A new infrastructure war is unfolding in digital finance — and it is being waged not by protocol teams or venture-backed startups, but by America's largest retail brokerages. Robinhood launched the public testnet for Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 built on Arbitrum, on February 11, 2026. Kr...
"What we wanted was the security of Ethereum, the liquidity that is available on EVM chains and the Ethereum ecosystem." — Johann Kerbrat, VP & GM of Crypto, Robinhood
A new infrastructure war is unfolding in digital finance — and it is being waged not by protocol teams or venture-backed startups, but by America's largest retail brokerages. Robinhood launched the public testnet for Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum Layer 2 built on Arbitrum, on February 11, 2026. Kraken's Ink network, an Optimism-based L2, has quietly amassed over $400 million in TVL since December 2024. Coinbase's Base continues to dominate L2 revenue at $80 million or more annually. All three are building blockchain infrastructure not as experiments, but as the settlement backbone for tokenized stocks, ETFs, and eventually the full spectrum of traditional financial instruments.
This is not simply another wave of tokenization hype. It represents a structural shift in how financial intermediaries are positioning themselves: vertically integrating from user-facing brokerage applications down through blockchain settlement layers, capturing value at every point in the stack. In the economic-value framework, these chains represent a rare case where the entity controlling the L2 also controls the demand source — potentially creating the first self-sustaining blockchain business models outside of pure DeFi.
The implications are profound. When the institutions that custody assets, execute trades, and manage compliance also control the chains those assets settle on, the distinction between "broker" and "blockchain" collapses entirely.
The logic is straightforward: if you are a brokerage that routes billions in order flow, why pay someone else for settlement infrastructure? Building a proprietary Layer 2 allows a brokerage to internalize sequencer revenue, control transaction ordering, set gas economics, and — critically — design the chain around compliance requirements that regulated financial products demand.
Coinbase proved the concept. Base, launched in June 2023 on the OP Stack, generates an estimated $50–80 million in annual net profit to Coinbase's treasury, with profit margins exceeding 75% after OP Stack licensing fees. It pays roughly 15% of revenue to the Optimism Collective and a fraction to Ethereum L1 for data availability. The rest flows directly to Coinbase.
Robinhood and Kraken watched and learned. Both are now building their own chains — not as diversification plays, but as core infrastructure for their tokenized securities ambitions. The brokerage-as-blockchain model is no longer a hypothesis. It is a competitive requirement.
Robinhood Chain launched its public testnet on February 11, 2026, built on Arbitrum Orbit technology with Ethereum for data availability and ETH as the gas token. The company has committed $1 million to the 2026 Arbitrum Open House developer program, with buildathons planned across New York, Dubai, London, and Singapore.
Infrastructure partners include Alchemy (development platform), Chainlink (oracle feeds), and LayerZero (interoperability). The chain is designed explicitly for tokenized real-world assets, with planned support for lending markets and perpetual futures exchanges.
Robinhood has already issued nearly 2,000 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs to European customers on Arbitrum One. These assets are expected to migrate to Robinhood Chain upon mainnet launch later in 2026. Current tokenized asset value: approximately $15 million — modest, but the infrastructure play is about what comes next, not what exists today.
Kraken's Ink, launched in December 2024 on the Optimism Superchain, has been the quieter but faster mover. With over $400 million in TVL and app revenue that grew from $500,000 in October to $5.77 million in January 2026, Ink is already generating meaningful economic activity.
Kraken has simultaneously launched xStocks — tokenized versions of over 50 stocks and ETFs available to users across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Kraken has held roughly 55% of tradable tokenized stock value tracked by Dune, though this share has declined as Ondo Global Markets has scaled through partnerships with exchanges like Bitget.
The Ink Foundation has announced plans for an INK token launch and airdrop, differentiating it from Coinbase's tokenless Base. Kraken's planned 2026 IPO — supported by a confidential SEC filing in late 2025 — positions Ink as part of a broader public company narrative where blockchain infrastructure becomes a revenue line on quarterly earnings calls.
Base remains the benchmark. Approximately $80 million in annualized revenue, 75%+ profit margins, and the highest L2 transaction throughput after Arbitrum make it the template for the brokerage-chain model. Base contributes roughly 80% of total Optimism Superchain revenue.
Coinbase is now seeking SEC approval to offer tokenized stocks to U.S. users, building on its "everything exchange" strategy that already includes prediction markets and advanced trading products. If approved, Base becomes the natural settlement layer for Coinbase-issued tokenized equities — closing the vertical integration loop.
The catalyst driving this infrastructure buildout is the explosive growth in tokenized securities. The market has gone from obscurity to critical mass in under twelve months:
The tokenized asset market nearly quadrupled through 2025 to approximately $20 billion. Analysts at Hashdex project it could exceed $400 billion by end of 2027. The question is no longer whether tokenized securities will trade on-chain, but who will control the chains they settle on.
The economic logic of brokerage-owned chains fundamentally differs from community-governed L2s like Arbitrum DAO or the Optimism Collective. In the brokerage model, a single corporate entity controls:
1. Sequencer Revenue: The centralized sequencer captures all ordering fees and MEV, flowing directly to corporate treasury. Base demonstrates this at scale — Coinbase retains 65–80% of all user fees after L1 costs and OP Stack licensing.
2. Demand Captivity: Unlike general-purpose L2s that must attract third-party applications, brokerage chains have a built-in demand source — their own user base. Robinhood's 24 million funded accounts and Kraken's 10 million+ users represent organic transaction volume that does not depend on ecosystem incentives or token emissions.
3. Compliance Integration: Brokerage chains can embed KYC/AML at the infrastructure level, making them uniquely suited for regulated tokenized securities. This is a structural advantage over permissionless L2s that must bolt on compliance after the fact.
4. Cross-Subsidy Economics: Traditional brokerage revenue (commissions, payment for order flow, interest income) can subsidize chain operations during the growth phase, avoiding the inflationary token subsidy model that plagues most L1s and L2s. This aligns with the webthreepedia economic value framework's finding that 85–90% of blockchain economic activity is subsidy-driven — brokerage chains may be the first to break this pattern by importing real-economy demand.
| Chain | Estimated Annual Revenue | Sequencer Control | Token | Built-in User Base | |-------|------------------------|-------------------|-------|-------------------| | Base (Coinbase) | $80M+ | Coinbase | None | 110M+ verified users | | Ink (Kraken) | ~$70M run-rate | Kraken | INK (planned) | 10M+ users | | Robinhood Chain | Pre-revenue (testnet) | Robinhood | None announced | 24M funded accounts |
The brokerage-chain race exists within a broader competitive field:
Wallet-Native Distribution: MetaMask's Ondo integration demonstrates that wallets can serve as brokerage interfaces without building their own chains. With 30 million monthly active users, MetaMask bypasses the chain-building question entirely by aggregating across existing infrastructure.
Protocol-Level Issuers: Ondo Finance ($2.52B TVL) and Superstate ($1.2B AUM) are chain-agnostic tokenized securities platforms that issue across multiple networks. Their strategy is to be the "Visa of tokenized securities" — present everywhere, controlled by no single chain.
Traditional Infrastructure: DTCC's Canton Network initiative, backed by BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Citadel Securities, represents the incumbent response. If DTCC successfully tokenizes the $60+ trillion in assets it custodies, it could render brokerage chains unnecessary for institutional use cases.
European Regulators: ESMA has flagged that tokenized stocks often "track share prices without granting shareholder rights," raising questions about consumer protection that could constrain growth in key markets.
Liquidity Fragmentation: Three competing brokerage chains risk splitting tokenized asset liquidity across incompatible ecosystems. Cross-chain bridges and interoperability protocols (LayerZero, Chainlink CCIP) partially address this, but fragmented order books remain a structural challenge.
Regulatory Uncertainty: Coinbase's SEC no-action letter request for tokenized stocks is pending. If denied, the entire U.S. tokenized equities market could stall. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act remains in legislative limbo after Senate postponement in early February.
Centralization Risk: Brokerage-owned chains with centralized sequencers create single points of failure and censorship risk. If Robinhood Chain's sequencer goes down, tokenized stock trading halts — reintroducing the very counterparty risk that blockchain was designed to eliminate.
Market Timing: Bitcoin has fallen roughly 48% from its October 2025 all-time high. BlockFills' withdrawal halt on February 11 — the same day Robinhood Chain launched its testnet — underscores that building for the next cycle amid the current downturn requires deep capital reserves and conviction.
The brokerage-to-blockchain transition represents something the crypto industry has long sought but rarely achieved: a credible path from speculative infrastructure to revenue-generating financial plumbing. When Robinhood, Kraken, and Coinbase build their own chains, they are not chasing narrative cycles or token valuations. They are constructing the rails on which the next generation of securities trading will settle.
The question is whether three competing proprietary chains can coexist — or whether the economics of liquidity will consolidate the market around one or two winners, much as traditional exchanges consolidated from dozens of regional venues to a handful of dominant platforms.
What is clear: the era of blockchains searching for use cases is giving way to an era of use cases building their own blockchains. In the economic-value framework, this is precisely the transition from subsidy-driven to demand-driven infrastructure that separates lasting protocols from transient experiments. The brokerages are not asking permission from the crypto ecosystem. They are building around it.