Which Altcoins Benefit from the Popularity of Robinhood Chain Without Issuing Tokens?

Original | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )

Author | Asher ( @Asher_0210 )

In just two months since its launch, Robinhood Chain has become one of the fastest-growing and most-discussed public chains in the community.

According to data from DefiLlama, on September 1, the trading volume of Robinhood Chain DEX exceeded $1.5 billion, surpassing Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Base at one point; the on-chain TVL also grew from less than $100 million at launch to nearly $800 million.

Since Robinhood Chain has not yet issued a native token, crypto investors optimistic about the continued growth of users, assets, and trading volume on this chain can focus on popular projects on Robinhood Chain; on the other hand, with a large influx of funds, projects providing trading, lending, and underlying infrastructure for Robinhood Chain may also gain users, revenue, or token demand.

So, which protocols are benefiting from the increasing trading volume and funds on Robinhood Chain? Which tokens have truly captured the growth dividends of this chain?

Odaily Planet Daily will analyze the value connections between UNI, MORPHO, LIT, ARB, and Robinhood Chain in this article (ETH, while serving as the gas and settlement asset for this chain, has limited incremental impact relative to its size, so it will not be included in the discussion).

Uniswap Captures Major Trading Share on Robinhood Chain, Protocol Fees Drive Token Burn

Robinhood Chain did not build its liquidity system from scratch but directly integrated Uniswap V2, V3, and V4. The Robinhood team positions Uniswap as the main public liquidity protocol on the chain, and most DEX trades on Robinhood Chain are completed through Uniswap. Therefore, regardless of whether the popularity on Robinhood Chain comes from meme coins, protocol tokens, or stock tokens, the growth in trading volume will primarily translate into Uniswap's trading volume and fee income.

Since July, Robinhood Chain has become one of Uniswap's most important sources of revenue. In July, Uniswap's daily fees reached approximately $5.16 million, of which about $4.38 million came from Robinhood Chain, accounting for nearly 85%. As of today, Uniswap's protocol revenue over the past 30 days is $9.19 million, with Robinhood Chain contributing $4.36 million, accounting for 47.4%.

In addition to native assets like meme coins, Robinhood Chain is bringing a new RWA trading increment to Uniswap. About six weeks after Robinhood Chain's launch, the cumulative trading volume of stock tokens processed by Uniswap reached $1.5 billion; as of today, the daily trading volume of stock tokens has further risen to $355 million, a 30-fold increase compared to a month ago. As the trading volume of stock tokens expands, the trading volume and fees that Uniswap can obtain are also increasing.

The increase in Uniswap's revenue, coupled with the implementation of the UNIfication proposal by the end of 2025, will officially launch the Protocol Fee, and this portion of revenue will be used for continuous UNI burns, transforming UNI from a "pure governance asset" to an asset clearly linked to protocol usage and revenue.

As of August 31, approximately 110 million UNI have been burned. Of these, 100 million came from a one-time treasury burn at the time of UNIfication's implementation, while the continuous burns generated by the protocol fee mechanism have reached about 10 million UNI. Recently, with the growth in protocol revenue, the burn rate has further accelerated, with multiple trading days in August seeing daily burns exceeding 100,000 UNI, and on August 21, approximately 150,000 UNI were burned in a single day, worth about $590,000, setting a new daily burn record since the mechanism was launched.

Lighter Becomes the Perpetual Contract Entry for Robinhood Wallet

When the mainnet of Robinhood Chain launched, Lighter was directly embedded into Robinhood Wallet, becoming the entry point for perpetual contracts within the wallet. Compliant users no longer need to switch to other DeFi frontends to trade Lighter's perpetual contracts within the wallet. Additionally, Lighter's official team stated that they are providing 11 million LIT as incentives for the Robinhood community, allowing users to earn double points when trading through Robinhood Wallet.

Unlike ordinary protocol deployments, the perpetual contracts on Robinhood are provided by Lighter, which offers underlying trading services and uses USDG as collateral and pricing asset. Lighter's founder, Vladimir Novakovski, previously revealed that both parties share the revenue from this business on a 50:50 basis, with Lighter's portion being used for LIT buybacks.

Data from DefiLlama shows that Lighter's perpetual contracts on Robinhood Chain have a cumulative trading volume of approximately $5.07 billion, with about $4.97 billion in the last 30 days and about $1.75 billion in the last 7 days. During the same period, Robinhood Chain contributed approximately $741,000 in fees and $537,000 in protocol revenue to Lighter.

Compared to just deploying contracts on Robinhood Chain, Lighter has directly accessed the user entry and order flow of the wallet. If Robinhood users' demand for trading perpetual contracts continues to rise, Lighter's revenue and LIT buyback scale will also grow accordingly.

Morpho as the Lending Infrastructure Behind Robinhood Earn

On July 1, the day Robinhood Chain's mainnet launched, Robinhood simultaneously launched the on-chain yield product Robinhood Earn and chose Morpho as the underlying lending protocol. Users can directly purchase USDG within the Robinhood App and then deposit USDG into the Morpho Vault managed by Steakhouse Financial through a self-custody wallet to earn yields. For ordinary users, the front end remains Robinhood, but the funds actually enter Morpho.

Less than two weeks after Robinhood Earn's launch, the deposit scale exceeded $100 million, further surpassing $250 million in early August. As funds continued to flow in, Robinhood Chain quickly grew to become Morpho's third-largest market, with an overall scale only second to Ethereum and Base.

Morpho's official data panel shows that the total deposits on Morpho in Robinhood Chain are approximately $932 million, with outstanding loans of about $412 million and a TVL of about $521 million.

However, unlike UNI, which can directly capture the trading growth of Robinhood Chain through protocol fees and burn mechanisms, Morpho's fees are still primarily flowing to lenders. Although the protocol has already built in a Protocol Fee switch, it has not yet been activated, so the growth brought by Robinhood Chain is more reflected in the scale of funds and lending demand, and has not yet directly translated into value capture for MORPHO.

After embedding Morpho into its Earn product, Robinhood is responsible for the user entry, while Morpho provides the underlying lending infrastructure. As Robinhood Earn continues to expand, Morpho's lending scale is also expected to grow in tandem; if the Protocol Fee is activated in the future, this growth may further translate into protocol revenue.

10% of Robinhood Chain's Revenue Flows to the Arbitrum Ecosystem

Unlike Uniswap, Morpho, and Lighter as applications on Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum provides a more fundamental blockchain infrastructure.

Robinhood Chain itself is built on Arbitrum Dedicated Blockchains as an Ethereum Layer 2, running Arbitrum Nitro and using Ethereum for data availability and settlement. According to the revenue-sharing mechanism of the Arbitrum Expansion Program, Robinhood Chain is required to return 10% of its net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem, with 8% going to the ArbitrumDAO Treasury and 2% to the Arbitrum Developer Guild.

As of now, Robinhood Chain has contributed approximately $1.3 million to the Arbitrum ecosystem, of which $1.04 million has gone to the ArbitrumDAO Treasury; in just the last 30 days, it has contributed about $665,000, with $532,000 belonging to the DAO.

However, this portion of revenue is currently not directly distributed to ARB holders, nor is there a corresponding ARB buyback or burn mechanism. Therefore, the value capture of ARB by Robinhood Chain is significantly weaker than that of UNI. Compared to short-term revenue, the more important significance of Robinhood Chain to Arbitrum is proving that this technology stack can support on-chain business for large financial institutions. If more institutions choose to build independent chains on Arbitrum in the future, Arbitrum DAO can continue to benefit from revenue sharing.