Tokenised stocks and RWAs: Robinhood Chain vs Arc

The question worth asking about Robinhood Chain and Circle's Arc, which reaches mainnet on 16 September 2026, is not which chain is faster or cheaper. It is which asset each one exists to move. Robinhood Chain moves equity exposure to retail users outside the United States. Arc is being built to move dollars and, eventually, institutional funds between institutions. Both get filed under "RWA" and the label does more harm than good, because the two products have almost no overlap in what they hold, who can hold it, or which regulator has to be satisfied first.

What Robinhood Chain has live

Robinhood Chain launched its public mainnet on 1 July 2026, built on Arbitrum's stack as an Ethereum Layer 2 and described by Robinhood as permissionless. Stock Tokens went live alongside it, available to eligible users in more than 120 countries but explicitly unavailable in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the UAE and sanctioned jurisdictions. Trading routes through third-party venues including Uniswap, Lighter, Rialto, Arcus and 1inch rather than through Robinhood's own order book, and self-custody runs through Robinhood Wallet, operated by Robinhood Non-Custodial, Ltd. Robinhood said it would cover gas for eligible users for the first 90 days, a window that closes at the end of September.

Two months in, the chain had real usage. More than 190 Stock Tokens were live as of early September 2026. Total tokenised value was reported at roughly $88m by Entropy Advisors in the first days of September, against a wider chain TVL of about $791m on DefiLlama on 3 September and a separately reported Robinhood figure of $1.27bn in "protocol TVL" — three numbers that measure different things and that nobody has yet reconciled in public. Holder counts for the tokenised assets were reported in a range of roughly 328,000 to 420,000 depending on the counting method. Daily volume clustered in a handful of names, with GameStop and Nvidia among the most traded.

Take those figures as directionally right and precisely uncertain. The point they establish is not the size of the chain but its shape: it is a live retail venue with real tokenised equities on it, three months before Arc has anything.

What Arc will have on 16 September

Arc is Circle's stablecoin-native Layer 1, in public testnet since 28 October 2025 and scheduled for mainnet on 16 September 2026. It uses EVM execution, a Malachite Tendermint-family BFT consensus with sub-second finality, a permissioned validator set, and — the design decision that defines it — gas paid in USDC rather than a volatile native asset. ChainList records testnet chain ID 5042002 and mainnet 1243. Circle had not published official mainnet RPC or explorer endpoints as of 12 September 2026, which means the ordinary public checks are not available until launch week.

On the tokenised-asset side, Arc arrives with commitments rather than products. Circle's 5 August 2026 press release named eleven founding validators — BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa — and said BlackRock is expected to deploy its BUIDL tokenised money market fund on the chain so that subscription, redemption and deployment can happen in one environment. Expected is the operative word: no issuance date and no share-class detail have been published. DTCC's tokenisation collaboration is dated to begin in the second half of 2027. The independent directory Built on Arc, which tracks status with a dated source for each entry, lists what it can evidence in its tokenised assets on Circle's Arc category; on the evidence available before launch, none of the tokenised-asset commitments had shipped.

Different assets, different buyers

Robinhood's Stock Tokens are exposure to listed equities, sold to non-US retail through a broker's app and its wallet. The buyer is an individual who wants Nvidia at two in the morning. The constraint is securities law in each jurisdiction, which is why the US, UK, Canada, Switzerland and UAE are excluded.

Arc's tokenised-asset case is a money market fund held by a treasury desk, sitting next to the dollars it settles in. The buyer is a corporate or institutional allocator. The constraint is not retail distribution but custody, fund administration and whether a qualified custodian will hold the position at all — which is why BNY's presence in Circle's materials as an institution "exploring" custody integrations matters more than it reads.

Those are two different businesses that share a vocabulary. A chain that is good at one is not automatically credible at the other, and neither has demonstrated it can do the other's job.

Where they actually touch

There is one point of genuine contact, and it is the settlement leg. Every tokenised-equity trade settles in something, and today on Robinhood Chain that something is a stablecoin held on an Ethereum L2. Arc's argument is that the settlement asset and the gas asset should be the same regulated dollar, on a chain whose validator set is a list of named institutions. If tokenised equities ever need an institutional settlement venue rather than a retail trading venue, that is the argument they will be tested against.

Nothing about that is settled. It is the only line along which the two chains might eventually compete, and it is several product decisions away on both sides.

What is not confirmed, as of 12 September 2026

Robinhood has not published a gas token or fee schedule for Robinhood Chain in its own launch materials; third-party analysis says gas is paid in ETH, consistent with an Arbitrum-stack L2, and Robinhood's covering of gas for the first 90 days means the observable user cost after the promotional window is not yet confirmed as of 12 September 2026. Sequencer decentralisation is not confirmed either; third-party analysis describes a Robinhood-operated sequencer with sanctions screening. No throughput or finality figure has been published by Robinhood. What would change this: a published fee schedule, a documented sequencer roadmap, or the first month of post-promotion transaction costs visible on chain.

On the Arc side, the mainnet RPC and explorer, the BUIDL issuance date, the identity of the roughly 100 validator nodes beyond the eleven named, and any slashing or rotation mechanism are all unpublished as of 12 September 2026. What would change that: Circle's launch-day documentation, a token contract visible on an Arc explorer, or a BlackRock statement of its own.

The honest summary

Robinhood Chain is a live retail equities venue with two months of usage and an unpublished fee model. Arc is an institutional settlement chain with a validator list and no tokenised assets on it yet. On 16 September the comparison is Robinhood Chain's traded product against Arc's stated intent, and anyone presenting it as a two-horse race in the same market is describing something that does not exist.