2. Robinhood Chain: Trading Stocks & Memes On-Chain with DLMM

DLMM Clan is an independent DeFi liquidity-provider education community for EVM chains — distinct from Meteora, which is a DLMM protocol on Solana. This lesson is a first look at the Robinhood chain, a new EVM chain now supported by SectorOne, the DLMM DEX used across the Academy. CryptoCroco explains why this chain has a genuine reason to exist — it repeats the Coinbase/Base playbook, giving Robinhood's roughly 38 million users a direct on-ramp from a familiar app into DeFi — and walks through the early ecosystem: lending-led TVL, Uniswap as the dominant DEX, and SectorOne establishing itself as the DLMM venue. The most distinctive draw is what you can trade there: a lively meme and long-tail token scene plus tokenized shares like Tesla and SpaceX, all tradeable on-chain using DLMM.

A first look at the Robinhood chain

Welcome back to another video about dynamic liquidity market making, the best ways to trade crypto on chain using DLMM. In today's video, I'm going to take a closer look at the Robinhood chain. It's a new chain that is also supported by SectorOne, one of my favorite DLMM DEXes. And with that, I now get the opportunity to trade all kinds of tokens, projects, and even stocks. You will see later in the video, on chain using DLMM. Let's get right into it.

The material presented in this tutorial and accompanying presentation is intended for informational purposes only and should not be interpreted as financial advice. Any investment decisions or positions you take are solely at your own risk.

Why another Layer 2? The problem with fading chains

Now, why do I think that the Robinhood chain is an interesting candidate to join? I mean, we had so many Layer 2s being launched on Ethereum, and many of those have faded away just in the span of days or weeks. One of those examples is the one here as well. It was mega. I think that one lasted not even one week, and entering a chain, taking all that risk, can be very cumbersome if you're in a market, right, as right now that is rather suppressed and not in a risk-on state.

The Coinbase / Base playbook

So why do I think that the Robinhood chain has attributes that make it a valid shot? So first of all, if you look at the Layer 2 landscape right now on Ethereum, the most successful Layer 2 is the Base chain. Now why is the Base chain so successful? It is because it is launched by Coinbase. And with that, all the amount of customers that are attracted in the real world to Coinbase have an easy access to the DeFi world via their own wallet onto the Base chain.

Now, what we have here with Robinhood is the exact same playbook. Robinhood offers financial services of all kinds, from trading options, futures, spot, but all kinds of, even bank cards. Everything you have on Robinhood. They also have been supporting crypto for a while now as a centralized exchange. So you can buy crypto and hold crypto.

But what is new now is, first of all, they have a wallet just like the Base wallet. They have a wallet. So if you're a Robinhood user, you trust the company, you have already your stocks being traded there. You can now use the same provider to access DeFi. And when you use the wallet, you can directly access the Robinhood chain.

So there's a very quick path for millions of users to enter DeFi through Robinhood. This, I think, is a huge advantage for the chain. It's a real reason to exist, because it allows real users in the real world to access DeFi products super easily through their very mobile-friendly experience apps. This is why I think this ecosystem is here to stay.

Different to other Layer 2s, it has a real reason to be there, and it's one of the avenues that's going to onboard the next million DeFi users. Right now, Robinhood has, I think, 38 million users trading on their platform. And this new bridge to the DeFi world is just going to become more interesting. And I'm going to tell you why it's interesting.

Three reasons the Robinhood chain is interesting

It's interesting from three main perspectives. The first, the DeFi natives. It's interesting for them because they can go into an ecosystem that is less opportunistic. DeFi is so big right now. There are so many options that normally the crowd flocks to an area and then they leave again. This happens with many chains. There's hype, everybody comes, and then they just bridge out to the next because they're DeFi native.

Now the second reason why I think this is very interesting is what I said: all the kind of users that are sticky because they come through the Robinhood experience onto the chain and they stay there. And then the third one, and this is, I think, very underestimated: you have products that you can launch as a builder on Robinhood chain that you would not be able to launch anywhere else, because you are targeting real users in the real world.

This is the easiest way to target these users, because if you build on that chain, you get an easy access to real users outside of DeFi. That being said, these are the three main big points.

How the ecosystem is developing

And now let's get into how it is being developed. So if you look at Robinhood chain, you can see steady growth here. The TVL is about 400 million. Most of that comes from lending, a curated lending platform. So most of it is lending. It normally creates the base liquidity. Bootstrapping a chain, it makes sense that a lot is in lending. I hope that more is also going to develop outside of lending. But what's already good to see is Uniswap with 64 million in TVL.

That's a big player. And then if you look further down at the DEXes, you can see most of them are below 1 million. So this is really the big DEX in the room is Uniswap, and then everything else you look at down here is smaller and just getting started. So we're still early in the ecosystem. I'm pretty sure many of these DEXes, they will be much more than a million going down the road in TVL that they can attract.

And here you can see also SectorOne with a bit more than 100,000, 133,000 in TVL already locked. So as the DLMM DEX on the chain, I think this is also a very interesting DEX overall to watch here.

A thriving meme and long-tail token ecosystem

That being said, I looked then into Uniswap, because with Uniswap I'm always interested what kind of tokens are the ones that hold the most liquidity. And if I go on Uniswap and I filter then for the Robinhood chain here, I can see that from the TVL point of view, most of the tokens that make up the TVL are actually ecosystem tokens. So these are memes, these are small projects. And this is to me very bullish, because if it all would just be the big blue chip tokens, let's say Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana etc., this you can get on any chain and it doesn't really diversify.

And it's not a real reason for anybody in DeFi to join this chain, because they don't get anything that they would get somewhere else. This is not true here. Robinhood seems to have a very lively, thriving meme token, small project, long tail token ecosystem that's being built right now. So this is really nice to see so much traction there.

If you go on Good Morning, Good Night AI, you can see all of these, and you can see that there's really solid volume there. So these tokens are really attracting volume, which is, as you know with DLMM, if you trade tokens using DLMM, a great way to boost your profits. You can trade them using DLMM in and out.

And then if it's ranging for a while, you can earn really, really good fees if the TVL-to-volume ratio is so good. And note here, right now I'm having one hour volume numbers here. So this is just in the past hour. If I would change this here to 24 hours, you have really high numbers. TVL liquidity to volume ratios is really good.

Trading on SectorOne — non-custodial, open any pool

Now let's look at SectorOne. You can here simply filter for Robinhood. Then you will only get the tokens. On Robinhood you can trade anything. You can just open the pool. It's fully non-custodial on SectorOne. So if you see a token that's not available, you can just open the pool and trade it there. This is what I often do.

I've already opened one pool and I see arbitrage bots have picked it up really quickly. And yeah, I could trade exactly as on any other decentralized exchange on Robinhood.

Tokenized shares: Tesla and SpaceX on-chain

And this is now the last thing I find super exciting when I saw it. You can see here Tesla, you can see here SpaceX. Because Robinhood comes from the traditional finance world, they are tokenizing shares and bringing their trading available on chain. And this is huge for users. So if you're in DeFi, and no matter where you sit, you can now access this and trade these tokens on Robinhood chain. This is a real reason to go to Robinhood chain and not to go to any other chain instead, because you just get a set of tokens you won't get anywhere else. Ecosystem tokens and actually tokenized shares, tokenized by a very established provider from the traditional finance sector.

What's next

This has been it. In the next weeks, what I'm going to do, I think, is I'm going to do two types of videos, and especially for the Robinhood chain I am going to focus on. Some of these stocks I'll try to DLMM, Tesla, SpaceX, see if I can get good entries there using DLMM. And then I'm going to look at the long tail tokens, small projects, meme tokens, and I'm going to trade these using DLMM on SectorOne.

So if you like this kind of content, please give me a like. And if you have any ideas what I can do better, please leave a comment below. I'm really reading every comment, and you can be sure that whatever you write there, it will appear in one of the next videos. I take that series and I adapt my style accordingly. That was it. This is crypto, and I hope to see you next time. Bye bye.