Robinhood’s testnet (HOOD) recorded four million transactions in its first week that its testchain is active, the investment platform’s CEO Vlad Tenev said on X Thursday.
Robinhood Chain, which focuses on tokenization and trading, comes at a time when centralized exchanges are looking to build their own blockchain infrastructure, even as the broader Ethereum ecosystem debates its future.
“Developers are already leveraging our L2, designed for real-world tokenized assets and on-chain financial services,” Tenev wrote.
Testnets are risk-free environments for developers to test experimental code and features before their mainnet goes live. The two stages of network development could be compared to a flight simulator and a commercial flight.
The Robinhood Chain testnet came against the backdrop of a broader reckoning in the Ethereum world.
Earlier this month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the protocol’s Layer 2 (L2) rollup-focused roadmap “no longer makes sense,” arguing that many rollups have failed to achieve full decentralization and that Ethereum’s base layer is scaling faster than expected.
That philosophical shift has fueled chatter in the Ethereum community about what scale and meaningful decentralization will look like in 2026. But while some in the developer community push for new frameworks, Tenev and other centralized players appear to be doubling down on proprietary chains and tokenized marketplaces as a way to capture users and liquidity.
The contrast underlines a growing divide in the cryptocurrency direction. As Ethereum’s core architects reevaluate how scaling at the base layer should evolve, major trading platforms are looking to control more of the stack themselves. For exchanges, owning the infrastructure could mean greater user capture, new revenue streams, and greater influence over how tokenized markets take shape.
Read more: Robinhood begins testing its own blockchain as cryptocurrency and tokenization momentum deepens
