Robinhood's crypto business is leaning into a strategy that would make most traditional finance executives uneasy: running tokenized equities and speculative meme coins on the same blockchain, on purpose. Johann Kerbrat, senior vice president and general manager of Robinhood Crypto, told Decrypt the approach traces back to a “two wolves” post from CEO Vlad Tenev describing the tension between “serious products — tokenized equities and derivatives contracts — and the memes that bring in attention, fun, and users.”
Roughly a month after launch, Decrypt reported that Robinhood Chain had processed more than 200 million transactions, locked in nearly $800 million in total value, and now lists approximately 200 tokenized stocks. “We want to show customers that we care about what they care about,” Kerbrat said, framing meme coin activity not as a distraction from the chain's serious use cases but as the on-ramp that gets users there in the first place.
Built on Arbitrum, Competing With Base
Robinhood Chain runs on Ethereum's Arbitrum Layer-2 technology, with automated market-making support from Uniswap and Pleiades, and launched directly into competition with Coinbase's Base network. The rollout leaned heavily on speculative trading from the start: the chain recorded $3.1 billion in DEX volume in its first week, driven substantially by the memecoin Cashcat, and its cumulative DEX volume has since topped $9 billion, with memecoins accounting for roughly 80% of that total.
That volume translated into a genuine distribution win. Robinhood Chain's daily active users passed Base's on July 21, reaching roughly 230,000 within four weeks of launch — a notable result given Base's head start and backing from Coinbase's existing user base. Coinbase has responded by moving to launch its own 1:1 stock-linked tokens on Base, positioning them as carrying actual shareholder rights, including dividends and voting power, which Robinhood's tokenized stocks — available in Europe since last June, including tokenized shares of the previously private SpaceX — do not currently offer.
Weekend Trading and a Chain for Everyone
Kerbrat pointed to always-on trading as a core reason for building Robinhood's own chain rather than relying on traditional market infrastructure. “The world doesn't stop on weekends. News is happening on Fridays after market close, and people want to be able to hedge their position,” he said. He also framed the chain's ambitions beyond Robinhood's own product suite: “I want the chain to not just be the chain for Robinhood, but also be the chain that anyone can use,” positioning Robinhood Chain as infrastructure for third-party developers rather than a walled garden.
Why the Memes Stay
On the meme coin question specifically, Kerbrat was direct about the calculation: “meme coins...bring liquidity, they bring interest from customers...If meme coins are something that they are extremely interested in, we want to make sure that the chain is supported for that.” The bet is that liquidity and attention generated by speculative trading spills over into the platform's more serious offerings, rather than cannibalizing them — and Kerbrat set an ambitious bar for what would count as success: “If we see tens of millions of customers trying to use a chain, I think that will be a good win for us.”
Related: Uniswap's New Token Launchpad Draws $99M on Robinhood Chain Debut
With Base reportedly leaning on its broader developer distribution to close the gap Robinhood Chain opened in its first month, the two networks' contest over tokenized real-world assets looks set to hinge as much on which platform's speculative trading activity converts into durable users as on the tokenized-stock products themselves.
