Robinhood Chain Surpasses Ethereum and Coinbase's Base in Daily Fees

Robinhood Chain, a blockchain built by the brokerage Robinhood, has surpassed Ethereum and Coinbase's Base in daily fees. According to DeFiLlama data cited by KuCoin, on September 1, Robinhood Chain generated $3.75 million in user-paid transaction fees, outdoing the combined daily fees of Ethereum mainnet and Coinbase's Base for that day.

The surge isn't coming from tokenized stocks as initially pitched by Robinhood. Instead, it's coming from Pons, an independent memecoin launchpad built on Robinhood Chain. Users paid about $5.95 million in fees over 24 hours to create and trade tokens through Pons, placing it fourth among fee-generating crypto services tracked by DeFiLlama.

Roughly 25,000 tokens launched on Pons on September 2, with a 24-hour trading volume of $544 million. The app takes a cut of trading activity, with some economics flowing back to token creators. However, Bitquery's research found that 66.8% of wallets it tracked finished with less than they started.

Robinhood still benefits from the activity running across its infrastructure, making a few basis points per transaction on the chain and sharing roughly half with Arbitrum. The company behind Robinhood Chain is not a crypto-native startup but a regulated, publicly traded brokerage, making investors watch the fee line closely as it could eventually impact earnings.

The next few weeks are crucial in determining whether Pons is the start of a durable transaction engine or just a loud speculator's playground. When traders have to pay the full cost of staying on Robinhood Chain, that will be the cleaner test.