As Circle's public blockchain Arc officially launched today, the trend of listed companies expanding their on-chain business through public blockchains is becoming increasingly evident. Here's a breakdown of a few: --- 1. **Robinhood (HOOD)** **Main Business:** A comprehensive financial platform for retail users. Its core offerings remain stocks, options, and crypto trading, with recent additions like prediction markets, Gold subscriptions, and banking/credit card products, while accelerating international expansion. **Blockchain:** Robinhood Chain is its self-built permissioned deployment, open to the public as an L2. It focuses on turning U.S. stocks/ETFs into Stock Tokens that can be traded, collateralized, and integrated into DeFi on-chain (primarily targeting non-U.S. users), along with lending, DEX liquidity, and more. --- 2. **Circle (CRCL)** **Main Business:** A stablecoin company. Its core product is USDC (and EURC, etc.), with revenue mainly from reserve earnings and platform services. It also offers cross-chain transfers, wallets, and enterprise payment tools. **Blockchain:** Arc is Circle's self-built finance-oriented Layer 1, where gas fees are paid in USDC. Validator nodes are primarily institutions like BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard, and ICE. It's positioned not as a "general-purpose blockchain" but for stablecoin settlement, RWA, and institutional-grade capital flows. According to the official schedule, the public mainnet goes live today (2026-09-16). --- 3. **Coinbase (COIN)** **Main Business:** The largest compliant crypto trading and custody platform in the U.S., covering retail trading, institutional brokerage/custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services. **Blockchain:** Base is the most mature and largest ecosystem among these blockchains. Operated by Coinbase, this L2 is open to developers. It already hosts a significant amount of USDC, DeFi, and has started issuing tokenized U.S. stocks via Coinbase. --- 4. **Figure (FIGR)** **Main Business:** Using blockchain for consumer lending and capital market infrastructure, especially HELOC (home equity line of credit) origination, secondary market trading, and securitization. It also offers yield-generating stablecoins (YLDS) and on-chain lending through Democratized Prime. **Blockchain:** Provenance serves as the foundation for its business. Loan ownership, transfers, and registrations are recorded on this blockchain, which has already processed billions of dollars in real-world assets. It follows the path of "on-chain business first, company listing later." --- 5. **Sony (SONY)** **Main Business:** Gaming (PlayStation), consumer electronics, music, film, and financial subsidiaries like Sony Bank. **Blockchain:** Soneium is led by a Sony-controlled joint venture and is a public L2 aimed at entertainment and creators. It focuses on bringing IP, digital collectibles, payments, and fan economies on-chain, rather than acting as a brokerage or stablecoin settlement platform. ---