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🐳 Daily Edition: Traders Left Disappointed By Robinhood Summit as Chain Revenue Slips

🐳 Daily Edition: Traders Left Disappointed By Robinhood Summit as Chain Revenue Slips

One of Robinhood's biggest announcements yesterday includes bringing perps to the US retail market, leaving LIT holders feeling abandoned

Will McKinnon & Beluga
September 30, 2026

At its Houston summit yesterday Robinhood announced it plans to bring perpetual futures (“perps”) to the US retail market in the coming months, starting with the top crypto assets and up to 10x leverage. While the product is targeted at existing Robinhood users and thus doesn’t affect the average crypto trader too much, it did drive their existing perps partner Lighter’s token to fall over 20% in less than an hour.

Source: Tree News

Lighter has enjoyed a significant run up over the last 3 months rising over 500% at its peak mainly due to its performance and activity as a perps DEX, yet given the market’s reaction today it’s pretty clear it also commanded a serious premium for being Robinhood’s “exclusive” perps rails that no longer applies.

The perps news lands as Robinhood’s onchain push is losing speed, with daily DEX volume having fallen from an ATH of $1.9B to a low of $800M over the weekend and many of the ecosystems top coins seeing a similar decline. Chain fees have fallen even harder, down to $160k in the last 24 hours from an ATH of over $6M. While the talking heads on X might have you believe the chain is dead, in my opinion this is just a classic rotation we see on every new chain that dominates memecoin volume.

Major financial services institution StoneX published that just 1-2% of the transactions we saw on RH chain came from Robinhood app users — further indication that the surge in activity was really just the same players we’re used to trading against on Solana and other chains. Without bringing that ratio up, we’ll likely continue to see their coin cycles play out the same way.

Average memecoin trading experience

Beluga is excited to partner with Polyester for the launch of their testnet campaign, featuring prizes and token rewards for early users. Polyester is a next-gen spot DEX backed by top investors and funds across crypto and TradFi, offering markets for any coin on any chain with a user experience that feels like you’re trading on a CEX.

To commemorate the launch of the testnet, we are giving away $5,000 in Zcash. Enter the giveaway using the instructions in our Tweet - winners will be announced soon!