Robinhood Chain slowdown spreads from fees to trading as transactions fall more than 40%

The slowdown on Robinhood’s blockchain has spread from fees to trading itself, with daily transactions down 42% from mid-September even as the brokerage keeps paying the network fees on token swaps worth more than 50 cents that customers make through its Robinhood Wallet app. The network averaged 6.2 million transactions a day during Oct. 2–8, down from 10.8 million during Sept. 10–16, according to CoinDesk calculations using growthepie data. Activity fell 20% from the preceding week alone. Robinhood launched the chain in July to let people trade tokens, borrow and lend through applications connected to Ethereum, with plans for round-the-clock trading of tokens tied to stocks and funds. Every transaction pays a network fee, and the apps built on top charge their own fees for trades and loans. Robinhood keeps roughly nine-tenths of the network fees, according to a Bernstein note last month, so fewer transactions means less income from the chain. When CoinDesk reported on Sept. 19 that fees had collapsed 97%, transactions were still near their highs and weekly trading volume was growing. Both have now turned lower. Daily active addresses averaged about 322,000 in the latest week, down 31% from mid-September, suggesting fewer people, and fewer of the trading bots they run, are using the chain each day. The drop is likely smaller in human terms than the raw number implies, since one trader can run many addresses and a single automated program can account for thousands of transactions. Spot exchanges, where users buy and sell tokens directly, handled $7.45 billion during Oct. 2–8, down 21% from $9.46 billion the week before, according to CoinDesk calculations using DefiLlama. Uniswap, an app that lets people swap tokens with each other without a company in the middle, handled roughly 77% of that. Users aren’t pulling their money out, though. Deposits in the chain’s lending and trading apps rose about 2% over the week to $1.04 billion, and the supply of stablecoins, tokens pegged to the dollar, ticked up to roughly $1.10 billion. That suggests the pile of money is simply being traded less, with traders keeping their funds on Robinhood Chain and waiting. Futures are the exception, however. DefiLlama’s rolling seven-day figures on Friday showed about $7.35 billion in perpetual futures volume, contracts that let traders bet on prices without owning the tokens, up 26%. Users paid about $65,000 a day in network fees during Oct. 2–8, down 39% from the week before. That’s a fraction of the $8 million the chain collected on its busiest day in early September. Robinhood and its partners have been trying to keep traders busy. Trading platform Arcus started handing out extra reward points on Oct. 1 for stock-token swaps made through Robinhood Wallet, and Robinhood pushed back the end of its fee promotion, which was due to expire Sept. 29. Robinhood will now pay the network fees on any swap over 50 cents made through its wallet until Dec. 31. That gives the chain under three months to get its $1 billion in deposits trading again before users start paying their own way.