Robinhood Chain mirrors Base’s early memecoin problem

Robinhood opened Robinhood Chain to the public on July 1. Built on Arbitrum technology, the network launched with integrations from Uniswap, Chainlink and BitGo and introduced around-the-clock stock tokens to eligible customers in more than 120 countries. Robinhood promoted self-custody features through the Robinhood Wallet and supported lending and decentralized exchange activity.

Within a week monthly active addresses on the chain rose roughly tenfold to more than 1 million. Decentralized exchanges on the network handled about $3.1 billion in spot trading over a seven-day span. Stablecoin balances on the chain exceeded $300 million and the network generated more than $800,000 in revenue over seven days, figures provided by on-chain analytics.

Much of the early trading activity involved speculative tokens. Tom Wan, head of data at Entropy Advisors, estimated memecoins accounted for about 80% of spot trading on Robinhood Chain. One cat-themed token, CASHCAT, reached a market value near $150 million during its initial rally. About 62,000 unique addresses held stock or ETF tokens on the chain within two weeks, representing roughly 11.1% of addresses holding tokenized stocks across the market.

Coinbase’s Base previously emphasized consumer-facing social products such as Farcaster, Zora, mini apps and creator coins. In a post on X, Jesse Pollak wrote: “The entire social side of the market that many of us had been building towards — Farcaster, Zora, mini apps, and yes, creator coins — disintegrated completely.” Base is refocusing on trading, payments and tokenized assets. Development of the Base consumer app moved back to Coinbase, with Jordan Fish taking lead on the app while Pollak concentrates on using the network for settlement and supporting AI agents that can hold and spend cryptocurrency. Coinbase acquired Fish’s Echo platform in 2025 for about $375 million; Echo had facilitated over $200 million across roughly 300 deals before the purchase.

Analysts have offered revenue scenarios tied to broader adoption. Jon Ma, co-founder and CEO of Artemis, estimated a theoretical upside of up to $10 billion in annual revenue if a network reached 100 million monthly users and averaged $100 in revenue per user per year.

Both Robinhood Chain and Base are shifting product focus toward tokenized stocks, stablecoins, payments and settlement. Early on-chain figures show rapid user and trading growth alongside high levels of speculative token activity.