Robinhood Chain Logs Record $944.57M Daily DEX Volume on Ethereum (ETH)

Robinhood Chain Sets DEX Volume Record

Robinhood Chain, the Ethereum (ETH) layer-2 network built by brokerage Robinhood, logged its largest day of decentralized exchange activity to date on Aug. 29. On-chain data from DefiLlama shows the network's daily DEX volume reached $944.57 million, clearing the prior peak set in mid-July. Volume on DEXs — venues where protocols such as Uniswap and DeXe settle swaps directly on-chain — had troughed near $300 million in mid-August before recovering across several consecutive trading days. The record also represents a step up from the $657.83 million in 24-hour volume that had ranked the chain fourth among all networks earlier in the week. Because DEX throughput counts only swaps executed on the chain itself, sustained growth generally points to rising liquidity provision, token exchange and protocol usage rather than off-chain activity. As an Ethereum layer-2, the network offers materially lower gas fees than mainnet, a structure suited to high-frequency retail trading. Robinhood unveiled the chain on July 1 as a network designed to bridge financial services, cryptocurrency and tokenized assets. What stands out in the data is that usage is surfacing in DeFi first — trading, lending and perpetuals — before the platform's stock-token and real-world-asset plans register in the metrics.

The broader tokenized-equities market is expanding at a similar pace. Transfer volume across tokenized stocks climbed more than 415% over the past 30 days to $29.5 billion, per RWA.xyz data, while monthly active addresses rose more than 209% to roughly 1.3 million. The number of tokenized stock holders increased 167% to 2.36 million, and the total value of tokenized stocks distributed on-chain edged up 1.45% to $2.54 billion — about 637% higher than the $344 million recorded a year earlier. Securitize Corp. ranked as the largest individual tokenized stock at roughly $163 million, followed by the Strategy PP Variable xStock at $136 million and an Ondo-tokenized version of Circle Internet Group at $109 million. By platform, Ondo led with $842.8 million in distributed value, ahead of Kraken's xStocks at $609.3 million and Binance's bStocks at $599.9 million; together the three control about 81% of the market. Distribution is widening too: Coinbase's tokenized US stocks went live on Base on Aug. 24, giving eligible non-US users around-the-clock access to tokens tracking companies such as Nvidia, Apple, Meta and Alphabet in self-custody wallets, and Bitwise rolled out automated portfolios built from those tokens a day later, targeting the Magnificent Seven, robotics and artificial-intelligence themes.

Upbit Leads Korea's Trading Revival

Retail participation is rebounding in Asia as well. Upbit, the South Korean exchange operated by Dunamu, processed roughly $1.04 billion in spot volume over 24 hours, exceeding the combined totals of its three nearest domestic rivals — Bithumb at about $632.6 million, Coinone at $67.9 million and Korbit, now branded Digital X, at roughly $11 million, per its public volume tracker. Bitcoin (BTC) broke above $80,000 in late August for the first time since mid-May, and Korean traders — historically quick to rotate rather than HODL through drawdowns — poured funds back into local order books; spot has since cooled to about $78,000 at press time. Upbit's daily volume, which had ranged between 300 billion and 600 billion won before the Aug. 20 surge, briefly touched 4.61 trillion won by midday Saturday — nearly ten times the level of a week earlier — with XRP the most-traded token on both Upbit and Bithumb. Smaller venues are buying growth: Coinone scrapped trading fees on all listed assets, while Digital X went fee-free until August 2027, lifting its average hourly volume 36-fold to 9.8 billion won, though 87% of that came from a single stablecoin, RLUSD. The recovery follows a bruising first half in which Dunamu's operating profit fell 79.7% year on year. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

DeFi Usage Outpaces Stock Tokenization

Read together, the three data points trace one arc: on-chain market activity is compounding again, and it is doing so through trading infrastructure rather than pure price speculation. The most load-bearing record here is the on-chain ledger itself — Robinhood Chain's $944.57 million day is a settled, verifiable DefiLlama figure, not a projection — and it shows a brokerage-owned Ethereum layer-2 generating traction from DeFi mechanics before its tokenized-stock roadmap matures. With tokenized equity transfer volume at $29.5 billion and Korean spot turnover rebounding behind a Bitcoin breakout, the infrastructure layer, not the asset layer, is currently where growth is most measurable. COINOTAG will track whether equity-token usage eventually closes the gap with pure DEX activity.