Memecoins Push Robinhood Chain Past Solana and BNB Chain in Trading Fees

Robinhood launched its own blockchain on July 1 and spent the summer fielding questions about what it was for. Chris Perkins, head of Franklin Crypto, used Monday’s episode of Bits + Bips to answer one of them, and a day later Bernstein told clients the same thing in different words.

“I wanna defend Robinhood Chain here for a second because I thought it was an incredible unlock. They are printing money,” Perkins said on the show, recalling being in London for the launch. He praised how the company built the network, calling it “the DeFi mullet in action,” an industry phrase for a mainstream front end running on DeFi rails behind the scenes.

Bernstein’s analysts, led by Gautam Chhugani, told clients in a Tuesday note that they were keeping an Outperform rating and a $160 price target on Robinhood Markets. “The chain is now earnings,” they wrote, putting daily trading fees at $2 million to $4 million. Over the previous 15 days the network led every other chain with roughly $33 million. Solana took about $11 million in the same stretch, and BNB Chain close to $9 million. Nearly 90% of that revenue stays with Robinhood, the analysts said, with about a tenth going to Arbitrum, whose technology the chain runs on, and under 1% to Ethereum.

The money arrived fast. Robinhood Chain has taken in $23.8 million in fees over the past seven days against $33.5 million over 30, meaning roughly 71% of its month came from its last week, DefiLlama data shows. Solana collected $4.3 million over the same seven days.

Much of the activity is memecoins paired against thinly traded stocks. Host Austin Campbell said on the show that FARMI, a Nasdaq-listed Chinese dried mushroom seller with 15 employees, ran 350% on Wednesday with 720 million shares changing hands, about 90 times its average, after a memecoin using its ticker began trading on Robinhood Chain. Campbell compared the pattern to bucket shops, saying “capitalizing on thinly traded names at off hours to push price” was the same behavior.

Perkins, asked directly about it in the next segment, did not defend that part. “I think it’s a game,” he said. “It’s not an investment.” He called the equities linkage “GameStop 2.0,” said anyone playing is “probably gonna lose money” and added that manipulating these markets is illegal where the assets are commodities. On the chain permitting it at all, he said, “people can do what people feel like doing,” and called that “part of the things of running a decentralized chain.”

Related Listen: Why Robinhood Chain Saw Memecoins Take Off Before Real World Assets

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