Robinhood Chain Faces First Test as Gas Subsidy Ends

For its first three months, using Robinhood Chain cost nothing. Since the public mainnet went live on July 1, 2026, Robinhood covered network fees for transactions made through Robinhood Wallet. That 90-day gas subsidy expired on September 29, and every transaction on the chain now pays a network fee in ETH again. The coming weeks will show how much of the chain's explosive growth was driven by free gas.

What Robinhood Chain is

Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum layer-2 network built on the Arbitrum platform. Robinhood launched the public mainnet at an event in London on July 1, with Uniswap and Pleiades as day-one exchanges and Alchemy, BitGo and Chainlink among its infrastructure partners. Its flagship product is Stock Tokens — tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs that eligible users in more than 120 countries can trade around the clock through Robinhood Wallet, depending on their jurisdiction.

Three months of subsidised growth

Value locked: rose from about $4 million in June to roughly $1.4 billion by late August, before settling near $738 million on September 1 and about $929 million by September 17.
Trading volume: daily DEX volume peaked around $1.5 billion in early September, with cumulative DEX volume reaching about $67.4 billion by mid-September.
Revenue: on September 2 the chain earned about $4.01 million in revenue, more than Solana's roughly $81,700 that day.

Built for stocks, powered by memecoins

The activity has not come mainly from the product Robinhood built the chain for. Most fee-generating transactions ran through Pons, a memecoin launchpad, and trading bots. At its peak, Pons saw about 22,600 new tokens created in a single day and collected $4.89 million in fees on August 31 alone. That is exactly the kind of activity that tends to shrink once users pay for their own transactions.

Stock Tokens are still growing, though. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said tokenized stock trading through Uniswap on Robinhood Chain reached $1 billion in August.

A new ceiling from the SEC

On September 17 the SEC issued a five-year innovation exemption for tokenized stocks, with hard limits:

Tier 1: up to 75 symbols, with volume capped at 0.25% of the underlying stock's average daily volume.
Tier 2: up to 250 symbols, with volume capped at 2.5% of average daily volume.
Venues that repeatedly breach a limit on a token must pause trading in it for three months.

Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood's general manager of crypto, said the company's stock token volume is "already pretty high and will hit some of its limits." Robinhood says it plans to add voting rights and in-kind redemption to Stock Tokens and to expand its U.S. stock and ETF coverage.

Meanwhile, at HOOD Summit

On September 29, the same day the subsidy ended, Robinhood used its HOOD Summit to announce perpetual futures for eligible U.S. customers "in the coming months": BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK and HYPE, with up to 10x leverage on BTC and ETH and 3x on the rest, and a promotional fee of one basis point per trade through year-end. These run through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp rather than on the chain itself.

What to watch next

Memecoin volume: whether launchpad and bot activity survives real gas costs.
Stock Token demand: the most durable use case — but now capped by the SEC's volume limits.
TVL and bridged assets: whether capital stays on the chain once the incentive is gone.

Free-gas periods often produce eye-catching numbers that fade. Robinhood Chain's next few weeks of data will show whether its user base sticks around once it has to pay its own way.

Featured image: Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016. Photo: TechCrunch / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).