Robinhood Chain has recorded less than 1% of its analyzed transactions through a contract clearly linked to Robinhood Wallet users, according to ARK Invest research director Lorenzo Valente.
Summary
- Less than 1% of analyzed transactions passed through the confirmed Robinhood Wallet swap route.
- Valente estimated Robinhood-linked activity could reach about 5% after including unidentified contracts.
- GMGN and OKX accounted for much of the remaining activity identified in the analysis.
- Robinhood Chain remains open to outside wallets, trading terminals and EVM-compatible applications.
According to Lorenzo Valente’s analysis, contract-level data indicates that most trading on Robinhood Chain comes from existing on-chain traders rather than new cryptocurrency users entering through Robinhood.
Valente, ARK Invest’s director of research for digital assets, examined which smart contracts generated transactions on the network. His review sought to separate activity that could be linked directly to Robinhood products from trades routed through outside wallets and applications.
Robinhood Wallet sends swaps through the 0x Settler contract, making that route the clearest source of transactions from the company’s wallet users, according to Valente. Transactions involving the contract represented less than 1% of the activity included in his analysis.
Allowing for contracts that could not be identified raised the possible Robinhood-linked share to about 5%, he estimated. Valente described the estimate as generous because some of the unidentified activity could also have come from outside trading services.
Robinhood Chain activity comes mainly from external platforms
Most of the identifiable volume outside the 0x Settler route came through GMGN and OKX, Valente said. Both platforms give traders access to on-chain assets without requiring them to use Robinhood Wallet as their main entry point.
GMGN functions as a trading terminal for users seeking newly issued tokens and other speculative assets across several blockchains. OKX also offers a Web3 wallet and decentralized exchange tools that can connect to Ethereum Virtual Machine networks.
Comparing the transaction patterns across chains, Valente said the activity on Robinhood Chain resembled the behavior already seen from users of the same services elsewhere. He described the network as attracting the “same degens” to a new blockchain, rather than showing clear evidence that Robinhood had introduced a separate group of users to on-chain markets.
Valente framed the observation as his reading of the contract data, not a customer count supplied by Robinhood. Wallets can also interact through aggregators, custom contracts, or routes that make their original source difficult to identify, limiting how precisely public blockchain data can assign transactions to individual platforms.
The findings concern transaction origins rather than the number of people using each wallet. One address may belong to a single user, a trading bot, an application, or a service that combines transactions for several customers.
An open network complicates Robinhood user counts
Robinhood Chain operates as a permissionless Ethereum Layer 2 built with Arbitrum technology. EVM-compatible wallets and applications can connect without holding a Robinhood brokerage account, while developers can deploy contracts without restricting access to the company’s customers.
Such access means the network’s total transactions, fees, and decentralized exchange volume cannot automatically be treated as Robinhood customer activity. A trade made through GMGN or OKX still appears on Robinhood Chain, even when the trader never enters through Robinhood’s wallet interface.
The distinction matters because the network has generated large trading and revenue figures since its July 1 mainnet launch. Crypto.news previously reported that three leading applications produced about 93% of measured application revenue during one 24-hour period.
GMGN led that snapshot with approximately $1.11 million, followed by the Pons token-launch platform with about $1.03 million and Uniswap with roughly $327,707. The concentration supported the view that a small group of crypto-native services drove much of the network’s early fee activity.
On Sept. 2, Robinhood Chain generated $4.01 million in chain revenue from $4.45 million in total fees, according to DeFiLlama data cited in a separate report. Its cumulative decentralized exchange volume had also crossed $47 billion in under two months, while GMGN and Pons accounted for much of the memecoin trading.
Robinhood has covered transaction costs during the network’s first 90 days, with the gas subsidy scheduled to run through the end of September. The free gas program has allowed traders and applications to execute transactions without paying the usual network fee themselves.
Tokenized stocks form a smaller but growing market
Robinhood introduced the chain partly as infrastructure for tokenized stocks, real-world assets, and decentralized finance. Trading activity, however, has also spread into memecoins and newly issued tokens that are not central to the brokerage’s stock-token strategy.
Uniswap processed $1 billion in cumulative tokenized-stock volume on Robinhood Chain by Aug. 21. The total covered swaps involved several stock-linked tokens rather than assets deposited on the network or trading in a single product.
Stock tokens remain unavailable to investors in the United States. Robinhood has offered the products across more than 120 countries, according to its August earnings call, allowing eligible overseas customers to gain price exposure to U.S. stocks through blockchain-based instruments.
For American readers, Robinhood Markets remains the direct listed exposure to the company’s blockchain strategy through its Nasdaq-traded HOOD shares. On-chain transactions generated by outside services should not be treated as equivalent to new U.S. brokerage accounts, cryptocurrency customers, or revenue reported in Robinhood’s financial statements.
Robinhood reported 28.4 million funded customers at the end of the second quarter, up 1.9 million, or 7%, from a year earlier. Its investment accounts increased 9% to 29.9 million, while total platform assets reached $369 billion, according to the company’s second-quarter results.
Robinhood’s customer base remains a separate metric
Supporters of the network have pointed to Robinhood’s existing customer base as a possible route for bringing more people on-chain. BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said in August that access to millions of funded accounts could make Robinhood Chain an important source of new Ethereum users.
Early network data has not yet established that connection, according to Valente’s contract review. Confirmed Robinhood Wallet routing represented only a small part of the transactions he examined, while trading terminals used by experienced crypto participants accounted for most of the activity he could identify.
Robinhood said during its second-quarter earnings call that it served more than 1 million accounts outside the United States. The company also reported quarterly revenue of $1.3 billion, up 32% from a year earlier, and said it added nearly 1 million funded customers during the quarter.
