Robinhood Chain’s fast start mirrors Base’s earlier problem

Robinhood’s new layer-2 network is growing fast, but the early numbers point to a familiar risk for crypto investors: speculative trading is outpacing the financial use cases the chain was built to support.

Coinbase is now repositioning Base after conceding that its push into social apps and creator tokens left it behind in markets such as trading, payments, and tokenized assets. Jesse Pollak said Base will focus on those areas instead, while Coinbase hands oversight of the Base consumer app to Jordan Fish, known as Cobie. Pollak will concentrate on the network’s role as settlement infrastructure.

That shift comes as Robinhood Chain, built with Arbitrum technology and settled on Ethereum, posts a strong launch. Since opening to the public on July 1, monthly active addresses rose about tenfold in a week to more than 1 million, according to Token Terminal. The chain briefly passed Base in daily transactions, while more than 62,000 addresses held tokenized stock or ETF products within about two weeks. DeFiLlama data also showed roughly $3.1 billion in seven-day DEX volume and stablecoin supply above $300 million.

But memecoins made up about 80% of spot DEX trading on Robinhood Chain, according to Entropy Advisors’ Tom Wan. That leaves Robinhood facing the same test as Base: turning early speculation into lasting demand for tokenized assets, lending, and payments.