Robinhood has made comprehensive inroads across the crypto industry, and already looks poised to become the largest crypto exchange in the United States.

Written by Joe Zhou, Foresight News

The title of the largest crypto exchange in the United States is up for grabs.

For years, this title belonged almost exclusively to Coinbase — but Robinhood is now on track to take its place, and has already outperformed Coinbase in multiple key metrics.

In September alone, Robinhood Chain posted $15.85 million in weekly revenue, outranking both top U.S. exchanges Coinbase and Hyperliquid. Total transaction volume on Robinhood Chain has now surpassed 750 million. It is worth noting that Robinhood Chain only launched on July 1 — by the end of July, cumulative on-chain transactions on the network had already topped 150 million, making it the fastest EVM chain in history to hit 100 million transactions.

Robinhood has expanded at a breakneck pace across the U.S. crypto sector, and now cuts an imposing figure as the country’s largest crypto exchange.

Its expansion is not limited to on-chain activity, however. Robinhood has built a presence across nearly every segment of the crypto industry.

In the prediction market segment, Robinhood’s Q2 prediction market revenue outpaced revenue from both crypto and stock trading, with its CEO noting the segment was one of its fastest-growing businesses. In the tokenized stock space, Robinhood Crypto has emerged as a core market player: since launching on July 1, it has quickly amassed more than 328,000 holders, capturing a 44% market share. While the total value locked (TVL) in its stock token offerings stands at only $170 million, its user base far outstrips that of competitors Ondo and xStocks. In on-chain markets, Robinhood has taken an even more aggressive approach: related DEX trading volume is approaching $50 billion, weekly revenue has now topped $10 million, and per the author’s count, more than six memecoins with a market cap of over $100 million have launched on the network since August, making it the leading chain driving wealth creation during this current market upcycle.

If Coinbase’s growth path has been to expand from a standalone crypto exchange into the so-called "Everything Exchange", Robinhood’s trajectory is the reverse: it began as a mass-market general trading platform, and is now migrating an ever-growing range of financial assets on-chain.

Even more striking, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev previously noted that Robinhood Chain crossed 100 million transactions shortly after launch, making it one of the fastest chains in history to hit that milestone.

This is no longer a traditional brokerage dabbling in crypto as an afterthought.

Robinhood is building itself into a full-fledged crypto infrastructure player.

Robinhood Chain: Robinhood’s Most Aggressive Strategic Bet

Over the past few years, the top spot among Ethereum Layer 2 networks has changed hands multiple times: first held by Arbitrum, then Base — and now, Robinhood Chain is emerging as a new major disruptor.

What makes this even more notable is that Robinhood Chain has been live for less than three months.

After launching its mainnet on July 1, it rapidly surpassed 100 million transactions, then went on to hit a cumulative 750 million transactions, making it the fastest EVM chain to reach that scale.

And this is only the beginning.

In July, Robinhood Chain’s daily fee revenue only hit $200,000. By early September, however, its daily fee revenue had at one point surpassed $4 million, with on-chain fee revenue climbing to roughly $25 million in the subsequent week. On September 1 alone, single-day DEX trading volume reached approximately $1.595 billion, on-chain DeFi deposits hit around $738 million, and the total supply of stablecoins on the network neared $800 million.

Even the memecoin market has seen explosive growth on this new chain.

Per the author’s tally, more than six memecoin tokens with a market cap exceeding $100 million have launched on Robinhood Chain since August. Tokens including PONS, Artificial Inu, CASHCAT, MEME, INDEX and FAMI have each joined the nine-figure market cap club. In early September, PONS — the largest launchpad token on Robinhood Chain — at one point neared a $1 billion market cap, posting a weekly gain of more than 200%, and driving a corresponding surge in both network fees and DEX trading volume across Robinhood Chain.

A Layer 2 network that has been live for less than three months is already seeing high fee revenue, multi-billion-dollar on-chain transaction volumes, and a cohort of memecoins with nine-figure market caps all at once.

That is precisely what makes Robinhood Chain so unique.

Historically, most Layer 2 networks first build the chain infrastructure, then work to attract users, assets and liquidity. Robinhood Chain, however, was never built to be a general-purpose public chain from the start — its core purpose is to bring financial assets on-chain.

When it unveiled the mainnet on July 1, Robinhood explicitly positioned the network as an Ethereum Layer 2 built for financial services and real-world assets (RWA), with core use cases including tokenized stocks, DeFi access and global market connectivity.

In other words, Robinhood did not build a chain first and then look for users. It took the opposite approach: it already has over 28 million funded customers, and is now migrating the assets and financial products these users are likely to trade onto its chain.

As of the end of August, Robinhood had roughly 28.6 million funded customers and $38.37 billion in platform assets. Over the same period, its August nominal crypto trading volume hit $17.5 billion, up 61% month-over-month. Its prediction market contract volume reached 4.7 billion, up roughly 15x year-over-year.

This means the most noteworthy aspect of Robinhood Chain is not simply that "another Layer 2 has launched".

Instead, it is that Robinhood now has its own dedicated on-chain trading venue for the first time, a development that could dramatically reshape Robinhood’s business model.

Historically, when users traded stocks or crypto on Robinhood, the platform generated revenue primarily through trading fees and interest income. Now, if users start trading, lending, providing liquidity, swapping memecoins and using stablecoins on Robinhood Chain, the "venue" where these transactions take place itself can become a new revenue stream for Robinhood.

This is why the rapid revenue growth of Robinhood Chain is such a key point of focus for market observers.

Per DeFiLlama data, Robinhood Chain’s daily revenue surged from less than $200,000 at the end of August to roughly $4.01 million on September 2, climbing even further to about $25 million in on-chain fees over the subsequent week.

Of course, there is a striking irony at play here.

Robinhood set out to build an "institutional-grade" chain tailored for financial assets and RWAs — but what actually helped it complete its cold start was not traditional RWA activity, but memecoins.

It is a somewhat ironic dynamic, but one that is perfectly aligned with crypto’s cultural DNA.

The explosive growth of memecoins like PONS brought Robinhood Chain its first wave of authentic transaction volume, liquidity and fee revenue — and this traffic, in turn, attracted even more assets and users to the network.

From this perspective, Robinhood appears to be taking a path very different from that of traditional Layer 2 networks: rather than building infrastructure first and then hunting for users, it already has existing users and trading activity, and built the infrastructure to match.

It built traffic first, then drove trading volume, then attracted liquidity — and only then built out its full financial infrastructure stack.

Comprehensive Expansion, Outperforming Coinbase in Key Segments

The real threat Robinhood poses to Coinbase does not stem from the fact that it launched its own chain. Rather, it comes from the fact that Robinhood is now taking aim at multiple core Coinbase business lines simultaneously.

The most obvious example is prediction markets.

In Q2 2026, Robinhood generated $156 million in event contract revenue, up more than 10x year-over-year. This marked the first time this revenue stream surpassed its $100 million in crypto trading revenue, as well as its $129 million in stock trading revenue. Over the same quarter, Robinhood’s total net revenue reached $1.308 billion, up 32% year-over-year.

In August, Robinhood’s prediction market still posted 4.7 billion in contract volume, up 15x year-over-year.

This means crypto is no longer Robinhood’s most high-growth "new business" — prediction markets have pulled ahead first.

Coinbase is also moving rapidly into this space. In Q2, Coinbase posted 106% month-over-month growth in prediction market contract volume and revenue, with annualized revenue already exceeding $100 million.

The two companies are now on a direct collision course in the same market track.

Robinhood’s competitive edge, however, is that it integrates prediction markets, stocks, options and crypto all into a single user account. A user can trade Nvidia shares in the morning, buy BTC in the afternoon, place a World Cup bet in the evening, and continue trading stocks over the weekend.

The long-standing boundaries between different financial assets are eroding — and Robinhood’s core strategy is to eliminate these boundaries entirely.

The same dynamic is playing out in the tokenized stock space.

On July 1, Robinhood expanded its Stock Tokens offering to over 120 countries and regions, giving global users on-chain economic exposure to U.S. equities.

Just one month after launch, Robinhood had roughly 328,000 tokenized stock holders, accounting for around 44% of holders across all major tokenized stock platforms at the time. The total number of holders across the entire tokenized stock market grew 92% in 30 days, reaching roughly 752,000.

There is, however, a key detail worth noting: Robinhood’s lead in user count does not translate to a lead in total asset size.

At the time, the total value of Robinhood’s tokenized stock offering was only around $44 million, significantly lower than Ondo’s $857 million and xStocks’ $487 million. Per data from DWF Labs, the average holding per Robinhood tokenized stock user was only around $134, while the average asset size per Securitize user was close to $4.9 million.

This perfectly illustrates Robinhood’s most unique strength: it is not built to cater exclusively to crypto whales, but to turn financial products into mass-market consumer offerings.

This is a competitive pressure Coinbase can ill afford to ignore.

Coinbase still holds significant advantages in native crypto users, institutional clients, stablecoins and on-chain infrastructure. In Q2 2026, Coinbase’s crypto trading market share hit 10.3%, an all-time high. The average circulating supply of its USDC stablecoin reached $20 billion, and its Subscription & Services revenue hit $555 million.

As a result, the competitive dynamic between the two companies is becoming increasingly clear: Coinbase is expanding outward from crypto into the broader global financial system, while Robinhood is expanding outward from retail finance into crypto and on-chain markets. The two paths are set to converge at the same end point.

Robinhood’s Next Chapter: A New Paradigm for Exchanges

On September 29, Robinhood announced a new slate of product plans: extending stock trading hours to weekends, launching perpetual contracts, adding prediction market products tied to corporate earnings reports, and further rolling out AI trading agents. Some of these features still require regulatory approval to launch.

If all these products launch as planned, Robinhood’s business model will be impossible to define as a traditional "brokerage" anymore.

Stocks, options, crypto, prediction markets, perpetual contracts, tokenized stocks, on-chain DeFi, AI agents — nearly every type of financial product that generates trading activity can now be accessed through a single user account.

This is the core challenge Coinbase actually has to confront: Coinbase is building the exact same type of offering itself.

Coinbase has explicitly laid out its "Everything Exchange" strategy, and continues to expand into derivatives, prediction markets, stablecoins, payments, RWAs and on-chain finance. In Q2 2026, its trading revenue is no longer heavily reliant on BTC spot trading: 88% of its net revenue comes from business lines unrelated to BTC spot trading. Its Subscription & Services revenue, meanwhile, has already reached $555 million.

In other words, Coinbase is not standing still. What has actually changed is the dimension on which the two companies compete.

Historically, when comparing Coinbase and Robinhood, market observers focused on which company had a stronger crypto business.

That comparison is no longer relevant. The more precise question to ask is: once stocks, crypto, prediction markets and RWAs are all migrated on-chain, which platform will emerge as the unified trading entry point for users?

Robinhood’s core advantage is its existing user base: as of the end of August, it has 28.6 million funded customers and $384 billion in platform assets. Coinbase’s core advantage, by contrast, is its native crypto infrastructure: it owns an exchange, a wallet, the Base network, the USDC ecosystem, institutional custody services, derivatives, and an increasingly comprehensive on-chain financial infrastructure stack. Its crypto market share even hit another all-time high in Q2.

As a result, it is still too early to claim that Robinhood has "replaced Coinbase". Even the very title of "largest crypto exchange in the United States" is becoming increasingly ill-defined.

Because what Robinhood is fundamentally transforming may well be the very concept of what a "crypto exchange" is.

In the past, an exchange was a discrete building: a user would log into Coinbase, buy BTC or ETH, and log out. In the future, an exchange will be more like a connected city: stocks, crypto, prediction markets, stablecoins, tokenized assets, DeFi, derivatives and AI agents will all flow through the ecosystem, and users will not even need to know whether they are interacting with Web2 or Web3 infrastructure.

This is exactly where the value of Robinhood Chain lies.

For the first time, it directly connects Robinhood’s traffic, product suite and user base to the open financial ecosystem of crypto.

Coinbase, meanwhile, is extending its crypto infrastructure outward into the traditional financial system. As such, the most important thing to watch in this rivalry is not which company earned a few hundred million dollars more in fees this year — but what the next generation of financial entry points will actually look like.

Coinbase aims to become the core infrastructure connecting crypto and traditional finance. Robinhood, by contrast, aims to become the unified entry point for everyday people to access the entire global financial system.

When the two companies finally meet on-chain, the entity that gets redefined in the process may be neither Coinbase nor Robinhood — but the very definition we have long held of what an "exchange" actually is.