Robinhood Chain slowdown spreads from fees to trading as transactions fall more than 40%

Daily active addresses averaged about 322,000 in the latest week, down 31% from mid-September, suggesting fewer people, and fewer of the trading bots they run, are using the chain each day.

The drop is likely smaller in human terms than the raw number implies, since one trader can run many addresses and a single automated program can account for thousands of transactions.

Less trading, steady balances

Spot exchanges, where users buy and sell tokens directly, handled $7.45 billion during Oct. 2–8, down 21% from $9.46 billion the week before, according to CoinDesk calculations using DefiLlama. Uniswap, an app that lets people swap tokens with each other without a company in the middle, handled roughly 77% of that.

Users aren’t pulling their money out, though. Deposits in the chain’s lending and trading apps rose about 2% over the week to $1.04 billion, and the supply of stablecoins, tokens pegged to the dollar, ticked up to roughly $1.10 billion.

That suggests the pile of money is simply being traded less, with traders keeping their funds on Robinhood Chain and waiting.

Futures are the exception, however. DefiLlama’s rolling seven-day figures on Friday showed about $7.35 billion in perpetual futures volume, contracts that let traders bet on prices without owning the tokens, up 26%.