I read Robinhood's two-month update on Robinhood Chain last night. On the surface it is a big win: $34.6B traded, 12.3M addresses, 576M transactions.

Here is the part the update leaves out. Robinhood earns very little on that volume. The chain collected about $20M in fees in two months. The Robinhood app made $100M on $18B of crypto trades in Q2, about half the chain's volume.

So Robinhood built a bigger venue that pays it roughly a tenth as much per dollar. This note explains why that is deliberate, and what happens when the free gas ends on 29 September.

Robinhood earns about a tenth as much on each dollar that trades on its chain.

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What Happened

On 2 September, Robinhood Crypto posted a two-month update on Robinhood Chain.

The numbers: $34.6B in total DEX volume, $1.27B in protocol TVL, 576M transactions, 12.3M addresses, 190+ stock tokens with $3B+ in cumulative DEX volume, and $7.29B in perps volume on Lighter.

The chain went live on 1 July. It is an Ethereum Layer 2 built on Arbitrum's stack, has no token, and charges gas in ETH. Robinhood has covered gas for wallet users since launch. That offer ends on 29 September.