Robinhood Created a Blockchain for Equities. A Synthetic Dollar Is Quietly Taking It Over.

At the time, Ethena's USDe sat with approximately $17 million on Robinhood Chain. That's now $236 million, or about 43% of everything backing dollar liquidity on the network. Real capital is staying, not just passing through.

USDe is not a traditional digital dollar

The majority of stablecoin is backed by bank deposits or treasuries. USDe doesn't. Ethena has crypto (mainly ETH and BTC) and offsets the price risk with short positions on derivatives in a delta-neutral hedge structure.

Day to day, it acts just like a dollar, however the underlying risks are different: derivatives liquidity, funding costs, counterparty exposure, all risks that don't apply in the same manner to something like USDC. Stake it and you get sUSDe in return, which generates yield off of that same hedging strategy. When USDe comes up to size on a new chain, it's typically yield chasers, not cash parked away.

Deposits are growing faster than users

Chain daily transactions are rising 30% week on week, and TVL increased to $774 million, up 20% in a week. Daily active accounts were up just 3.3% over the same stretch, still running around 11% below July 16 peak levels. The dollars are landing well before the people who are supposed to use them.

Memecoins got here first

This chain was built around tokenized stocks and real-world assets by Robinhood. As of now, it has not panned out that way. More than 99% of the total trading volume on the chain has actually come from memecoins, according to analysis by OAK Research, with Uniswap alone commandeering nearly two-thirds of all app fees generated on Robinhood Chain since launch.

Most of the reason for that is CASHCAT, a token built out of Robinhood's old mascot, it surged over 5,500% in just one week post-launch, quickly hit $200M in market cap, and then pulled along an entire wave of copycat tokens behind it. The entire premise of the chain, tokenized real world assets, still sits at sub $13 million.

There are actually two different things going on right now over the same network. You've got early volume, wallets, and liquidity in memecoin trading, exactly what any new chain would need to take off.

USDe and the other stablecoins are creating something slower and less visible: a dollar sitting there, waiting to lend or trade no matter which token is on the upswing this week. Robinhood pitched, in actuality, tokenized securities. All that is showing up is speculation on one side, and on the other, synthetic-dollar yield farming, with the thing Robinhood said it would build hardly present in either.

The still-unresolved question is whether either of those does grow into the kind of robust network Robinhood originally promised.

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