The Chopping Block: Robinhood Chain's Memecoin Mania and Tokenized Stocks

**Tarun Chitra** (0:00)
You sound like a grandfather lecturing a child.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:03)
Look, it's kind of our role now is to be grandfathers for the industry, you know?

**Tom Schmidt** (0:07)
Not a dividend.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:08)
It's a tale of two quants.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:09)
Now, your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:12)
Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:15)
I'm into trading firms who are very involved.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:18)
I like that each of the ultimate puns.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:20)
DeFi protocol is part of the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody, welcome to The Chopping Block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro is for us, we got Tom, the DeFi maven and master of memes. Hello, everyone. Next, we got Tarun, the Giga brain and Grand Poobah at Gauntlet. Yo.
And coming back, we've got Laura, CEO of the show. Welcome back, Laura.

**Laura Shin** (0:45)
Thanks for having me.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:47)
And I'm Haseeb, the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see ChoppingBlock.xyz for more disclosures.
So the story of this week has been the rise of Robinhood Chain.
So we've alluded a little bit to what's going on on Robinhood Chain, but it seems to have hit a fever pitch recently.
So when Robinhood Chain first launched, there was a little bit of a peak, kind of started to come down and people thought, oh, maybe this is a flash in the pan, kind of a one-hit wonder, maybe got people a little bit excited. If you recall, when we had Thread Guy on the show, Thread Guy was speculating that, you know, I don't really know that Robinhood is bringing in new users. These might just be people front-running other users who haven't shown up yet. But now, all of a sudden, we've got the second rally in Robinhood Chain, and it seems to be much more explosive than the first. We are now seeing over 125,000 active wallets, 5.7 million transactions per day, $1.2 billion in DEX volume, $2 million in REV in a single day, REV standing for realized, what is it, realized value or something? Basically, the total number of fees that are paid on a blockchain. So all of a sudden, there's a lot of economic activity happening on Robinhood, and a lot of this economic activity is being driven by some of the meme coins, as well as some of the stock tokens that have been tokenized on Robinhood. We'll get to talking about some of those and what's happening there. But a lot of this has gotten people excited that, hey, maybe in fact, Robinhood Chain is working. We are onboarding real normies into crypto again, and all of a sudden, there's a new distribution channel that's bringing people back online. This has led to a rally in Arbitrum, which of course they built on top of the Arbitrum stack, and there's a kickback of fees that the Robinhood Chain generates to Robinhood. There's also been a discussion about Ethereum.
And of course, Ethereum does get some of the fees, but a very small amount because these are just data availability fees. It's basically just paying for the right to publish certain data into the Ethereum blockchain, but it doesn't really capture any of the transaction fees or the value in the same way that Arbitrum is doing. So some people have argued, hey, look at this. It shows that there's almost no value that's being captured by the Layer 1, isn't this bearish for Layer 1s, even if it's bullish for Layer 2s or for some of the layers that are actually participating in the rally. Tom, what's your reaction seeing what's happening on Robinhood Chain? Is this the nail in the coffin for L1s being able to benefit from L2s built on top of them?

**Tom Schmidt** (3:15)
I thought Tarun was the Robinhood Chain guy.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (3:19)
Why is he the Robinhood Chain guy?

**Tom Schmidt** (3:21)
He was the one who was excited to talk about Robinhood Chain.
I am surprised that you have a corporate chain that has this kind of activity. It's also not... I mean, I guess they do have half the volume in these tokenized stocks. So it's not totally meme coins or it's these interesting kind of synergies, which I guess we're going to talk about it at some point. But yeah, I don't know. I'm curious what the reaction is internally at Robinhood. I'm sure when they were building this, they're like, oh, we have this beautiful vision of this new financial system and 24-7 stock trading and this global permissionless chain. And then it's like, I know people want to trade vulgar meme coins and there's something very human about it. I don't know.