Activity on Robinhood’s Layer-2 network is falling sharply even as users leave more than $1 billion parked in its applications, setting up a decisive test for the chain’s December 31 fee dead
Activity on Robinhood’s Layer-2 network is falling sharply even as users leave more than $1 billion parked in its applications, setting up a decisive test for the chain’s December 31 fee deadline. Robinhood Chain averaged 6.2 million daily transactions from October 2 through October 8, down 42% from 10.8 million in mid-September, according to CoinDesk’s analysis of growthepie data. Weekly spot trading volume fell 21% to $7.45 billion, while deposits across the network’s lending and trading apps rose to $1.04 billion.
The slowdown marks a shift from September, when transactions were still near record highs even as network fees had collapsed. Now the activity measures themselves have turned lower, and the chain’s busiest products are no longer growing.
Daily active addresses averaged about 322,000 in the latest week, down 31% from mid-September, and users paid roughly $65,000 a day in network fees, down 39% from the prior week. That is a fraction of the $8 million the chain collected on its busiest day in early September. Spot exchanges handled $7.45 billion during October 2-8, down from $9.46 billion the week before, with Uniswap accounting for roughly 77% of that volume.
The declines do not prove users are abandoning the network. One person can control multiple addresses, and automated trading programs can generate thousands of transactions, so the drop in active addresses may overstate the decline in individual users.
Despite the weaker trading, deposits in the chain’s applications rose about 2% over the week to $1.04 billion, and the supply of stablecoins ticked up to roughly $1.10 billion. The money is being traded less, not withdrawn. Perpetual futures are still growing: rolling seven-day volume reached about $7.35 billion, up 26% according to DefiLlama data cited in the report, a sign that some traders are shifting toward leveraged products after Robinhood began offering crypto perpetual futures in late September.
Robinhood keeps roughly nine-tenths of network fees, according to a Bernstein note cited in the report, so fewer transactions directly reduce what the brokerage collects. To revive activity, Robinhood extended a promotion that pays network fees on swaps over 50 cents through December 31, and the trading platform Arcus began handing out extra reward points for stock-token swaps on October 1. The network still generated more daily app revenue than Ethereum as recently as September, but that lead depended on the same fee activity that is now fading.
The promotion’s expiry is the key observable. Until December 31, swaps through Robinhood Wallet are effectively free above 50 cents, so current volumes partly reflect an incentive rather than organic demand. Whether spot trading recovers before users begin covering their own fees, and whether the growth in perpetual futures can offset the spot slowdown, will determine whether the current decline is a temporary cool-down or a more durable loss of momentum.
Robinhood launched the chain in July to let people trade tokens and borrow and lend through Ethereum-linked applications, with plans for round-the-clock trading of tokens tied to stocks and funds. Sustaining that ambition depends on activity recovering once the promotional fees end.
