Robinhood Chain, the company’s own Ethereum layer-2 network, has reached nearly $800 million in total value locked (TVL) and processed more than 200 million transactions in just over a month since launch, according to Robinhood’s head of crypto, Johann Kerbrat.

The “Two Wolves” Strategy

Kerbrat, who leads Robinhood’s crypto and international businesses, has framed the network’s approach around a “two wolves” concept, referencing a post by CEO Vlad Tenev that describes a deliberate balance between serious financial products and the more speculative, attention-driving side of crypto. 

He laid out this thinking in an exclusive interview with Decrypt’s media podcast, FOMO Hour, describing it as a summary of what Robinhood is going for with the network.

“We want to show customers that we care about what they care about,” Kerbrat told Decrypt. “We want to make sure the chain works for what people care about.”

On the serious side, the network supports roughly 200 tokenized stocks, other real-world assets, stablecoin lending, and perpetual futures trading. 

Kerbrat said Robinhood chose to build on an Ethereum layer-2 rather than on its own standalone layer-1 blockchain specifically so it could rely on Ethereum’s existing security and decentralization while putting its own resources toward products rather than core infrastructure. 

One specific advantage he pointed to is round-the-clock trading access. “The world doesn’t stop on weekends,” Kerbrat said. “News is happening on Fridays after market close, and people want to be able to hedge their position, which was something that was not really available to retail until recently.”

Meme Coins Are a Deliberate Part of the Strategy, Not an Accident

Kerbrat has been explicit that meme coin activity is not something Robinhood is merely tolerating on its network; it’s something the company sees as strategically useful. 

“We think memes are an important part of crypto,” he said. “We think that for a new chain, like Robinhood Chain, these tokens have value. They bring liquidity, they bring interest from customers, especially the DeFi-type of customer that are pretty hard to move.” 

He added that if meme coins are what a segment of users are most interested in, “we want to make sure that the chain is supported for that.” 

Readers interested in how meme coins function more broadly, and what to watch for before trading them, can find more in our guide to meme coins.

What Robinhood Is Optimizing For

Beyond TVL and transaction counts, Kerbrat said developer activity is one of the metrics he personally watches most closely, since it signals whether the network is becoming a platform other builders want to use rather than something that only serves Robinhood’s own products.

“I want the chain to not just be the chain for Robinhood, but also be the chain that anyone can use and interact with our product, like our stock tokens, but also everything else that we are building,” he said.

Kerbrat framed Robinhood’s real target market as people who have never used crypto before, rather than users already active on competing blockchains. 

“If we see tens of millions of customers trying to use a chain, I think that will be a good win for us,” he said. “We want to bring more customers on-chain and show them the benefit of the technology.” 

He pointed specifically to deposits and transaction count as the network’s earliest, most immediate measures of adoption, framing developer activity as the metric that will matter more once the initial launch period settles.

Robinhood Chain is part of a broader effort by the company to move its brokerage products on-chain rather than a standalone crypto side project. 

The network lets customers buy and sell tokenized versions of real-world assets, including roughly 200 stocks, alongside lending stablecoins and trading perpetual futures contracts, all within the same infrastructure the company is also using to court retail crypto traders through meme coin activity.

What Comes Next

Robinhood Chain is still early, having only been live for a bit over a month, and the current numbers reflect an initial adoption wave that hasn’t yet been tested over a longer stretch.

What this means for you: the network’s stated strategy deliberately combines tokenized traditional assets with speculative meme coin trading on the same infrastructure, which is a different approach than blockchains built around a single use case, and it’s worth watching whether Robinhood’s developer-activity metric holds up as evidence the chain is attracting builders beyond Robinhood’s own product roadmap.