Robinhood Chain launched July 1 as an Arbitrum L2 built for tokenized equities — the next infrastructure layer for its Everything Exchange ambitions. Two weeks later it has $135 million in total value locked and 800,000 wallet addresses, but almost none of that activity is in tokenized stocks. Memecoins dominate: HOOD, VLAD, HOOD2025, and dozens of others launched within hours of the chain going live and quickly overtook the platform's intended use case. The irony is sharp — Robinhood's brand was built on democratizing stock trading, and its chain is being used to recreate the exact speculative casino its founders said they wanted to disrupt. The tokenized stock use case isn't dead, but it's being crowded out by faster, noisier demand.
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Zcash's Tachyon upgrade is the protocol's most ambitious overhaul yet — designed to scale shielded payments, harden the network against quantum computing attacks, and stress-test whether its funding model and governance can hold under pressure. CoinDesk Research examines how the upgrade positions Zcash ahead of the quantum computing threat that most blockchains are only beginning to take seriously, and what the outcome means for privacy-preserving infrastructure at scale.
The Securities Transfer Association — the industry group representing Wall Street's transfer agents, the firms that officially track stock ownership — has submitted a comment letter to the SEC arguing that third-party tokenized representations of equities should receive different regulatory treatment than company-authorized tokenization. Their core argument: only issuer-sanctioned tokens should count as legitimate ownership records, while tokens minted by third parties like Robinhood, Coinbase, or offshore exchanges create a parallel and legally ambiguous claims structure that could undermine market integrity. The fight is a preview of the next major regulatory battle in tokenized finance — who gets to define what constitutes valid equity ownership on-chain.
