Robinhood Chain's Daily Transactions Fall 42% as Trading Cools

The fee collapse on Robinhood Chain has reached its traffic. The network averaged 6.2 million transactions a day in the week to 8 October, down 42% from 10.8 million a day over 10-16 September, on CoinDesk's reading of growthepie data filed in the early hours of Saturday. Spot trading volume fell 21% to $7.45 billion across the same week. Fees ran about $65,000 a day, a further 39% down. Deposits barely moved.

September was the fee story, October is the volume one

The first half was covered here in September, when daily fees fell 97% while transactions held near their peak. Three outlets then carried a 32% drop in trading volume that CoinDesk's own figures did not support, and it was left out of that piece. CoinDesk now reports trading volume falling on its own numbers, 21% week over week, with Uniswap handling roughly 77% of what is left. Daily active addresses are about 322,000, down 31% from mid-September. CoinDesk notes that one person can hold several addresses, so that is not 31% fewer users.

Not everything is down

Perpetual futures volume is about $7.35 billion on a rolling seven-day basis, up 26% on the week. Robinhood set 10x leverage on bitcoin perps for its US traders in September, and that product line is the one going the other way. Deposits in lending and trading apps rose about 2% to $1.04 billion. Stablecoin supply ticked up to roughly $1.10 billion. Crypto Briefing puts total value locked at about $1 billion and steady through the period.

Two counts of the same autumn

Crypto Briefing's Saturday piece runs under a headline saying transactions fell more than 40%, and its own body gives 13.1 million falling to 8.9 million by mid-September, about 32%, with a seven-day average down about 6%. Those are September figures measured a different way, and they do not add up to the headline; the 40% traces back to CoinDesk, which the outlet names. We used CoinDesk's week-over-week averages throughout. Crypto Briefing also reports Pons's weekly memecoin volume down 37% and writes in its own voice that memecoin trading drove both the rise and the fall. No other outlet read here makes that claim, and no provider is named for the 37%.

What the company is paying for

Robinhood will cover network fees on wallet swaps above 50 cents until 31 December. An earlier version of the promotion had been due to lapse on 29 September. Arcus started handing out extra reward points for stock-token swaps on 1 October, and neither measure shows up in the first week's figures. CoinDesk puts Robinhood's share of the chain's network fees at roughly nine-tenths, attributing it to a Bernstein note from last month that is not published, so that split arrives secondhand. A person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk on Friday that the chain is weighing Arbitrum's Priority Gas Auctions, a sequencing method that would let traders pay to be processed ahead of others. Robinhood declined to comment and Arbitrum's developer did not respond. That account has one unnamed source behind it.

At $65,000 a day the fee line is a rounding error against the $8 million the chain collected on its busiest day in early September, and the subsidy means the published total no longer measures what users would otherwise pay. Nobody has put a figure on what the promotion costs. The chain opened on 1 July, which leaves it without a comparable quarter to read these weeks against. Whether 6.2 million transactions a day is a floor is not answerable from one week of averages.