Lorenzo Valente, Head of Digital Asset Research at crypto investment firm ARK Invest, diagnosed that the recent surge in trading volume on the Arbitrum (ARB)-based Ethereum (ETH) Layer 2 Robinhood Chain appears to stem mostly from existing cryptocurrency traders' transactions, with almost no effect of new cryptocurrency user inflows observed. He explained, "We examined on-chain data and directly analyzed contract-level data. As a result, the vast majority of Robinhood Chain's trading volume overwhelmingly seems to be transactions by existing 'Degens' (professional cryptocurrency traders). Swap transactions from Robinhood Wallet are routed through 0x's Settler contract, which is currently the only transaction type that can be definitively identified as Robinhood user activity on-chain. However, this accounts for less than 1% of total transactions. Even generously assuming some unidentified transactions are also Robinhood user transactions, this proportion is only about 5%. The rest appears to be transaction flows from existing traders using trading terminals such as GMGN, Axiom, and OKX. These traders are trading in the same way they always do on other chains. In conclusion, 'old-timers' have simply moved to a new chain; new users have not been onboarded."
