Inside Robinhood’s high-stakes bet to onboard 10 million casual users onto decentralized finance

FinanceInside Robinhood’s high-stakes bet to onboard 10 million casual users onto decentralized financeThe company says its advantage lies in bringing retail customers onchain, but early activity remains dominated by memecoins, while its original tokenization vision remains small. By Oliver Knight|Edited by Aoyon Ashraf Jul 17, 2026, 3:36 p.m. 4 min readMake preferred on ShareShare this articleCopy linkX iconX (Twitter)LinkedInFacebookEmailMake preferred on SummaryShowRobinhood says its new blockchain isn't trying to compete with crypto-native trading venues like Hyperliquid — it wants to bring its 10 million active users into onchain finance for the first time. But the data so far tells a more complicated story.Despite generating $878 million in 24-hour DEX volume on July 12 and briefly overtaking Base and Ethereum, the chain's activity has been dominated by memecoin speculation rather than the tokenized stocks and ETFs it was built for.Of the $734 million bridged onto the chain, only $211 million is actually deployed in lending or yield products, while the chain's tokenized real-world asset market cap sits at just $12.66 million — dwarfed by CASHCAT, a cat-themed memecoin, which peaked at $156 million.Robinhood Chain briefly climbed to No. 2 in decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume over the last weekend, prompting comparisons with some of crypto's largest networks. But Robinhood says those comparisons miss the point.The popular trading app argues that its opportunity is not to take volume from established crypto-native venues, but rather to leverage Robinhood’s more than 10 million active users to bring new investors into tokenized assets and onchain derivatives. "Our opportunity isn't to take volume from existing crypto traders. Most people have never touched a perpetuals contract, not necessarily because they don't want exposure, but because the on-ramps have never been there. We're changing that," Seong Seog Lee, Head of Product at Robinhood Crypto, to…

Inside Robinhood’s high-stakes bet to onboard 10 million casual users onto decentralized finance

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