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The Gold Rush on Robinhood
The timeline seems euphoric.
What’s happening? I’ll let the charts answer for you.
Robinhood has gone parabolic. DEX volume has gone from ~$147 million on August 1st to $1.8 billion yesterday. That’s >12x.
Other metrics are also impressive.
- >$800M in total value locked.
- They have around ~128k active wallets.
- Hit a new ATH of daily transactions yesterday at 6.25 million txns.
- Yesterday alone, Robinhood Chain made ~$4.45 million in revenue!
What’s driving this? A bunch of factors came together. The crypto markets seem to be preparing for the bull run. So everyone seems optimistic. (I covered this in detail last week.) Robinhood already had the momentum from its launch. The improved conditions created a virtuous cycle: price up > more traders and activity > more fees & attention > price goes up even more > repeat.
Despite targeting the “stock tokens” niche,
The trend accelerated with the new stocks+memes meta. Degens are pairing stock tokens with memes on DEXes. There are interesting theorizations regarding that. About how memecoins will short-squeeze Wall St penny stocks. But that doesn’t matter. It only matters that there’s crazy activity on the Robinhood chain.
This dominance of the meme+stocks meta is visible on the chart tracking onchain trading volume of RWA assets on Robinhood.
While stock trading did ~$245M in trading volume yesterday, memecoin+stock pairs did $287.6M. This is excluding the pure memecoin volume, which is even crazier.
Where are the opportunities? Personally, I haven’t degened with memecoins. But people on the timeline have been talking about it a lot. You can play that game by chasing volume and liquidity trends. Onchain sleuths have an advantage here.
I like more “sensible” strategies. Below are my two preferred strategies.
During a gold rush, selling shovels is the best business. Similarly, during memecoin mania, launchpads and trading bots are the best businesses.
$PONS is the perfect example here. It’s the dominant launchpad on Robinhood Chain. I had covered it becoming the $PUMP of Robinhood back on July 23rd (Crypto’s newest cash printer). It was only $0.031 then. Right now, it’s ~$0.555. That’s ~18x.
There will be other such “profitable businesses” in this gold rush. Among trading bots, Fomo (covered here) is the leader. But it doesn’t have a token for us to buy. Anyways, looking for good businesses here is a good strategy.
Another strategy is to be a liquidity provider. People are printing 4k+ APR on providing liquidity to meme<>stock pairs.
Others have written on LP farming. Defi Ignas’s guide for 2026 degen farming is great. Karim’s methodology sounds cool as well.
The energy on Robinhood has reached a bit euphoric. So there could be a short-term, local correction. But in the medium term, Robinhood will keep attracting users and liquidity. The broader ecosystem is also growing.
Even if you missed these initial moves, there’s no need to use leverage to make up or something. More opportunities are coming.
Tools
New Entrants to Your Tool Stack
Don’t enter a new crypto cycle with the same research stack you used in the last one.
The market has changed. ETFs, RWAs, prediction markets, tokenized stocks, and new yield opportunities are becoming much more important.
So, you gotta update your tools.
Here are 5 newer ones worth adding to your stack:
1. Valueverse
This is useful when I want to understand why the token should have value in the first place. It tracks things like protocol revenue, buybacks, staking, governance, and whether any of that actually flows back to token holders.
Their X account, @valueverse_ai, also produces great long-form content on valuing crypto tokens. They’ve even built many new frameworks to track crypto-native value accrual mechanisms like ve(3,3).
2. Yieldz.io
You can scan for lending and leveraged yield opportunities. It pulls markets from Morpho, Aave and others into one interface and shows APY, liquidity, utilization, LLTV and risk. You can also enter or unwind some leveraged positions in one transaction instead of manually doing the borrow/swap/deposit loop yourself.
3. SoSoValue
This is the cleanest place to follow ETF flows now that almost every major asset seems to be getting one. $BTC, $ETH, $SOL, ripple:native, $HYPE all sitting together with daily and 30D flows, AUM and volume. Separate data for Bitcoin treasuries and fundraising too.
4. SPECTRE AI
You can compare tokens, chains, and sectors, then layer in mindshare, narratives, liquidations, and other market data on top of each other. Currently in Beta, but will go live soon.
5. Polymarket Analytics
@poly_data shows whale trades, individual wallets, trader P&L, win rates, open interest, historical positioning. Much easier to tell whether a move has serious money behind it or a few small trades pushing price around.
Bonus: New Features on Old Ones
Token Terminal and Jumper have been around for some time. But recently, I started using them both again because I kept seeing tokenized stock numbers on X with no way to sanity check them.
Token Terminal gives the market-level view, issuers, and market share. Jumper’s new RWA dashboard is better for browsing individual onchain assets, prices, market caps, volume, and you can swap right there.
Most of these are free enough to be useful without paying for another subscription.
And if the market does keep getting more risk-on, having the right dashboard open before everyone starts chasing the same trade is probably worth more than finding another 20 accounts to follow.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Morpho shipped In-Kind Redemptions for vaults, letting you redeem a vault position for the underlying market position even when the vault has no available liquidity.
Solana validators approved SGP-0002, doubling the annual disinflation rate from 15% to 30% with 67% support against a 66.67% threshold.
Ethena launched Ethena Pay, a neobank paying 5.0% card cashback and a 6.0% dollar savings rate, with free global onramps in USD, GBP, EUR and local FX.
Pump.fun added HyperEVM support, letting users trade any HyperEVM token with USDC at near-zero fees and earn callout rewards.
LONG piloted an early alpha of LongX, which turns Lighter perp exposure into a composable leveraged spot ERC-20 on Robinhood Chain.
Arcadia went live with margin on tokenized stocks, with every leveraged position borrowing from Arcadia lending pools.
Arcus turned perp accounts into spot tokens: pBTC for 1x, pBTC3x for 3x, tradable on Uniswap like any other ERC-20.
Ethena‘s Foundation announced four changes. Live fee-switch proposal for programmatic ENA buybacks, the removal of monthly VC unlocks, and more.
Variational launched XAU and US100 swap markets on Omni, sourcing liquidity from TradFi venues rather than crypto-native ones. A $1M gold long costs $200 to execute against $1,100 elsewhere.
Jupiter launched Universal Deposit, which takes a token from Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum or Sui and returns USDC in your Solana wallet. Flat $0.30 fee whether you send $100 or $10M.
Kamino introduced Kamino Fixed Rates, pitched as the definitive architecture for fixed-term, fixed-rate on-chain credit. Private beta now, public launch in Q3 2026.
Lighter cut average block proof time from ~5.3 minutes to ~1 minute across two rollouts on July 23 and August 23.
Spectra Finance announced they’re bringing fixed-income markets to Stellar assets, traded through an order book from day one.
Valantis made Hyperliquid fee tiers a tradable instrument, powered by stHYPE and Pendle. You can now trade tokenized Hyperliquid Fee Discounts!
Doppler Finance introduced $XDP, a 10 billion supply token where staking unlocks advanced vaults, priority access to new products, and ecosystem campaigns.
🆕 New Launches
Tydro launched v2 on Ink, claiming first-to-market with isolation, fixed and floating rate, and term markets built on Aave’s lending infrastructure.
NoRekt is a hedged-lending protocol: deposit ETH, borrow USDC, buy protection. It bundles the loan and an options hedge into one margin account instead of leaving you to run them across separate protocols.
YO Protocol introduced BASKETS, a way to customize yield exposure across blue-chip assets. Pick Balanced, Growth or Edge, or build your own: one deposit, multiple vaults.
🪂 Airdrop Alpha
TREAD‘s Genesis Distribution registration is live and gated on accepting the terms.
Melee, which raised $3.5M led by Variant and DBA, is handing badges to early users. It’ll start accruing a Melee Score.
Canopy‘s CNPY airdrop claim portal is open for testnet reward points. Submitting is required to be considered and doesn’t guarantee an allocation.
📰 Industry News
Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, and UBS are among the institutions establishing a stablecoin enterprise.
DefiLlama and Forgd launched Universal Token Ratings, scoring 128 tokens 0 to 100 and grading them AAA to CCC.
Base launched a Creator Grant Program backing independent creators with up to $4,000 to make content about Base, its ecosystem, and builders.
Telegram began rolling out the non-custodial Gram wallet to a limited group, with wider release to its 1B+ users over the following weeks. The first five transactions a day are free.
StarkWare‘s quantum-safe Bitcoin construction landed on mainnet, no fork required. It protects legacy outputs only, not Taproot or Lightning channels, and each spend burns several hundred dollars of off-chain GPU compute.
📉 Down Bad
HyEna is winding down, and the stated reason is Hyperliquid’s alignment with USDC, which removed the case for a USDe-margined venue. Markets delist from August 31 to September 2, one per hour.
Injective stopped producing blocks for about 3 hours and 42 minutes amid a suspected exploit netting $4.9 million, then resumed without a rollback.
Core Lightning shipped v26.06.7 with fixes for responsibly reported vulnerabilities, and everything before it is unsupported.
🚨 Rekt Report
Cronos rolled back roughly 11,000 blocks to undo a ~$75M Tectonic exploit, restarting from block 90,896,189 after about ten hours down. The $6.29M already bridged to Ethereum was gone.
Fogo‘s Foundation was compromised, and 400 million FOGO went to a bad actor. They halted the mainnet about 15 hours later and upgraded to restrict the attacker’s addresses.
Avici traced its ~$500k card drain to partner Rain’s Solana card contract, which hit a small number of other programs too. Every affected balance is being refunded in full.
Ajna v2 lost roughly $775,400 across seven Ethereum pools to an attacker exploiting its liquidation math.
😂 Meme
Until next time,
Edgy
Today’s email was written by Edgy and Yayya.
DISCLAIMER: I’m NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
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