Robinhood Chain temporarily rose as high as second in the world by decentralised exchange (DEX) trading volume over the weekend.

According to DefiLlama, Robinhood Chain posted about $878 million in DEX trading volume on July 12 alone, briefly surpassing Coinbase’s Base and Ethereum and drawing attention in the community. Most of the volume came from CashCat, a memecoin named after a former mascot. CashCat surged more than 2,100 percent in its first week, reaching a market capitalisation of $156 million.

On July 17 (local time), CoinDesk reported that Robinhood explains its goal is not to take volume away from existing exchanges but to use its customer base to bring new investors into tokenised assets and on-chain derivatives.

Seong Seog Lee (성석 이), head of crypto product at Robinhood, told CoinDesk, "Our opportunity is not in taking volume from existing traders," adding, "Most people have never encountered perpetual contracts. That is because there was no on-ramp." He added, "Users in more than 120 countries can trade perpetual futures on gold, silver, foreign exchange, crypto and more directly in the Robinhood Wallet app through the Lighter exchange."

Even so, Robinhood Chain is still in an early stage. Perpetual futures trading volume on July 13 totalled just $5.9 million. Hyperliquid processed $8.9 billion on the same day. Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum Layer 2 built on Arbitrum, and it was officially launched earlier this month with stock and ETF tokenisation as a key goal.