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Robinhood, a popular retail brokerage platform in the U.S., launched Robinhood Chain, a blockchain built using a framework from Arbitrum (ARB), one of the main layer-two networks on Ethereum (ETH). The announcement came after Robinhood Chain was released on public mainnet in February.
The core purpose of Robinhood Chain is to bridge the gap between traditional finance and decentralised finance (DeFi) in order to expand global access to financial ownership. It was designed and optimised to facilitate the trading of tokenised real-world assets (RWAs), such as equities, private assets and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Speaking of RWAs, one of the products announced in the Robinhood Chain launch event was Robinhood Stocks. These tokens are designed to give holders economic exposure to underlying securities like U.S. shares and ETFs. While these are not the same as directly owning the stock, the aim with Robinhood Stocks is for holders to eventually be able to deploy these tokens into lending pools where they can be used as trading collateral across the broader DeFi ecosystem.
Of note, several familiar names across the DeFi category were announced as launch partners of Robinhood Chain. For example, Morpho (MORPHO) has been integrated as the core decentralised lending infrastructure for Robinhood Chain. Similarly, Uniswap (UNI) had day-one support for the chain, serving as a primary liquidity protocol to allow users to swap tokens.
Infrastructure providers and applications with initial support for Robinhood Chain
Within a week of launching, Robinhood Chain has surpassed $100 million USD in total value locked (TVL), as per DefiLlama. The vast majority of that value ($88.4 million USD) has been deposited into Morpho, the DeFi protocol powering Robinhood’s new Earn product, which is gradually being rolled out to eligible U.S. users.
Total value locked (TVL) on Robinhood Chain, as of July 8 (Source: DefiLlama)
A group of more than 140 companies, spanning payment networks, banks and tech firms, announced a new stablecoin venture, Open Standard, which will issue a new U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin called Open USD (OUSD). Initial partners include Stripe, Visa, BlackRock, as well as Australia’s four largest banks.
Existing stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) and USDC (USDC) are run by single companies which essentially collect all the earnings from the reserves that back their stablecoins. With OUSD, it will instead be governed jointly by the Open Standard consortium, with members sharing in the earnings made on its reserves. Stripe has already said OUSD will become its default stablecoin for businesses, with a full launch planned for later this year.
Overall, this is yet another sign of that adoption of stablecoins in continuing. For everyday users, the more competition there is in this space, the greater likelihood that fees are as low as possible. Expect to hear more about OUSD over the months ahead, with its expected release planned for later this year.
Various crypto companies and blockchain projects were listed, either directly or indirectly, in the Open Standard, including Solana (SOL), XRP (XRP), Stellar (XLM), Canton (CC), Aptos (APT), Polygon (POL) and Aave (AAVE).
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared updates last weekend on the next major upgrade for Ethereum. The initiative, which has garnered the name ‘Lean Ethereum’ since talks about Ethereum’s next phase ramped up last year, will involve a series of milestones that are expected to take up to four years of work. Buterin described Lean Ethereum as the network’s third major upgrade, comparable in ambition to the Merge in 2022, which itself was several years in the making.
In short, Lean Ethereum is designed to make the network faster, safer, and much lighter. It proposes to shrink the massive data currently needed to run Ethereum, making it more viable for everyday computers to support the network. Among other things, Lean Ethereum will also transition Ethereum into a blockchain that can defend against future threats from quantum computing.
