Robinhood Chain processed an average of 6.2 million daily transactions between Oct. 2 and Oct. 8, a 42% decline from 10.8 million in mid-September, extending the network's slowdown from fee income into trading activity itself. The figures come from CoinDesk calculations based on growthepie data.

Daily active addresses fell 31% over the same period, averaging about 322,000 in the latest week. Activity dropped 20% from the preceding week alone, indicating the decline is still accelerating rather than stabilizing.

The brokerage continues subsidizing network fees on token swaps worth more than 50 cents made through its Robinhood Wallet app, a promotion it extended beyond its original Sept. 29 expiration date. Robinhood will now cover those costs through Dec. 31, according to the company.

What is driving the revenue impact?

Every transaction on the chain pays a network fee, and applications built on top charge additional fees for trades and loans. Robinhood retains roughly nine-tenths of network fees, according to a Bernstein note published last month, so the transaction decline translates directly into shrinking fee income.

Users paid approximately $65,000 per day in network fees during Oct. 2–8, down 39% from the previous week. That figure is a fraction of the $8 million the chain collected on its busiest day in early September, when activity peaked shortly after launch.

Robinhood launched the chain in July to let users trade tokens, borrow and lend through applications connected to Ethereum, with stated plans for round-the-clock trading of tokens tied to stocks and funds.

The drop in active addresses likely overstates the human exodus. A single trader can operate many addresses, and one automated program can generate thousands of transactions, meaning the decline reflects a pullback from bot-driven activity in particular.

Is capital leaving the network?

Deposits have not followed transactions downward. Balances in the chain's lending and trading applications rose about 2% over the week to $1.04 billion, while stablecoin supply ticked up to roughly $1.10 billion. Some stablecoins sit inside those apps, so the two figures overlap.

The pattern points to idle capital rather than an exodus: traders are keeping funds on Robinhood Chain while waiting out the slowdown rather than withdrawing them.

Spot trading volume tells the harder story. Spot exchanges handled $7.45 billion during Oct. 2–8, down 21% from $9.46 billion the prior week, according to CoinDesk calculations using DefiLlama data. Uniswap accounted for roughly 77% of that volume.

Perpetual futures are the exception. DefiLlama's rolling seven-day figures on Friday showed about $7.35 billion in perpetual futures volume, contracts that let traders take price exposure without owning the underlying tokens, up 26% week over week.

Can promotions revive activity?

Robinhood and its partners are spending to keep traders engaged. Trading platform Arcus began distributing extra reward points on Oct. 1 for stock-token swaps executed through Robinhood Wallet, and Robinhood pushed back the fee-promotion deadline that was originally set for Sept. 29.

The economics remain asymmetric. When CoinDesk reported on Sept. 19 that fee revenue had collapsed 97%, transactions were still near their highs and weekly trading volume was still growing. Both metrics have now turned lower, marking the first period in which subsidized fees have failed to support underlying activity.

Robinhood now has under three months of fee coverage remaining to reactivate the roughly $1 billion sitting in its chain's applications. If transactions do not recover before Dec. 31, users will begin paying their own network fees on every swap — a cost that could further compress activity on a network already trading at 58% below its September peak.