Robinhood's New Blockchain Is Now Making More Money Than Ethereum. Does That Make Robinhood Stock a Buy?
Key Points
Robinhood recently launched a new blockchain.
Its chain is currently very popular for trading meme coins.
In fact, it's so popular that it's bringing in a lot more fee revenue than Ethereum, a much larger and older chain.
Robinhood Markets' (NASDAQ: HOOD) newly launched Robinhood Chain is now a bigger earner than Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) in terms of the fees it brings in. Over the 30 days ending on Sept. 10, the network's users paid $34.4 million in transaction fees, whereas Ethereum only saw $11.3 million, per data from DefiLlama. Most of the Robinhood Chain's haul flooded in during the final seven days of that period, as the crypto market's speculative fervor intensified considerably.
Can this pace possibly continue, and if it does, is Robinhood's stock worth buying?
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One meme coin launchpad pulled in $40.8 million of fees
The goal of Robinhood's new blockchain is to become a hub for the trading of tokenized stocks. It could still accomplish that goal, but for now, its users have other ideas about what they'd prefer to do with the platform.
Pons, a meme coin launchpad, is the project that embodies the state of the chain at the moment.
Essentially, its service is to enable anyone to create and trade a new meme token in minutes using tokenized stocks to fund the process. It collected a whopping $96.1 million in user fees over the 30 days ending on Sept. 10, making it the chain's largest launchpad by fees, as well as the biggest generator of the chain's deluge of transaction fees paid to Robinhood.
In short, the launchpad is a sign that Robinhood's fee base is currently riding on meme coin enthusiasm alone. What's more, the assets being traded on the network are, in large part, meme coins, the vast majority of which have no value or enduring appeal. As the market's spell of euphoria dries up, and it always does, so will the activity on the chain.
The same issues do not necessarily apply to Ethereum.
Its ecosystem took $290 million over the 30-day period ending on Sept. 10, led by a mixture of its decentralized finance (DeFi) and staking projects, with no meme launchpads represented among its 10 largest earners by revenue or fee contribution. Its ecosystem will still suffer if the crypto market turns over and enters a new bear phase, but, at that point, it could well be bringing in more transaction fees on a daily basis than Robinhood's ledger.
So is Robinhood stock still worth buying?
Robinhood's stock looks good here, and it'll likely continue to look good even if the activity on its chain dries up for a while.
After its costs, its chain kept $30.1 million over the same 30 days. Passing an entire quarter at that pace would generate around $90.3 million in revenue. For reference, the company saw $1.3 billion in total net revenue the business reported in Q2 of this year. So the gain to the top line from crypto fees is meaningful, but incremental, at least for now.
But the stronger argument for buying the stock is that the new blockchain is just a logical extension of the one-stop investing and speculating shop that Robinhood already is. Its new chain could fail entirely, and the stock could still march upward thanks to the company's other activities.
From that framing, the incremental growth from crypto is just the icing on the cake.
Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum and Pons. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.