What Is Robinhood Chain? Arcus's Home Network Explained

Robinhood Chain

Robinhood Chain is the blockchain Robinhood built for trading tokenized stocks and other financial assets onchain. Technically it is an Ethereum Layer 2 built on Arbitrum technology, with chain ID 4663 and ETH as its gas token. Its public mainnet launched on July 1, 2026, and it is the only network Arcus runs on. If you trade on Arcus, every Stock Token you hold and every dollar of perps collateral lives on Robinhood Chain.

This guide explains what the chain is, the network details you need for a wallet, how to bridge in and out, what else runs on it, and the incidents and scams worth knowing about. It sticks to what Robinhood's docs and public data show and makes no claims about how regulators view the chain.

What Robinhood Chain is

Robinhood's documentation describes it as "a permissionless, Ethereum-compatible Layer-2 blockchain built to support a new era of onchain financial infrastructure." A few properties from those docs matter to traders:

• It runs on what Robinhood calls Arbitrum Dedicated Blockchains, the Arbitrum chain stack many people still know as Orbit. Transactions execute on the Layer 2 and get posted to Ethereum, using Ethereum blobs for data availability.
• Gas is paid in ETH. There is no separate gas token, so keep a little ETH on Robinhood Chain for any onchain action you pay for yourself.
• The sequencer orders transactions strictly by arrival time. Paying a higher fee does not let anyone jump the queue.
• It is EVM compatible: Solidity contracts, standard wallets and tools like Hardhat, Foundry, ethers.js and viem work without changes.
• ERC-4337 account abstraction is built in, which is how apps sponsor gas or offer smart wallets with session keys.
• Robinhood says the chain is optimized for tokenized equities, ETFs and other financial instruments that people can self-custody and trade 24/7.

Arcus's Help Center sums it up as "an EVM L2 that inherits Ethereum's security."

Source: Robinhood Chain docs, used under fair use for educational purposes

When it launched

Robinhood announced the public mainnet at its "The World is Flat" keynote in London on July 1, 2026 (Robinhood newsroom). The post describes the chain as "Built using the Arbitrum Platform," names Uniswap and Pleiades as day-one liquidity partners, and lists Alchemy, BitGo and Chainlink among the infrastructure integrations. Arcus launched spot and perps beta the same day.

Network details for your wallet

Source: Connecting to Robinhood Chain. I confirmed the mainnet RPC returns chain ID 0x1237 (4663) on October 2, 2026. Robinhood labels the public endpoints rate-limited and recommends a provider such as Alchemy for production apps. Most wallets, including MetaMask, can add the network from the settings above; Robinhood's docs also have an add network page.

The explorer

The mainnet explorer runs on Blockscout. When I loaded it on October 2, 2026 it showed an average block time of 0.1 seconds, about 8.55 million daily transactions, more than 881 million total transactions, 26.4 million addresses and a gas tracker under $0.01. Those are point-in-time readings from the explorer's own dashboard.

Source: Robinhood Chain explorer, used under fair use for educational purposes

You can paste your Arcus wallet address into the explorer to see Stock Token balances, spot settlements and deposits. Perps trades will not appear one by one, because Arcus matches them off-chain and only commits state roots and settlements to the chain.

Bridging in and out

Robinhood's bridging page lists these routes:

The canonical bridge inherits Ethereum's security but withdrawals take three steps: start on Robinhood Chain, wait out the roughly 7-day challenge period, then claim on Ethereum and pay Ethereum gas. Faster bridges trade that wait for trust in the bridge operator. Robinhood also notes that a bridged ERC-20 has a different contract address on Robinhood Chain than on Ethereum, so check token addresses before you send.

If your goal is trading on Arcus, you rarely need any of this. Arcus's deposit flow, powered by Fun, routes crypto from Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Solana and Bitcoin, or cash from cards and Apple Pay, into USDG on Robinhood Chain for you, using Circle CCTP, Relay, Across and LayerZero behind the scenes. The deposit and withdrawal guide covers it step by step. You may still want a small amount of ETH on the chain for the spot actions that are not gasless.

Stock Tokens on Robinhood Chain

The chain's headline asset is the Stock Token: an ERC-20 that gives economic exposure to a US stock or ETF. Two issuer names appear in official documents, and it is worth knowing which applies to what.

• Robinhood's own Stock Tokens, offered in the Robinhood Wallet "in more than 120 countries," are described in Robinhood's disclosure as "tokenised debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited" that do not give holders rights in the underlying shares. Robinhood says they are not available in the US and are restricted in other places, including Canada, the UK, Switzerland and the UAE.
• The Stock Tokens Arcus lists are, according to Arcus's docs and Help Center, "issued by Bitstamp," minted by Bitstamp Global Ltd. (BVI), with a contractual right to redeem for the cash value of the linked security.

I could not find a public document that reconciles the two descriptions, so check the issuer disclosure attached to the specific token you hold. Robinhood's newsroom post lists Uniswap, Rialto, Lighter, Arcus and 1inch as venues for Stock Token spot trading inside the Robinhood Wallet, and since October 1, 2026 the wallet has routed Stock Token swaps through Arcus's RFQ system (Arcus blog). For trading hours, spreads and weekend quotes on Arcus, see trading stocks 24/7 on Arcus.

What else runs on Robinhood Chain

DefiLlama tracked about $1.04 billion of total value locked on Robinhood Chain on October 2, 2026, its highest reading so far (chains API). The main venues:

The perps picture matters if you are choosing where to trade. Lighter's separate Robinhood Chain exchange did about $12.7 billion of perps volume over 30 days against Arcus's $4.11 billion, and Robinhood's newsroom post says Lighter is the perps venue inside the Robinhood Wallet, with 11 million LIT tokens committed to the Robinhood community. The Arcus vs Lighter comparison weighs the two on fees, depth and access; our sister site lighterpedia.com covers Lighter in depth. Robinhood's Chain docs list both Lighter and Arcus as perps partners, and they note that appearing on that page "does not constitute an endorsement, partnership, affiliation."

Incidents and risks on the chain

The September 4, 2026 disruption

On September 4, 2026, Robinhood Chain paused block production and batch posting for about 14 minutes around 12:57 UTC, according to crypto.news. CryptoSlate described the same event as roughly 40 minutes of impaired app traffic. No losses were reported. The two reports frame the duration differently, which is worth remembering whenever you read a single outage figure.

For Arcus users, a chain pause affects deposits, withdrawals and spot settlement directly. Perps matching happens off-chain at Arcus, but collateral custody and settlement depend on the chain. Arcus's escape hatch covers the case where Arcus or its validators stop working. It runs on Robinhood Chain, so it cannot help while the chain itself is paused.

Sequencer and freezing

Like other Arbitrum-stack Layer 2s, Robinhood Chain runs a sequencer that orders transactions. Arcus's Help Center adds that transfers to sanctioned addresses are blocked at the network level, and that Stock Token transfers can be restricted for a short window after purchase. Self-custody on this chain therefore has some limits that self-custody on Ethereum mainnet does not.

Scams on the chain (not Arcus)

Robinhood Chain is permissionless, so anyone can launch a token, and plenty of people have. Reported incidents include tokens that "vanished" from buyers' wallets after purchase in July 2026 (KuCoin News) and a rug-pull ring linked to 53 token launches and about $18.43 million in losses (The Cryptonomist). These involve third-party tokens, not Arcus.

The scam that touches Arcus users most directly is the fake "Arcus" token. Unofficial ARCUS tokens trade on Robinhood Chain right now, and Arcus has no token at all. See Arcus scams and fake sites for the addresses we have seen and which Arcus for the unrelated projects that share the name.

How Arcus uses Robinhood Chain

Arcus calls itself "exclusively on Robinhood Chain." Concretely:

• Spot: Stock Token trades settle wallet to wallet on Robinhood Chain through the Arcus Spot Router, which pulls quotes from Arcus RFQ makers and Uniswap pools.
• Perps: your USDG collateral sits in Arcus's Bridge Vault contract on Robinhood Chain. Orders match off-chain, a permissioned Arcus appchain re-verifies them, and state roots are committed to a Checkpoint Manager contract on the chain.
• pTokens: Arcus's leveraged position tokens are ERC-20s on Robinhood Chain that you can hold in any compatible wallet (pTokens guide).

The full product walkthrough is in what is Arcus, and how to trade on Arcus takes you from an empty wallet to a first trade. Arcus is not available in the US, Canada or the UK, and Robinhood's own Stock Tokens carry similar restrictions; Arcus not available in your country explains the rules as written.

To try Arcus on Robinhood Chain, open app.arcus.xyz. Spot works in eligible regions with no code, and joining with ARCUSGUIDE gets you Arcus's 5% referred-user fee discount (ArcusGuide earns a share of fees from referred traders).