Activity on Robinhood Chain has accelerated significantly over the past week. According to DefiLlama, the network surpassed Ethereum and Hyperliquid in 24-hour app revenue, ranking behind only Solana. Within the same window, the chain recorded $874.8 million in DEX volume, while daily transactions hit 5,521,213 yesterday — the network's largest day since mainnet went live on July 1. The chain is the brokerage's own layer-2 network, built on Arbitrum's Orbit stack and integrated with Robinhood's retail trading app, which gives it a distribution channel into a user base that most new networks lack.

In terms of daily DEX volume, the chain has completed a full round trip in two months. After launch-week euphoria gave way to a six-week drawdown to roughly $140 million per day in early August, the network staged a three-week climb that pushed past the previous highs set on July 11.

One Launchpad Accounted for Half the Record

Pons.family is a permissionless token launchpad on Robinhood Chain that lets any user deploy a fixed-supply token tradable against WETH, with the platform taking a cut of each swap. Since Noxa halted new token launches on July 11, Pons.family has become the chain's busiest token launchpad. The launchpad category has a long history on other chains — pump.fun on Solana being the most prominent example — and its economics tend to concentrate quickly in whichever venue wins the fee-and-attention race.

Pons drew $445.98 million in token volume yesterday, representing about 51% of everything traded across the chain that day. That figure is nearly 2.6 times the launchpad's own mid-July peak and more than twenty times its level in mid-August.

Uniswap Came for the Launchpad and Lost the Round

On August 5, Uniswap Labs launched Pools.trade, another launchpad built specifically for Robinhood Chain, featuring zero platform fees and permanently locked v4 liquidity. Token volume and daily token creation on the platform overtook Pons during the first 24 hours, but the momentum did not last.

Three weeks later, the incumbent is printing record volume. A reflexive fee loop is doing part of the work: per the protocol's documentation, Pons currently routes 80% of protocol fees into an automated TWAP buyback that sends PONS to a burn address. The team said on August 29 that 29% of the original 1 billion supply had been retired — the day before the record. Higher volume funds more burn, the token rallies, attention returns, and more tokens get launched on the back of it.

Leverage and Stock-Token Collateral Landed in the Same Window

Arcus, the dYdX-built DEX backed by Robinhood Crypto, launched pTokens on August 25. These wrap leveraged perpetual accounts into transferable ERC-20s, including pBTC3x and pHOOD3x. Arcus also began accepting SPY, QQQ, and MAG7 stock tokens as collateral at 50% LTV, giving traders a way to put tokenized equity exposure to work without unwinding it. The move fits a broader push by Robinhood into tokenized equities, which the company has rolled out for US-listed stocks and ETFs alongside its crypto offerings.

Then the wider market turned. Bitcoin has rallied since August 17 on what Bloomberg called a record $2.7 billion wave of short liquidations, the largest since records began in 2021, following a White House crypto meeting and a US Treasury move to double long-dated bond buybacks. BTC ran to a high near $81,500. Ether added nearly 29% on the week, with a long list of altcoins following.

Launchpad speculation is the highest-beta way to express that kind of rotation. Robinhood Chain's trough maps almost exactly onto the market's, and so does its recovery.

What the Record Does Not Settle

The July 11 high came from launch-week novelty. This one came from a single venue doing half the chain's throughput while a well-funded competitor sat on the same chain with lower fees. Both are volume records, but only one of them says much about how the chain performs when speculation cools.

Robinhood Chain's next test is whether transactions and volume hold any level without Pons carrying them. The ongoing Pons-versus-Pools.trade fee competition, the PONS burn rate, and whether Arcus's leverage and stock-token collateral products broaden the chain's activity base beyond launchpad trading are the observable signals to track in the weeks ahead.