve; reaching the first $1 billion took only 0.7 years, far faster than stablecoins. Robinhood Chain accounts for just 3.2% of the global tokenized stock market, and the tokenization penetration rate of its own custodied stock assets remains extremely low.

Robinhood Chain is only 8 weeks old and already holds a 3.2% share of the tokenized stock market. Meanwhile, the US and Canada have not yet opened up tokenized stocks — which leads to the second point.

Catalyst Two: Onboarding Existing Users into the Chain Ecosystem

So far, Robinhood has barely begun to onboard its existing users into the public chain at scale. Although users in over 100 countries can access tokenized stocks, the Robinhood wallet has launched, and it has partnered with Lighter and rolled out LIT token incentives, everything is still just beginning:

The public chain is only two months old
The exchange has only listed one native token, Cashcat
The US market, which accounts for the bulk of users and stock asset management scale, has not yet opened up tokenized stocks.

Robinhood's stock tokens are currently only available to international users, who make up 3.5% of total customers; US users cannot access them yet. The current $81 million in tokenized stocks is based on only a small portion of user assets — if US regulatory exemptions land, there is huge room for release.

Overseas users account for only 3.5% of Robinhood's total users, and Canadian users still cannot use stock tokens.

The Solana-style wealth effect that belongs to Robinhood Chain hasn't arrived yet, because the door hasn't fully opened. In the 18 months since the April 2025 tariff episode, stock market capitalization has increased by more than $16 trillion.

From the April 2025 tariff low to September 2026, the S&P 500 rose about 52.93%, and total US stock market capitalization increased by $16.3 trillion, a gain of about 27.63%.

Robinhood Chain's wealth effect may not come purely from within the chain, but more from tokenizing various asset classes (existing categories as well as new ones like private equity), bringing wealthy new users on-chain.

Looking back at historical cycles, crypto's share of Robinhood's overall revenue rises steadily with bull markets, having reached 41% and 35% at cycle peaks. In Q2 of this year, that share was only 7.6%. Leveraging its own public chain, tokenized stocks, and other tokenization projects, crypto's revenue share could break 50% for the first time this cycle. Whether measured in absolute scale or relative share, there is still a long way to go.

This stacked bar chart shows the breakdown of Robinhood's quarterly net revenue: green is crypto trading revenue, dark gray is all other business revenue including options, equities, and net interest. Crypto trading revenue's share fell from a 2021 high of 41% to 7.6% in 2026, while total company revenue continued to expand.

This line chart shows the quarterly change in crypto revenue as a share of Robinhood's total net revenue: it peaked at 41.2% in Q2 2021 during the Dogecoin craze, fell to a trough of 4.9% in Q3 2023, rebounded to 35.3% in Q4 2024, and fell back to 7.6% in Q2 2026.

Don't forget Robinhood has 27 million active users, and these users currently cannot access tokenized stock products in the official main app. Next, let's look at cross-chain capital and overall on-chain metrics.

Catalyst Three: General-Purpose Capital from Other Public Chains and Trading Terminals

Hard to imagine, but Robinhood Chain's current metrics are still:

Ranked 10th in bridged TVL
Ranked 10th in total DeFi TVL
Ranked 13th in stablecoin market cap

This ranking shows Robinhood Chain at 10th in both bridge TVL and DeFi TVL, and 13th in stablecoin market cap; bridge TVL is $3.15 billion, DeFi TVL is $931.3 million, and on-chain stablecoin market cap is $1.06 billion — putting it among mainstream public chains.

To assess how much incremental capital Robinhood Chain can attract from outside, there are a few key points:

Cross-chain characteristics are becoming increasingly pronounced this cycle, with Solana, Robinhood Chain, and BSC splitting the market together, while Fomo provides a unified cross-chain interaction experience and its influence keeps growing.

This is a Dune stacked bar chart of weekly trading volume across multiple public chains. In mid-2026, Robinhood Chain (yellow) trading volume exploded upward, driving overall on-chain volume and total fees (white line) higher in tandem, forming a clear FOMO rally.

But in terms of trading volume share, Robinhood Chain already holds a considerable portion. On-chain activity often leads metrics like TVL. Nearly half of Fomo platform's trading volume flows to Robinhood Chain, yet the chain's TVL is only one-sixth of Base's.