In the short term, the light asset model of CEX runs faster, and the scale of derivatives has formed a competitive advantage. However, looking at a longer cycle, licensed brokers like Robinhood may have stronger momentum.

Written by: Blockchain Knight

This year, the cryptocurrency market has taken two completely opposite paths of expansion. Brokerages centered on stocks like Robinhood have laid out plans for public chains, quickly rising to the forefront of trading activity through memes.

Meanwhile, major cryptocurrency exchanges have collectively turned to tokenized stocks and RWA assets, becoming distribution channels for Wall Street assets.

Although both sides have entered from different starting points, they are essentially competing for the trading entry point of the next generation of assets.

Robinhood Chain has been online for less than two weeks, and its growth rate far exceeds market expectations.

Data from DeFiLlama shows that its accumulated DEX trading volume has exceeded 3.98 billion USD, with daily trading volume only second to Solana, ranking second across the network.

In the Ethereum L2 track, single-day transaction counts reached 10.4 million, surpassing Base, which has been online longer.

Notably, users are mainly from the incremental market, with the number of active addresses increasing several times within a week, and new addresses accounting for over 45%, rather than existing users inflating volume.

Of course, the heat is not supported by the official narrative of RWA, but rather by meme speculation, with memes contributing nearly 50% of the entire chain's trading volume most of the time.

However, risks are also emerging behind the prosperity. Cross-chain platform Relay has warned of a large number of buying-and-disappearing honeypot tokens on-chain, with malicious contracts bypassing security checks to directly transfer user funds. Meanwhile, several projects have associated address clusters controlling the assets, warranting vigilance.

More crucially, the current market cap of active real assets across the chain is only about 12.5 million USD, lagging far behind the speculative heat.

On the other hand, cryptocurrency exchanges are collectively "de-cryptofying," with tokenized assets becoming the new main force for growth.

Data from CryptoRank shows that in the first half of 2026, tokenized assets accounted for nearly one-fifth of newly listed assets on exchanges, while the proportion was less than 7% in 2025, with overall new asset listings declining for two consecutive quarters during the same period.

From the perspective of trading volume, the benefits of entering this track are already visually evident, and for exchanges, user acceptance of traditional asset-linked products is quite high.

In June, the trading volume of CEX perpetual futures for real assets reached 311 billion USD, a month-on-month increase of 57%, setting a historical high. In the past year, the market size of tokenized stocks globally has grown by over 470%, with monthly on-chain transfer volume reaching 8.4 billion USD.

However, these products generally have inherent shortcomings; most are synthetic derivatives or debt certificates, where users do not enjoy real shareholder rights and are restricted by regulations, essentially not open to U.S. users, making it difficult to enter the core market. Conversely, why would U.S. retail investors use crypto channels?

In the short term, the light asset model of CEX runs faster, and the scale of derivatives has formed a competitive advantage. However, looking at a longer cycle, licensed brokers like Robinhood may have stronger momentum.

The core of financial business is the authenticity and compliance of assets. Robinhood possesses complete brokerage qualifications, and its RWA assets have real underlying support. Once securities accounts are linked with public chain wallets, the experience cannot be replicated by exchanges.

Although both sides are currently expanding within their comfort zones, Robinhood has had a good leading effect. If other brokerages follow suit, the story could become very interesting, and we may ultimately see a competition from another dimension. It is uncertain how CEX bosses would feel about this.