Robinhood Chain’s valuation lags behind Base’s early growth, but user numbers tell a different story

Robinhood’s freshly minted Layer-2 blockchain holds roughly $603 million in total value locked. Coinbase’s Base network sits at $5.53 billion. That’s a gap of nearly 10x, and it tells you everything about where Robinhood Chain stands in the pecking order of Ethereum rollups. But TVL doesn’t tell the whole story. On July 21, Robinhood Chain briefly surpassed Base in daily active users, logging around 324,000 wallets compared to Base’s 275,000. For a chain that went live on July 1, that kind of early traction is hard to ignore, even if the reasons behind it are a bit complicated. The memecoin problem Robinhood built its chain with a specific vision: tokenized real-world assets and fractional stock trading on-chain. The pitch was that your brokerage account and your DeFi wallet could finally merge into one experience. Think buying a slice of Tesla stock as a token, then using it as collateral in a lending protocol. The reality so far looks quite different. Early trading volumes on Robinhood Chain topped $500 million on multiple days, which sounds impressive until you look at what people were actually trading. Memecoins dominated the action, with real-world assets accounting for only a...