One Cat, Seven Days, $570M: Robinhood Chain Leaves Hyperliquid in the Litter Box 🐱

Robinhood Chain, a permissionless Ethereum Layer-2 network built on the Arbitrum stack, recorded between $560 million and $570 million in 24-hour decentralized exchange volume on July 8, 2026, surpassing Hyperliquid on that metric seven days after mainnet launch. DefiLlama data cited by CoinGape put the chain's 24-hour DEX volume at roughly $433 million, with seven-day volume near $900 million and a fifth-place ranking on the by-chain DEX volume leaderboard. Hyperliquid, by contrast, posted $296 million in 24-hour DEX volume and $656.28 million over the trailing seven days, despite having reported $492.7 billion in quarterly volume and a record ~$161 million in net revenue in Q1 2026, the highest single-quarter figure ever recorded by a DeFi protocol.

The surge was driven primarily by a memecoin called CASHCAT, which alone generated approximately $98 million in 24-hour volume, about 17% of the chain's daily DEX total. CASHCAT, a cat-themed token that emerged organically on Robinhood Chain, traded against WETH on Uniswap pairs and hit an all-time high above $0.17, with its market cap reaching between $100 million and $170 million in a single session according to DexScreener data. CoinGape reported the CASHCAT price had skyrocketed by almost 60%.

Robinhood Chain launched on July 1 with integrations including Uniswap for trading, Chainlink for price oracles, and Morpho for lending. Because the chain is fully permissionless, any participant can deploy a token and create trading pairs, the mechanism through which CASHCAT appeared without any corporate announcement. Santiment highlighted massive demand for the chain tied to RWA, DeFi, and CASHCAT activity, and CEO Vlad Tenev's earlier comments on meme-coin suitability and gas waivers added to the attention.

Onboarding metrics underscore the scale of the spike. Daily active addresses on Robinhood Chain approached 200,000 on July 8, with more than 140,000 of those being first-time users, figures that indicate new-user acquisition rather than rotation from existing DeFi participants. The chain has been described as AI-native and built for financial services and real-world assets, though the bulk of recent activity has been memecoin-driven rather than RWA-based.