Robinhood stock went parabolic yesterday, closing up more than 16%. Apparently, Wall Street discovered blockchain data platforms, where anyone can watch, in real time, how much money the two-month-old Robinhood Chain is making.
And there’s suddenly a lot to watch. After hovering between $40k and $140k in daily fee revenue for most of August, activity exploded in recent days, peaking at $4.6 million on Wednesday.
For context: across all business lines, Robinhood averaged $14.4 million in daily revenue in Q2. In other words, the two-month-old Robinhood Chain just printed a third of that in a day.
Now, there’s of course plenty to debate about how sticky this revenue is.
The overwhelming majority of activity is speculative memecoin trading, partly powered by a new phenomenon called stock-paired memecoins: a memecoin pooled against a stock token instead of ETH or USDC, so that trading the meme requires buying the stock.
We won’t overintellectualize why anyone would want this (it’s also difficult to say). It does come with side effects, though. Yesterday, AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron fired off a public rage tweet, distinctly unamused to find his company's stock trading onchain without consent.
Interestingly, it’s most likely not Robinhood’s brokerage customers doing the trading. Robinhood Wallet, our best proxy here, accounts for just 2% of activity. The rest arrives through trading platforms like FOMO and GMGN, which abstract away the underlying chain and route users wherever the casino currently pitches its tent. Today that’s Robinhood Chain. Tomorrow it could be Solana again.
Still, it’s already an impressive launch by any measure. Safe to assume Interactive Brokers, eToro and peers requested their blockchain-data logins this morning, too.
IN TODAY’S BRIEFING:
Kraken to bring Hyperliquid to the U.S.
Ethena moves into neobanking with Ethena Pay
WITH INSIGHTS FROM
Alex Obchakevich
Oobit
Ondrej Pilny
Gnosis
HIGH SIGNAL NEWS
Kraken parent to bring Hyperliquid onshore. According to Bloomberg, the companies are in advanced talks on a deal that would allow U.S. traders to access selected Hyperliquid-linked perpetual futures through Payward’s CFTC-regulated Bitnomial exchange. 🇺🇸
Bitwise launches first RWA vault on Morpho. Dubbed PAPY, the vehicle will allocate user assets across RWA markets, including short-duration cross-border payment financing to institutions, loans backed by GPUs that power AI, and tokenized claims collateralized by prime home equity. 🏦
Solana passes disinflation proposal. Under the change, the network’s disinflation rate will double to 30%, reducing projected SOL issuance by 18.9 million SOL, worth roughly $1.9 billion, over the next six years. 🗳
Ethena expands reserve backing strategy. Going forward, basis trades using equity perpetuals will form part of USDe’s backing. According to the team, equity perpetual funding rates have averaged 15–20%, more than 5x Bitcoin funding rates in 2026, while showing near-zero correlation with crypto funding rates. 💱
TOP STORY
Ethena Moves Into Neobanking With Ethena Pay
Ethena enters neobanking: This week, stablecoin issuer Ethena launched Ethena Pay, its own crypto neobanking app. The product went live in 48 countries and combines a self-custodial stablecoin wallet with fiat banking rails. Its headline features include up to 6% rewards on dollar balances, up to 5% cashback on card purchases and free fiat onramps.
Why it matters: The announcement comes as crypto neobanks are gaining significant traction, growing not only in number but also in size. The biggest names in the vertical, such as Ether.fi and KAST, are now processing more than $100 million in monthly card spend, growing 8x and 20x YoY, respectively.
Why the sector is taking off: Three structural advantages explain this growth:
Global dollar accounts: Stablecoins allow crypto neobanks to offer dollar-denominated accounts in markets where access to traditional USD banking is limited or expensive. This is particularly powerful in emerging markets, where the alternative is often a weaker local currency.
Maturing card infrastructure: Stablecoin card issuers such as Rain allow fintechs to launch card programs across countries in weeks, so stablecoin balances can be spent through existing card networks.
Yield & rewards: By connecting users to DeFi infrastructure, crypto neobanks can offer access to yield opportunities that are difficult to reproduce through traditional banking rails. On top of that, many providers are using generous cashback programs, often ranging between 2% and 5%, to accelerate adoption.
A crowded market: But the same infrastructure that enables crypto neobanks to scale quickly also lowers the barrier to entry. Stablecoin wallets, card programs and DeFi integrations are increasingly available off the shelf, making it easier for new entrants or traditional neobanks with existing distribution to assemble the same feature set. As the stack becomes a commodity, differentiation depends on what a platform offers beyond it.
Vertical integration: For Ethena, that differentiation is USDe. USDe is already the fifth-largest USD stablecoin by market capitalization. By controlling USDe's backing revenue, Ethena captures more of the economics generated by balances in Ethena Pay, which gives it more room than platforms built on third-party stablecoins to fund rewards and absorb costs such as free onramps.
Owning the distribution: Ethena Pay also creates a new distribution channel for USDe. Money entering the app is converted into USDe, so growth in balances creates direct demand for the stablecoin. Until now, USDe has largely reached users through third parties such as Binance, Bybit and Aave; its own consumer product lets Ethena reach them directly and reduces its dependence on those partners.
“If you never own the user and get one step closer to them, you can never control that economic relationship in a much more powerful way. We just don’t want to be in that position in three to five years where the distribution of our products is entirely reliant on other people,” Guy Young, founder and CEO of Ethena Labs, said on a recent podcast.
Geographic expansion: That direct distribution strategy is initially focused on Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, with the U.S., EU and UK set to follow. How much of the product makes it into those markets will also depend on local stablecoin regulation. GENIUS and MiCA both prohibit issuers from paying yield on stablecoin balances, which puts the 6% rewards at the heart of Ethena Pay in question for U.S. and European users.
Outlook: Beyond expanding into new markets, Ethena plans to launch an enhanced USD savings product in the coming months, offering one-click access to higher-yielding DeFi strategies such as leveraged USDe looping. The stated near-term goal is to become one of the largest crypto neobanks by card spend and user balances.
“Placing ourselves within the top three crypto-native providers of this product within the next six to nine months is what we’re wanting to hit,” Young added.
Alex Obchakevich is Research Partner and Advisor at Oobit, a global crypto payments platform.
Which markets and user groups are driving crypto-neobank adoption today, and how do usage patterns differ between them?
Growth is strongest in Latin America, India, Nigeria and Vietnam, essentially markets where high inflation or limited access to dollars creates stronger demand for alternatives to traditional banking. Looking at the users themselves, two groups stand out: crypto-native Gen Z users who are comfortable holding and spending digital assets, and freelancers who receive part of their income in stablecoins.
In emerging markets, crypto neobanks are already starting to resemble primary accounts. Users often fund them through international transfers or by buying USDT and spend directly from those balances. Usage patterns also vary across markets. In Latin America, groceries account for 35% of spending, followed by restaurants and fast food. In El Salvador, telecom captures 22% of spending, while in Vietnam hotels and lodging lead at 23%.
Developed markets look different. In the U.S., users also spend on everyday purchases, but groceries account for only 8% of transactions, while other forms of consumption make up the largest share at 41%. More importantly, users tend to spend crypto they already hold rather than regularly topping up these accounts with fiat.
Ondrej Pilny is Head of Growth at Gnosis, the organization behind Gnosis Pay, which launched one of the first stablecoin-enabled Visa cards and has since evolved into infrastructure for fintechs and wallets looking to launch their own branded crypto card programs.
What could drive broader crypto-neobank adoption in developed markets, and how do you see the competition between crypto-native neobanks, traditional neobanks and banks evolving?
In developed markets, cards alone probably are not enough. I think yield offerings are the next step and could become one of the strongest drivers of adoption among both crypto-native and mainstream users, turning these products from simple spending accounts into a combination of checking and savings.
Crypto-native neobanks may have an easier path to launching these products because they are already built around self-custodial wallets, making integrations with DeFi protocols more straightforward. Fintechs could follow, given their relative agility and need to keep pace. Traditional banks, however, face a harder transition. They generally prefer custodial setups, which are also central to their existing business models, and operate under tighter compliance constraints.
One bank I spoke with, for example, considered offering Aave yield to its customers but could not get comfortable with not knowing who was borrowing on the other side of the lending pool. Permissioned or KYC-gated markets could therefore become an important bridge, allowing banks to offer more innovative products while staying within their compliance requirements.
Competitive advantage through vertical integration
Illustration: Blockstories
Aave: Director Capital Markets Growth, London 🇬🇧
Bybit: Country Manager, Germany 🇩🇪
Ethena: Head of Product - Ethena Pay, Remote 🌐
Gnosis: Chief Technology Officer, Germany/Portugal 🇪🇺
Monzo: Senior Legal Counsel, Digital Assets and Payments, Remote 🇬🇧
MoonPay: Product Manager, Crypto Asset Management, London 🇬🇧
Morpho: Revenue Operations Manager, Paris 🇫🇷
OKX: Head of Business Operations / COO, London 🇬🇧
Spiko: Country Manager - Netherlands, Amsterdam 🇳🇱
Polymarket | $1 billion | Undisclosed : A leading prediction markets platform, valued at $21 billion.
Félix Pago | $200 million | Series C : WhatsApp-based remittance platform using stablecoins for settlement.
OpenReserve | $25 million | Seed : Blockchain-native bank and onchain capital markets platform for institutions.
Diameter Pay | $10 million | Series A : Cross-border payments infrastructure for banks and fintechs.
Firelight | $8 million | Seed : Onchain protection infrastructure for DeFi products and earn programs.
How Argentina uses stablecoins, in 5 charts (a16z) — This piece uses five charts to show how stablecoins became a major way for Argentines to save and get paid in dollars, and why adoption has remained strong even as inflation and capital controls have eased.
Why Stablecoins (Alone) Won't Fix Remittance (DCo) — This article argues that stablecoins won’t fix remittances on their own because they only improve the settlement leg, while much of the cost comes from compliance, FX, banking, and local payout infrastructure. Their bigger advantage, according to the authors, is making cross-border payments more capital-efficient by reducing the need to pre-fund accounts in every market.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in the Crypto Briefing by Blockstories does not constitute investment advice. Accordingly, we assume no liability for any investment decisions made based on the content presented herein.
