Seven-day average fees fell 82% while transaction counts slipped 6%, with about $1.5 billion a day still changing hands.
The memecoin rush that made Robinhood Chain one of the most expensive networks has cooled, taking 97% of the network's fee income with it, even as transaction counts held near their highs.
That marks a sharp turn from Aug. 30, when applications on the two-month-old chain earned $2.7 million in a day, twice as much as those on Ethereum and behind only Solana. Token issuance platform Pons and memecoin trading app GMGN supplied about $2 million of that total as users launched 22,600 tokens in 24 hours.
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At its peak in early September, the chain collected roughly $8 million in fees from 13.1 million transactions in a single day, averaging 64 cents a transaction. However, by Sept. 16, the daily bill had fallen to about $230,000 across 8.9 million transactions, or just 2.6 cents each, according to growthepie data.
The money paid to use the chain fell 97%, while activity on it fell 32%, a gap that only opens when a network gets cheaper rather than emptier.
The collapsing fee chart invited an explanation that higher costs may have chased traders back to Solana and taken Robinhood’s volume with them. Weekly data, however, shows a narrower retreat.
Robinhood's decentralized exchanges handled about $13 billion in the seven days through Sept. 16, up 5% from the preceding week, according to CoinDesk calculations using DeFiLlama, while stablecoin supply slipped just 1% to around $1 billion, with about $930 million of that sitting in decentralized-finance applications.
The businesses built on the chain kept earning far more than the chain itself, taking about $8 million in fees over the latest 24 hours and retaining $1.5 million as revenue per data tracked by DeFiLlama, against the network's $230,000.
What traders are saying
Pseudonymous trader Unipcs, who is ranked first by all-time profit on FOMO, a trading platform that tracks memecoin traders' performance publicly, held his positions through the reversal and said the expensive stretch never entered his thinking.
"The earlier higher gas fees did not affect me or any trencher I know," he told CoinDesk in a Telegram message. "People don't care about that as long as they can make money on the chain.” Trencher, in crypto parlance, is someone who trades newly launched tokens in the earliest hours after they appear, when prices move fastest.
The cooling is visible at Pons, the launchpad where users create and trade new memecoins, and the app that drove most of Robinhood Chain's boom. It recorded about $616 million in trading volume during Sept. 10-16, data shows, down 37% from the previous seven days even as trading across the chain's exchanges rose, with protocol revenue falling from $10.7 million to $5.8 million over the same stretch, still about $830,000 a day.
Uniswap V3 volume on the chain more than doubled from $2.5 billion to $5.3 billion between the two periods, while Uniswap V4 volume fell 22% to $4.9 billion. Across every decentralized exchange tracked by DeFiLlama, Robinhood volume rose 5% to $12.8 billion.
Read More: A memecoin making app becomes crypto’s top fee generators as Robinhood Chain activity explodes
Unipcs remains bullish on Robinhood Chain and expects its users, trading volume and fees to set new records before the end of the year, adding that speculative memecoin activity remains mainly across Robinhood Chain, BNB Chain and Solana.
Earlier this month, Pons creator Ozzy told CoinDesk that it uses 80% of its protocol revenue to buy and burn PONS, permanently removing the purchased tokens from circulation, which at last week's revenue rate and by the launchpad's own figures, would direct around $4.6 million toward the program.
Did traders move to Solana?
Solana is the frontrunner for wherever existing traders land, given the network remains the busiest venue for memecoin trading and speculative bets.
But its numbers show no sign of them arriving. Solana's decentralized exchanges processed about $17 billion during Sept. 10-16, down 8% from the preceding week, while PumpSwap, the exchange tied to memecoin launchpad Pump.fun, recorded $2.9 billion, down 36% against Pons' 37%.
Specific tokens may have pulled traders between the networks, but the chain-wide figures do not show a wholesale migration from Robinhood to Solana.
However, direct bridge flows show some money did move toward Solana. deBridge, a platform that enables token transfers between the two networks, processed $8.2 million from Robinhood to Solana during Sept. 10-16 and just over $6 million in the opposite direction, resulting in a net outflow of about $2 million.
The previous week was almost perfectly balanced, with $13.4 million leaving Robinhood and $13.3 million entering. Transfer counts then moved toward Robinhood, with about 5,000 Solana-to-Robinhood orders during the latest week against 3,800 going the other way, per data accessed by CoinDesk.
Strip out the wildest days and the same picture holds. Robinhood Chain averaged 11.5 million transactions and about $4 million in daily fees during the seven days ending Sept. 4, against 10.8 million transactions and $641,000 in fees in the seven days ending Sept. 16.
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