What is Robinhood Chain? The Arbitrum layer 2 for tokenized stocks

Robinhood Chain is a permissionless, Ethereum-compatible layer 2 blockchain built by Robinhood on Arbitrum technology, designed for tokenized real-world assets such as stocks and ETFs. It settles to Ethereum, pays gas in ETH, and has run on public mainnet since July 2026. This guide explains how it is built, how to connect, what lives on it and where its official infrastructure draws the line.

What Robinhood Chain is

Robinhood describes the chain as an Ethereum layer 2 for "tokenized real-world assets, including equities, ETFs, private assets, and other financial instruments".¹ It is fully EVM-compatible: Solidity contracts deploy unmodified and the usual Ethereum tools (Hardhat, Foundry, ethers.js, viem) work without changes.¹

Under the hood it is a dedicated Arbitrum chain settling to Ethereum.² It runs Arbitrum Nitro³ and uses Ethereum blobs for data availability,⁴ and a transaction inherits Ethereum's security once the batch that holds it is final on Ethereum.⁵ Transactions are ordered first come, first served by the time they reach the sequencer.¹

The chain is offered by Robinhood Digital Assets, LLC and runs separately from Robinhood's brokerage and crypto accounts.⁶ Contract deployment is permissionless: anyone can deploy without asking Robinhood.¹

Timeline

• Public testnet: opened on 2026-02-10, with Chainlink and LayerZero among the first named integration partners.⁷
• Mainnet: live on public mainnet since 2026-07-01, launched at Robinhood's event in London.²⁸
• Before launch: the testnet processed more than 200 million transactions, according to the Arbitrum factsheet published after the launch.²

Robinhood Chain is part of the Arbitrum Expansion Program: it returns 10% of protocol net revenue, of which 8% goes to the ArbitrumDAO treasury and 2% to the Arbitrum Developer Guild.²

Network details

Values from the official connecting page.⁴ The Robinhood Wallet supports the chain natively; other EVM wallets add it as a custom network with the values above.⁶

The public RPC and its limits

The official public endpoint is meant for trying things out. The docs describe the public endpoints as rate-limited and not meant for production, and point production apps to node providers; historical reads and indexing need an archive endpoint.⁴

The Robinhood Chain Terms of Service go further. They list the public RPC among the "Services", say it "is subject to rate limits and is not intended for production-grade, high-throughput, or latency-sensitive applications", allow Robinhood to throttle or stop it without notice, and ask users to use the Services "solely for lawful testing, experimentation, evaluation, and development purposes".⁹

For a builder this means: develop and test against the public endpoint, then move every production workload (an app's backend, an indexer, a bot) to a node provider or to your own node. Robinhood publishes instructions for running a full node.³

What lives on the chain

Stock Tokens

Stock Tokens are the chain's main asset class. Robinhood's docs define them as "tokenised debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited". Each one tracks one U.S. stock or ETF, but a holder gets economic exposure only, with no legal or beneficial rights in the underlying shares.¹⁰

• Standard: ERC-20 tokens with 18 decimals; dividends and splits are applied through an on-chain multiplier.¹⁰
• Issuance: only authorised participants can mint or burn, inside a weekly window from Monday 02:00 to Saturday 02:00 Central European time. Outside that window the tokens still trade on-chain.¹⁰
• Eligibility: the tokens are not registered under U.S. securities laws and may not be offered, sold or delivered in the United States; offers in other jurisdictions are restricted too, including Canada, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.¹⁰
• How many: Robinhood's public assets API listed 203 active Stock Tokens, all deployed on chain 4663, when we read it on 2026-11-05.¹¹

A token with the same name or ticker but a different contract address is not a Robinhood Stock Token, so Robinhood tells builders to check every address against its registry.¹²

USDG, the main stablecoin

USDG (Global Dollar, issued by Paxos) is the stablecoin listed on the official token contracts page, next to WETH.¹² Paxos lists the same contract for Robinhood mainnet and uses LayerZero's OFT standard for transfers between chains.¹³ When we read the contract on 2026-11-05 at 03:30 UTC, totalSupply() returned 667,408,650 USDG at block 106,424,126.¹³

Perpetual futures on Lighter

Lighter runs a dedicated instance on Robinhood Chain, with its own contracts, sequencer, blockspace and liquidity, separate from the main Lighter exchange. For Robinhood Wallet users the docs name direct deposits on the chain, with USDG as the example asset.¹⁴ Blockmetric shows the positions of tracked accounts on this instance as its own layer of the liquidation heatmap, labelled "Lighter RH", with the liquidation price Lighter reports.

Bridges and finality

The canonical way in and out is the Arbitrum bridge: deposits from Ethereum take about ten minutes, withdrawals back to Ethereum wait out a seven-day challenge period and then need a claim on Ethereum.¹⁵ Faster routes exist through messaging and intent-based bridges listed in the docs, such as LayerZero (Stargate), Chainlink CCIP, Relay and Across.¹⁵

Like other Arbitrum chains it has two steps of finality. The sequencer confirms inclusion and order in under a second (a soft confirmation, which Lighter's fast withdrawals rely on). The batch then goes to Ethereum, typically within minutes, and the transaction reaches full finality about thirteen minutes after that posting, when Ethereum finalizes it.⁵¹⁴

How Blockmetric covers it

Today we show the positions of the Lighter instance on Robinhood Chain in the heatmap, and Robinhood Chain is on the RPC waitlist as a chain teams can request. We do not offer Robinhood Chain RPC endpoints yet: we open a chain once enough teams ask for it, so a request counts.

The RPC chain list shows what is open today, and the guide What is an RPC node? explains what a provider endpoint does that a public one does not.