One week. That’s all it took for Robinhood’s new Ethereum Layer-2 community to dethrone Hyperliquid as the highest decentralized alternate by 24-hour buying and selling quantity. On July 8, Robinhood Chain posted between $560 million and $570 million in day by day DEX quantity, eclipsing what had been the dominant perps-and-spot platform in DeFi.
The catalyst wasn’t some blue-chip DeFi protocol or a revolutionary new buying and selling primitive. It was a memecoin referred to as Money Cat.
A sequence launch turbocharged by a cat token
Robinhood Chain went reside on July 1 as a permissionless Ethereum Layer-2 community constructed on the Arbitrum stack. It integrates Uniswap for buying and selling, Chainlink for oracles, and Morpho for lending.
CASHCAT, a memecoin buying and selling on Uniswap WETH pairs on the brand new chain, surged to an all-time excessive above $0.14. Its market cap ballooned to someplace between $100 million and $150 million in a single day. The token alone accounted for roughly $98 million in 24-hour buying and selling quantity, performing because the rocket gasoline that pushed Robinhood Chain’s whole DEX numbers previous Hyperliquid’s.
The numbers behind the surge
Day by day lively addresses on Robinhood Chain approached 200,000, with greater than 140,000 of these being first-time customers.
The chain’s whole worth locked crossed $100 million inside its first week, pushed primarily by Morpho lending exercise.
For context on what Robinhood Chain was up towards: Hyperliquid had amassed $330.8 billion in mixed spot and perpetual buying and selling quantity by July 2025. Robinhood’s total crypto buying and selling quantity sat at $237.8 billion over the identical interval.
Conventional finance meets permissionless chaos
Robinhood Chain is constructed on the Arbitrum stack, integrating Uniswap for buying and selling interfaces, Chainlink for worth feeds, and Morpho for lending. The permissionless nature of the chain means anybody can deploy tokens and create buying and selling pairs, which is how Money Cat emerged organically reasonably than via a company partnership announcement.
What this implies for buyers
Buying and selling volumes on Robinhood Chain have already begun to stabilize at decrease ranges because the July 8 peak. The $100 million-plus in TVL from Morpho lending is a distinct sign: lending exercise suggests customers are deploying capital for yield, not simply flipping tokens.
