When crypto last boomed in 2024 and 2025, memecoins were all the rage. Traders flocked to blockchains like Solana or the app Pump.fun to launch their own dog-themed, cat-themed, or frog-themed tokens. Even two presidents got involved. (While President Donald Trump’s memecoin made a killing, Javier Milei’s landed the Argentine president in hot water.)
Then, the “memecoin trenches,” as traders jokingly called them, started dozing off. Some investors caught on that the game was often rigged, and others started chasing other speculative assets like perpetual futures or prediction markets. But, last week, the trenches appeared to have woken up—if even just a little bit.
In early July, the online brokerage Robinhood, which has made serious investments into crypto, publicly launched its own blockchain, a layer-2 network built on top of Ethereum. The initiative was a long time coming and part of the public company’s broader thesis that financial institutions will increasingly tokenize assets, or issue products like stocks within blockchain wrappers.
Trading volume on Robinhood Chain exploded out of the gate, rising from just over $200,000 on July 1 to more than $500 million nine days later, according to data from the crypto analytics provider DefiLlama. But that volume wasn’t from real-world assets, another term for tokenized financial products. Instead, trading came from the trenches.
