Is Robinhood Chain Onboarding Retail?

Every chain launch says the same thing: we are bringing the next wave of users on-chain. Almost none of them do. What I have watched happen over the past few years is mostly rotation: the same user base going from one chain to the next, from one protocol to the next, and everybody keeps calling it growth.

Robinhood launched a chain 11 days ago. It is already doing 309,859 daily active addresses, which is more than Arbitrum.

So I went and read the chain: 7 days of its transactions, every lending position on it, and the balance of every active wallet I could reach. Here is what came out.

The base rate nobody publishes

Take any protocol and ask it one question: how many of your users had already touched blue-chip DeFi before you launched?

The lowest number I have ever measured is QuickSwap on Polygon, at 20.6%. That is the floor. Every protocol I have scanned recruits at least 1 in 5 of its users straight out of the same crowd, and the median recruits half.

Robinhood Chain is at 1.7%. 12x below the floor, 27x below the median.

The crowd, and whether it is real

The chain went live on July 2. It opened at 48,837 daily active addresses, and 8 days later it was at 309,859, with 9,966,192 transactions a day and 492,793 unique addresses in a week.

That is 32.2 transactions per address per day, from addresses whose median balance is $8.20. Nobody trades like that, so I went looking for the machines, and I found them.

So the transaction count is worthless. The address count survives it, because those bots are a handful of addresses making an enormous number of transactions, and most of the addresses I captured showed up exactly once.

What the new ones are doing

Buying memecoins, at $36 a go.

The busiest contract on the chain is a bonding curve, almost certainly hood.fun, and the second is Uniswap, which is the same flow one step later: you buy the coin on the curve, the curve fills, the coin graduates to a Uniswap pool, and you trade it there. The tokens are called CASHCAT, HOODBOY, JUGGERNAUT, TULIP and Pointless.

Not one of those people is doing anything a DeFi tool would recognise.

And the DeFi on it? 7 wallets

Because the chain does have DeFi, and it is the reason it shows up on dashboards at all. DefiLlama prints $119M of TVL on Robinhood Chain, so I pulled every Morpho position on it.

7 wallets supply the entire lending book, $109.3M. 2 of them are $109.0M of it.

99.7%.

How much they actually hold

The median wallet on Robinhood Chain holds $8.20.

34% of them hold more than $100. 13.9% hold more than $1,000.

So, did they onboard anyone?

They did. That part is real: almost none of these addresses show up on the other chains or on the blue-chip protocols, and no other launch I have measured comes within 12x of that. But the app they came for is a memecoin launchpad, and they are not touching DeFi at all. What these people do on Robinhood Chain beyond memes is the thing to watch, and 11 days in, nobody knows it yet, including me.

A few words on Otomato

This is the ad, and I would rather label it than dress it up.

Otomato babysits DeFi positions. We watch your wallet across 11 chains and tell you when something actually needs you: a health factor slipping, an LP out of range, a PT maturing. It is built for the funded, active core of DeFi, which in the dataset above is 29,430 wallets: human, active in the last 30 days, holding at least $1,000, with a real transaction history behind them.

It is not built for a wallet holding $8.20 of CASHCAT. Those people need a rug alert, not a health-factor alert, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make a TAM slide look better.

But 68,340 of those Robinhood addresses hold more than $1,000, and almost none of them are in my 371,330. That is a market that does not overlap the one every DeFi tool is already fighting over, and it is the first time I have been able to write that sentence about anything.

So here is the bet, and you can hold me to it: I am re-sampling the exact same wallets in 30 and 60 days. If 20% are still there and still funded, that is 14,000 people nobody has ever offered a decent on-chain tool, and I will build for them. If they are gone, it was a farm, and I will publish that instead.

What would you build for 68,340 wallets that have never met DeFi?

Clément Hecquet

CEO & Co-founder · Otomato

Co-founder and CEO of Otomato. Engineer turned product leader, building the portfolio-aware alerts layer for on-chain users.