Robinhood Bets on Millions of Retail Users Moving On-Chain: On-Chain Trading Explodes, but RWA Vision Still Unproven

Odaily Planet Daily News: Robinhood is betting on the decentralized finance (DeFi) market by launching its own blockchain, Robinhood Chain, aiming to bring over 10 million active users into the on-chain ecosystem. However, current network trading activity is still primarily driven by Meme coin speculation, while the initial vision of tokenizing real-world assets (RWA) has yet to gain significant traction.

Robinhood Chain has recently seen rapid growth in trading volume. On July 12, the chain recorded a 24-hour DEX trading volume of approximately $878 million, briefly surpassing Coinbase's Base and Ethereum to rank among the top in decentralized exchange trading volumes, drawing attention from the crypto community. However, Robinhood Chain is still in its early stages. Data shows:

1. On July 13, the chain's perpetual contract trading volume was only about $5.9 million, compared to $8.9 billion for the leading on-chain derivatives platform Hyperliquid over the same period;

2. Robinhood Chain shows a bridged TVL of around $734 million, but the actual on-chain Total Value Locked (TVL) is about $211 million, with some assets remaining in wallets without entering lending or yield protocols;

3. The market cap of RWA tokenized assets is currently only about $12.66 million.

Currently, most of Robinhood Chain's trading activity comes from Meme coins. The CASHCAT token, recently issued on this chain, surged over 2100% in a week, reaching a market cap of $156 million at one point—12 times the size of the entire on-chain RWA market.

Robinhood stated that early on-chain activity is in line with expectations, with developers building the ecosystem and users participating in network usage. The company emphasized that its long-term goal remains to bring real-world assets like stocks and ETFs on-chain, enabling 24/7 trading, on-chain lending, and other financial services.

Analysts believe that the development path of Robinhood Chain is similar to the early stages of some new public chains: initially gaining traction through speculative trading, then needing to prove whether it can convert this into long-term users, a developer ecosystem, and genuine financial applications. The key question ahead is whether Robinhood, leveraging its massive retail user base, can transform the short-term Meme coin frenzy into a sustainable on-chain financial ecosystem. (CoinDesk)