Tokenized stocks have existed for years without finding an audience. Crypto-native issuers built the wrappers, but none owned a retail brokerage, so the products sat on venues their target buyers never visited. The constraint was distribution, and distribution belongs to the incumbents.
On July 1, 2026 Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum layer 2 that ships with the company's nearly 28M customers attached.
In this edition, we look at what the chain is, what shipped at launch, and whether the early activity is the activity that matters.
Robinhood Chain is a permissionless, EVM-compatible layer 2, a network that settles transactions to Ethereum without congesting it directly, built on Arbitrum’s dedicated-chain stack with ETH as the gas token. The public testnet opened in February at Consensus Hong Kong, and mainnet followed on July 1. It exists to host tokenized RWAs, primarily equities, where Robinhood’s users already are, with self-custody and round-the-clock settlement instead of brokerage hours.
Robinhood Crypto@RobinhoodCrypto
Robinhood Chain mainnet is live. An AI-native blockchain built to bring real-world assets onchain. Learn more: robinhood.com/chain
6:39 PM · Jul 1, 2026 · 626K Views
182 Replies · 257 Reposts · 1.49K Likes
The design choices favor compatibility over novelty. Contracts written in Solidity or Vyper deploy without modification, standard tooling works out of the box, and sequencing is first-come, first-served, so no transaction jumps the queue by paying more. Uniswap deployed a dedicated automated market maker as the public liquidity venue, Pleiades runs a proprietary one, and Alchemy, BitGo, and Chainlink provide infrastructure, with Chainlink’s oracles and crosschain messaging live at mainnet to price Robinhood-issued assets.
The launch bundled the chain with the products that give it a reason to exist. Stock Tokens went live in the Robinhood Wallet across more than 120 countries, tradable 24/7 through DEXs including Uniswap, Rialto, Lighter, Arcus, and 1inch, and usable as lending collateral across DeFi. The tokens are not available in the US and are structured as tokenized debt securities, so holders get economic exposure without shares or shareholder rights.
Robinhood Crypto@RobinhoodCrypto
Shout out to our featured partners building with Robinhood Chain since day one. Learn more: robinhood.com/us/en/chain/ec…
4:39 PM · Jul 14, 2026 · 158K Views
288 Replies · 125 Reposts · 1.26K Likes
Robinhood Earn also began rolling out to eligible US users: a self-custody lending product for USDG, Robinhood’s dollar-backed stablecoin, built on Morpho at an estimated 7% APY, insured through Lloyd’s of London and RELM.
Morpho 🦋@Morpho
Robinhood Earn, powered by Morpho Millions of eligible @RobinhoodApp users can now earn onchain yield from a Morpho Vault curated by @SteakhouseFi via noncustodial wallets. This is how we bring the benefits of onchain finance to the world.
7:04 PM · Jul 1, 2026 · 133K Views
64 Replies · 86 Reposts · 619 Likes
They are also trying to ride the AI wave by introducing AI-native markets with agents able to trade, swap, and lend tokenized assets onchain, and launch week reporting 2,100 agents generating $77M in volume.
TVL crossed $100M in the second week, but early traders are picking memecoins over Apple, so the launch numbers measure speculative churn, a pattern every new L2 produces and few sustain, rather than demand for equities onchain. Despite this, memecoins have proven to be the best go-to-market strategies for onboarding users, as we have seen in the past with Solana, Base, and many more.
Vlad Tenev@vladtenev
While we’re building robinhood chain to be the best chain for RWA … it works great for memes too
3:23 AM · Jul 8, 2026 · 3.96M Views
2.51K Replies · 1.28K Reposts · 9.58K Likes
Robinhood operates the sequencer, the node that batches and submits transactions, so the chain is permissionless to build on but centrally operated. There is no chain token, and fees accrue to Robinhood Markets, so the trade is HOOD equity rather than anything onchain. Coinbase’s Base showed an exchange-owned L2 can convert an existing user base into durable onchain activity, and Robinhood starts with the same asset and a large captive funnel of retail traders.
The number to track is tokenized equity volume as a share of the chain’s DEX activity. Memecoin churn decays on every new chain but a brokerage’s customers trading NVDA and AAPL at 3am, borrowing against them, and lending USDG is the behavior no competing L2 can replicate without Robinhood’s licenses and user base.
Vlad Tenev@vladtenev
If you're a builder looking to embed stock tokens or RWA into your applications, we want to hear from you
5:39 AM · Jul 15, 2026 · 292K Views
952 Replies · 171 Reposts · 2.18K Likes
If Stock Token volume grows into the primary form of activity over the coming quarters, the distribution thesis holds and tokenized equities start seeing rapid growth.
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