ROBINHOOD CHAIN IS DEAD Is the take I keep seeing all over my timeline right now, and I honestly think it’s a stupid one. Outside of the OGs like Solana, BNB and Ethereum, we haven’t had a new chain break out and capture this much attention since Base, and four months in, Robinhood Chain is already the third-biggest chain by DEX volume over the past month, behind only Solana and Ethereum. Robinhood Chain’s best week was about four times bigger than anything Base did in its first eight months, back when Base was actually doing well, and it got back above its launch high around five months sooner than Base did. New chains move a lot like coins do at launch, where the early attention sends them up and then they pull back to retest the level they broke out from. That retest is exactly where Robinhood Chain’s volume is sitting right now, and it’s the same level Base’s biggest run started from. Trading has slowed down since September, but TVL has kept climbing and just hit a new all-time high this week, which means the capital is sticking around even though the hype has cooled off a bit. If you’re lumping Robinhood Chain in with every other new L2, you’re missing the biggest thing it has going for it, which is a stock brokerage with close to 29 million users, and less than 1% of them are onchain on any given day. With free swaps running until the end of the year and 24/7 stock token trading on the way, that’s a lot of runway for a chain that’s only four months old. CT is an echo chamber. Once takes like “it’s dead” and “Base 2.0” get a bit of engagement, you start seeing them everywhere, to the point where they feel like the consensus, but the data doesn’t support that narrative. Ultimately it comes down to what Vlad and the team do from here. He just did an AMA going over his plans for the chain and asking people what they want to see, and there’s talk of a lot more support coming from Robinhood. This is a company that built one of the biggest retail brokerages in the US, and I can’t see them settling for less in crypto.