Robinhood Chain’s TVL Nears $1B, but Failed L1s Raise Sustainability Question

Four blue-chip layer-1 blockchains from the last market cycle have lost more than 99% of the value once locked on them, and a crypto researcher is asking if Robinhood Chain is next.

Stacy Muur pointed to steep TVL losses at Fantom, Aurora, Canto and Songbird, putting Robinhood Chain’s recent growth against a less forgiving history.

Four Blue-Chip L1s That Cratered

In a post on X, Muur called out the damage bluntly. “Blue-chip L1s from the last cycle got absolutely deleted,” she wrote before running through the numbers. Fantom peaked at $7.7 billion in locked value and now sits at $4.8 million, with daily decentralized exchange volume down to under $9,000 even though $318 million worth of stablecoins are still parked on the chain.

Aurora went from $2.6 billion to $3.1 million, and DefiLlama shows just 133 addresses touching the chain in the past day, despite the project having raised $102 million over its lifetime. Canto fell from $200 million to $3.6 million, with its token now trading at $0.0017 for a market cap of roughly $1 million.

On its part, Songbird dropped from $50 million to about $200,000, though it still pulled in over 2,500 daily active addresses even with chain fees sitting at just $77 for the day.

Current DefiLlama data shows Robinhood Chain itself holds about $928 million in DeFi TVL, several orders of magnitude above where any of the four chains Muur cited stand today, with a stablecoin market cap of $1.026 billion. Its 24-hour DEX volume was $1.552 billion, while perpetuals volume hit $577.58 million.

The chain recorded $524,989 in fees and $471,769 in revenue over the same period, although it also had net outflows of $11.11 million. Its DeFi TVL is up 3.35% over seven days and 71% across 30, and it ranks 10th among the biggest chains by that metric, behind more established networks like Ethereum, Solana, Base, BSC and Tron.

Despite the impressive performance, Muur closed her post by asking, flatly, whether Robinhood Chain’s own TVL will still be around in 2030.

Activity High, but TVL Durability Remains Untested

Robinhood Chain’s DEX volume hit a daily high above $1.3 billion in early September, with Arkham data at the time showing the chain generating more in fees than Solana, Base, or Ethereum, one of the drivers being the direct trading of meme coins against tokenized stocks.

It has since beaten that mark repeatedly, going as far as $2.61 billion in DEX volume on September 11, with yesterday’s coming in at over $1.6 billion.

But Muur’s comparison raises a different question: whether the current usage can translate into TVL that persists through another market cycle, and the four older chains have shown how dramatically liquidity can disappear after an L1 falls out of favor.