Robinhood vs. Vitalik: Why the trading app is building it own L2 while Ethereum founder cools on them

Robinhood’s (HOOD) testnet has logged four million transactions in its first week that its testnet chain is live, CEO of the investment platform Vlad Tenev said on X on Thursday.

The Robinhood Chain, which focuses on tokenization and trading, comes at a time where centralized exchanges are looking to building their own blockchain infrastructure even as the broader Ethereum ecosystem debates its future.

“Developers are already building on our L2, designed for tokenized real world assets and onchain financial services,” Tenev wrote.

Testnets are risk-free environments for developers to test code and experimental features ahead of its mainnet going live. The two stages of a network’s development could be compared to a flight simulator and a commercial flight.

The Robinhood Chain’s testnet has arrived against the backdrop of a larger reckoning in the Ethereum world.

Earlier this month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin declared that the protocol’s long-held layer-2 (L2) rollup-centric roadmap “no longer makes sense,” arguing that many rollups have fallen short of full decentralization and that Ethereum’s base layer is scaling faster than expected.

That philosophical shift has fueled chatter in the Ethereum community about what scaling and meaningful decentralization may look like in 2026. But while some in the developer community push for new frameworks, Tenev and other centralized players appear to be doubling down on proprietary chains and tokenized markets as a way to capture users and liquidity.

The contrast underscores a growing divide in crypto’s direction. While Ethereum’s core architects reassess how scaling should evolve on the base layer, major trading platforms are looking to control more of the stack themselves. For exchanges, owning the infrastructure could mean tighter user capture, new revenue streams and greater influence over how tokenized markets take shape.

Read more: Robinhood starts testing its own blockchain as crypto and tokenization push deepens