A Layer 2 for tokenised finance
Robinhood Chain is a permissionless, EVM-compatible Layer 2 built on the Arbitrum stack and settling to Ethereum. Public mainnet went live on 1 July 2026 — chain ID 4663 — after a public testnet in February 2026 that Robinhood and Arbitrum say processed over 200 million transactions.
It is not a general-purpose consumer chain. Its stated job is onchain financial infrastructure: tokenised equities (Stock Tokens), stablecoins, lending, perpetuals, and agentic trading. That focus explains most of its design choices — the asset set, the day-one partners, and the absence of a token to speculate on.
How it is built
The chain is an optimistic rollup running Arbitrum Nitro. Transactions are ordered by a Robinhood-operated sequencer producing blocks roughly every 100ms, then batched and posted to Ethereum, with Ethereum blobs carrying the data so the chain's state can be independently reconstructed.
ETH is the gas token — there is no separate coin to hold. The sequencer orders transactions first-come, first-served, with no priority-fee auction. Because the EVM is standard, existing wallets and tooling connect without modification; the chain adds first-class account abstraction (ERC-4337, EIP-7702) on top.
The chain with no token
Robinhood Chain has no native token: no gas coin of its own, no staking token, no governance token, and no airdrop. Gas is paid in ETH. Value from the chain routes instead through sequencer economics and an Arbitrum Expansion Program revenue share that sends part of net protocol revenue back to the Arbitrum ecosystem.
For a reader used to L2s that launch with a token, this is the headline: the investable thesis here is the venue, not a coin. Robinhood's distribution — a large retail user base and a wallet that connects to the chain natively — is the asset, not a ticker.
Permissionless, but operator-run at launch
"Permissionless" describes the chain honestly at the application layer: anyone can deploy a contract or a token, and much of the early scam-token activity is a direct consequence. It describes the operations less well. Robinhood runs the sequencer and the public RPC itself, so at launch the chain is operationally centralised — closer to the operator-dependent end of L2BEAT's decentralisation stages than to a proofs-govern-everything rollup.
The neutral reading: treat the chain's decentralisation as a dimension to track over time, against L2BEAT and the docs, rather than a settled property on day one. A single sequencer is a single point of failure, and its absence — if it ever stalls — is information.
On the record in this article