One week. That’s all it took for Robinhood’s new Ethereum Layer-2 network to dethrone Hyperliquid as the top decentralized exchange by 24-hour trading volume. On July 8, Robinhood Chain posted between $560 million and $570 million in daily DEX volume, eclipsing what had been the dominant perps-and-spot platform in DeFi.
The catalyst wasn’t some blue-chip DeFi protocol or a revolutionary new trading primitive. It was a memecoin called Cash Cat.
A chain launch turbocharged by a cat token
Robinhood Chain went live on July 1 as a permissionless Ethereum Layer-2 network built on the Arbitrum stack. It integrates Uniswap for trading, Chainlink for oracles, and Morpho for lending.
CASHCAT, a memecoin trading on Uniswap WETH pairs on the new chain, surged to an all-time high above $0.14. Its market cap ballooned to somewhere between $100 million and $150 million in a single day. The token alone accounted for roughly $98 million in 24-hour trading volume, acting as the rocket fuel that pushed Robinhood Chain’s total DEX numbers past Hyperliquid’s.
