Robinhood's Ethereum (ETH) Layer-2 Sees Daily Transactions Fall 42%

6.2 Million Transactions a Day, Down 42%

Robinhood Chain averaged 6.2 million transactions per day between Oct. 2 and Oct. 8, a 42% slide from the 10.8 million recorded across Sept. 10–16, according to growthepie's on-chain tally. The latest week also ran about 20% below the one immediately before it, so the deceleration is recent rather than a one-off monthly comparison. A separate single-day count placed Oct. 10 at 8.47 million transactions, though weekly averages and one-day snapshots use different windows and cannot be compared directly. Ethereum (ETH) price is not the variable behind these figures; the slowdown lives in the chain's own usage data.

The network launched as a public mainnet on July 1. The company describes it as a layer-2 connected to Ethereum (ETH), built on the Arbitrum (ARB) platform and reachable through the same cross-chain bridge mechanics any layer-2 depends on, with plans for round-the-clock trading of tokenized stocks alongside on-chain lending and borrowing. None of that architecture changed in October; what changed is how much the chain is being used. Trading depth followed the same path. Spot volume across the chain's decentralized venues reached $7.45 billion for the week, 21% under the $9.46 billion posted the week prior, and Uniswap, the largest swapping application on the network, took roughly 77% of that turnover. Daily active addresses averaged about 322,000, down 31% from mid-September, a retreat that includes the automated programs, from simple scripts to the occasional AI trading bot, that inflate the raw count. One address can also serve several traders, so the human decline is smaller than the address figures imply.

Balances moved the other way. Deposits sitting in the chain's lending and margin trading applications edged up about 2% week over week, to $1.04 billion, while the supply of dollar-pegged stablecoins ticked up toward roughly $1.10 billion. The two figures overlap, because part of the stablecoin supply sits inside those applications, so they cannot be summed into a single inflow number. Derivatives diverged from the trend: rolling seven-day perpetual futures volume stood near $7.35 billion as of Oct. 9, up 26%, on DefiLlama's aggregation. Perpetuals let traders take price exposure without holding the underlying tokens, and they measure a different product mix and window than spot, so the two are best read side by side.

From $8 Million Days to $65,000

The revenue mechanics make the slide expensive for the operator. Every transaction on the chain carries a network fee, and the applications layered above it add their own charges for trades and loans. Users paid about $65,000 a day in network fees during Oct. 2–8, down 39% from the prior week, against a peak of roughly $8 million collected on the chain's busiest single day in early September. Fee income had already collapsed 97% by the time the slowdown first surfaced on Sept. 19, a point when transactions still sat near their highs and weekly volume was still growing; both have since turned lower. A Bernstein research note last month estimated that Robinhood (HOOD) keeps roughly nine-tenths of network fees, so thinner activity maps almost directly onto the company's chain revenue.

Robinhood has answered by extending the clock. Its fee promotion had been due to lapse on Sept. 29. In its official announcement on X, the company said it will keep covering network fees on swaps above 50 cents made through Robinhood Wallet until Dec. 31. A partner program is running alongside it: from Oct. 1, the trading platform Arcus has been issuing bonus reward points for stock-token swaps executed through the wallet. The extension leaves fewer than three months for the chain's roughly $1 billion in parked deposits to resume turning over before wallet users begin covering their own network costs.

@RobinhoodCrypto · X post

Covering network fees.

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A $1 Billion Stockpile, a Dec. 31 Clock

Read together, the two datasets point to parked capital rather than exit. Money is staying on Robinhood Chain; it is simply not turning over, and the fee waiver amounts to a subsidy meant to keep that stockpile from drifting to other venues. Perpetual futures, the one metric still climbing, suggests the users who remain skew toward active traders rather than casual swappers. The Oct. 10 print of 8.47 million transactions is the first figure hinting the slide may be flattening, but one day against a rolling weekly average settles little. The measure that matters now is whether weekly averages stabilize before Dec. 31; if they do not, a 42% activity decline converts into a thinner revenue stream at nearly full retention.