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I run a centralized exchange, so I obviously have a position in this. When a retail financial platform with nearly 28 million customers launches its own Layer 2, my first thought is not that RobinhoodI run a centralized exchange, so I obviously have a position in this. When a retail financial platform with nearly 28 million customers launches its own Layer 2, my first thought is not that Robinhood

After Robinhood Chain: How Much Infrastructure Should a Financial Company Own?

2026/09/04 17:16

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I run a centralized exchange, so I obviously have a position in this.

When a retail financial platform with nearly 28 million customers launches its own Layer 2, my first thought is not that Robinhood has decided to build a blockchain. It is a more practical question. If brokers start building chains, wallets start handling trades, and exchanges start connecting to a widening range of onchain and traditional assets, how much meaning is left in the categories we have been using to describe this industry?

On July 1, Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain. It is a permissionless Ethereum Layer 2 built with the Arbitrum stack, settling back to Ethereum, running 100-millisecond blocks and aimed primarily at financial services and tokenized real-world assets. Uniswap deployed an AMM on day one as a public liquidity venue, Pleiades deployed a proprietary AMM, and Alchemy, BitGo and Chainlink integrated at the same time. The public testnet, running since February, cleared more than 200 million transactions before mainnet went live.

That is not a small investment, but the technical specifications are not the part I find most interesting. What makes Robinhood Chain worth discussing is that a financial platform is moving from using blockchain infrastructure to making it part of its own business architecture.

That shift runs deeper than the arrival of one more Layer 2.

Robinhood had the users and the products before it had the chain

Robinhood did not start from an empty network. In June 2025 it launched its first generation of Stock Tokens on Arbitrum One, offering European customers more than 200 tokenized US stock and ETF products. The range expanded from there, and only afterwards did Robinhood extend its onchain business onto a Layer 2 of its own. Arbitrum describes this kind of path as "launch-and-migrate."

The sequence matters. For most of the past decade the default was the opposite: build the chain first, then go looking for users. Recruit developers, subsidize liquidity, stand up an ecosystem fund, court projects, and only at the end find out whether real demand would stay. Plenty of networks have been through the phase where activity falls away once the incentives taper.

Robinhood took a different route. Before the chain existed there were already customers, an account system, a wallet and a mature product surface. The chain is not the starting point of the business model. It is a further extension into infrastructure, made after the existing business reached a certain scale.

So I would not read Robinhood Chain as evidence that dedicated chains are becoming fashionable among traditional brokers. What it shows is narrower: for financial platforms with enough users, enough transaction demand and a clear product case, building a chain is no longer a technical experiment. It has become an infrastructure option that can enter a management-level strategy discussion.

A dedicated chain is a commercial decision before it is a technical one

Engineering teams obviously have a say in whether a financial company should run its own chain, but the decision is ultimately about capital allocation and business architecture.

Using an existing network has direct advantages: security, developer tooling, an established ecosystem and some liquidity all come ready-made, with nothing to rebuild from scratch. The cost is equally direct — the platform accepts that network's execution environment, fee mechanics and technical limits. A dedicated chain buys back control instead. How fast transactions confirm, how fees are designed, how products connect to one another, which capabilities live onchain: all of it can be reconfigured around the business.

But control and responsibility increase together. Who is accountable for network security, how bridging works, where market makers come from, how liquidity is routed, why third-party developers would stay, whether the network holds up in extreme market conditions — none of that disappears simply because you built the chain yourself.

Nor does building your own chain mean independence. Under the Arbitrum Expansion Program, Robinhood Chain returns 10 percent of net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem. That number tells the story: operating your own network is not a leap from dependence to full autonomy. It is a redivision of control, cost and responsibility within the same technical system.

So I do not expect dedicated Layer 2s to become standard equipment for brokers and trading platforms. They will be an option, but the long-term investment only holds up when the commercial case is strong enough. The test is not complicated. If a platform cannot say which key products a dedicated chain would meaningfully improve — in performance, cost, control or integration — then shared infrastructure is almost certainly the more efficient choice.

Arriving with users changes how Layer 2s compete

Chains have traditionally been judged on throughput, gas costs, total value locked, developer counts and onchain activity. Those measures still matter, but a case like this one adds a variable that used to sit further in the background: existing distribution.

At mainnet launch Robinhood covered 38 countries with close to 28 million customers, and its subsequently disclosed July operating metrics put that figure above 28.5 million. Its new Stock Tokens are available through Robinhood Wallet to eligible users in more than 120 countries. That is not the same as a network starting from zero. A conventional Layer 2 builds infrastructure first and then looks for applications and users; a financial platform building its own chain may have the users, the products and the traffic first, and then decide which parts of the business are worth moving onchain.

None of which means the ecosystem will succeed. Customers willing to use Robinhood are not developers willing to build around Robinhood Chain for years, and 28.5 million accounts do not make onchain liquidity deep by themselves. Market makers, DeFi protocols, bridging infrastructure and third-party applications still accumulate through real demand and time. But the starting line has moved. The hardest question for a new chain has usually been where users come from, and for a platform like this one that question already has a partial answer.

This may also change how the Layer 2 market competes. Some of the most significant networks may not appear to ordinary users as independent blockchain brands at all, sitting instead behind a broker, a payments platform, an exchange or a large financial application. The user knows Robinhood, or a bank, or a wallet; whether the Arbitrum stack or another architecture is running underneath is not something most people will ask. Mature infrastructure tends to go through exactly this process.

The more important it becomes, the less it needs to be seen.

More chains, and a growing premium on organizing liquidity

If financial platforms keep moving down the stack, the market runs into a second problem. The number of chains goes up. Liquidity does not appear out of nowhere.

Every additional execution environment is potentially another pool. Digital asset markets are already fragmented enough, with capital spread across centralized exchanges, DEXs, different Layer 1s, different Layer 2s and a long list of onchain protocols. If more brokers, fintechs and trading platforms begin operating their own networks, the underlying structure only gets more complicated.

Which produces a tension worth watching:

The base layer keeps fragmenting while the layer users see keeps consolidating.

Nobody wants to research which chain the liquidity is on before placing a trade, and no one should have to work out whether their order ended up on an order book, an AMM or some other onchain venue. Users care about a short list of concrete things: whether the asset is there, whether the price is fair, whether the trade completes, whether their money is safe. Where the liquidity ultimately comes from should be the platform's problem to solve.

Traditional finance works the same way. An investor opening a brokerage app rarely investigates which venue the order reached or which clearing system processed it. The simpler the front end, the more complex the market structure behind it usually is. Crypto is now building its own version of that arrangement, and if the direction holds, one of the most valuable capabilities will not be creating more isolated pools of liquidity but reconnecting the ones that exist. Bridging, routing, aggregation, settlement and unified account systems all become more important as a result.

Centralized exchanges are not disappearing, but matching alone is no longer enough

The simplest narrative is that as onchain finance matures, centralized exchanges become more marginal.

I do not accept that linear reading.

Centralized exchanges solved a very specific set of problems early on: they concentrated liquidity, simplified custody and trading, and let ordinary users enter this market without understanding private keys, gas or complex onchain operations. Not one of those needs has disappeared. What has changed is that no exchange can now assume every asset, every pool of liquidity and every user behaviour will stay inside its own order book for good — and equally, no DEX or Layer 2 can assume users will interact with base-layer protocols directly just because the technology is more open.

The reality is more likely to be mixed. Some trades continue to clear on centralized order books while other assets move onchain; some users prefer custodial accounts, some prefer self-custody, and a great many use both. Financial markets have rarely relied on a single trading mechanism, and digital assets will not be the exception.

So I think of the exchange less as a venue and more as an entry point. It has to offer good execution and sufficient liquidity first, of course. But it also has to answer a second question: as assets, networks and markets grow more distributed, can a user still reach those opportunities through a reasonably simple front door?

This is not abstract for us. In my letter earlier this year I described a MEXC user who started out trading only crypto and later began following IPOs, gold and oil. That example convinced me of something I keep returning to: today's retail investors are not simply crypto investors anymore. They are opportunity investors. Over the past period we have been widening the markets those users can reach beyond crypto, including equity-linked products and prediction markets. That is the same direction as the "Infinite Opportunities" idea MEXC has been building around: users should not have to move between disconnected platforms to find opportunities in different markets. The aim is not an endlessly longer product list. It is that users stopped organizing their own decisions around the industry's categories some time ago.

Tokenization puts brokers, exchanges and chains in the same market

Robinhood Chain carries one further implication: it was not built simply to add another way to trade crypto assets, but with tokenized real-world assets at the centre from the start.

The two generations of Stock Tokens need to be kept apart here. The Classic Stock Tokens launched in 2025 are, in substance, derivative contracts between the customer and Robinhood Europe. The new Stock Tokens launched in 2026 are issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited as tokenized debt securities, giving holders economic exposure to the underlying securities without granting any legal or beneficial rights in those securities or against their issuer.

The legal structures of the two products are not the same.

That distinction should not be blurred. Tokenization changes the technical container of an asset, making it easier to program, transfer and use across onchain applications. It does not rewrite the legal relationships underneath, and it does not make any jurisdiction's regulatory requirements disappear. The technical layer and the legal layer remain two different things.

From a competitive standpoint, though, the effect is already visible. Crypto exchanges, brokers, wallets and Layer 2 providers used to occupy separate tracks; now they are entering the same market. Exchanges list equity-linked and other traditional asset products. Brokers build their own blockchains. Wallets carry trading and DeFi functions. Layer 2 providers increasingly resemble enterprise infrastructure vendors sitting behind financial institutions.

If a broker holds securities accounts, crypto trading, a wallet, stock tokens and its own Layer 2, is it still a broker in the traditional sense? If a crypto exchange connects digital assets, equity-linked products, commodities and prediction markets, is it still just a spot trading venue? What needs redefining may not be the classification of any single company, but the boundary of the financial platform itself.

What is really being rewritten is the role of the platform

I would not conclude from this launch that every broker should have its own Layer 2. Most companies have no reason to. Shared infrastructure remains cheaper, more mature and easier to plug into an existing ecosystem and its liquidity.

But Robinhood has moved a previously marginal question into mainstream strategic discussion:

How much infrastructure should a financial company use, and how much should it own?

That question will get harder to avoid. Layer 2 technology may gradually recede behind financial products. Wallets will keep extending into trading and financial services. Tokenization will bring more traditional assets onchain. Exchanges will have to connect markets and liquidity far more complex than before. The resulting structure is not hard to describe: what users see keeps getting simpler while the systems underneath keep getting more complicated.

For a trading platform, the job therefore stops being just running a good matching engine. You also have to know where assets are issued, where liquidity forms, how users want to hold what they own, and how those assets move across different networks and markets.

It is far too early to say whether Robinhood Chain grows into an onchain financial ecosystem of real scale. But it has already made one thing clear to the industry: brokers, exchanges, wallets and blockchains are moving from adjacent tracks onto the same competitive map. The next phase of competition between financial platforms may not be decided by trading volume and user counts alone, but by who can organize assets, liquidity, accounts and underlying infrastructure most effectively.

About the Author

Vugar Usi is the CEO of MEXC, where he leads the company's global strategy, business growth, and long-term vision to build a more open and inclusive digital asset ecosystem. Prior to joining MEXC, he served as Chief Operating Officer at Bitget, where he played a key role in expanding the platform's global operations and user base. With more than 15 years of experience in marketing, communications, and brand strategy, Vugar has worked with leading global brands including Carlsberg, Facebook, Coca-Cola, and Twitter. He holds a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University and previously served as an advisor to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on minority issues.

Disclaimer

This article reflects the personal views of the author and is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment, financial, legal, or tax advice and should not be relied upon when making any investment or business decision. The stock tokens referenced in this article are financial products with a specific legal structure that differs from direct ownership of the corresponding shares, and their issuance, sale and use may be restricted in certain jurisdictions. Digital asset markets are highly volatile, and participation involves substantial risk, including the possible loss of principal. Readers should conduct their own research and seek independent professional advice before making any financial decisions. MEXC assumes no responsibility or liability for any losses arising from the use of the information contained in this article.

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