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Robinhood L2, Tokenized Stocks & DeFi TVL's 37% Drop | Jul 3
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Ethereum's institutional pivot accelerates as Robinhood's Layer 2 goes live, two rival tokenized equity models launch on the same day, and DeFi TVL slides to $70B amid $972M in first-half hacks. Six stories shaping where ETH infrastructure is headed.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Three major Ethereum infrastructure launches hit in the same week, and the timing isn't coincidental. Ethereum Institutional, EthLabs, and Robinhood's Layer two chain all went live within days of each other.
Robinhood's Layer two chain is the third piece of this. It launched on Ethereum with tokenized real-world assets and AI-native trading features, reaching twenty-eight million customers across thirty-eight countries.
On July second, two competing tokenized equity products launched on the same day, and the difference between them reveals a real regulatory fault line. Ondo Finance uses custodial wrapping to represent underlying equities.
Total value locked in DeFi has fallen thirty-seven percent year-to-date, from one hundred twelve point six billion dollars to seventy billion. Liquid staking is down forty-four percent.
On the regulatory side, two developments are worth tracking. The Ethereum Foundation published a non-technical governance framework on July first aimed at public-sector deployments.
Two more developments round out the picture. BlackRock listed Ethena's USDe synthetic dollar on its Aladdin platform, with the BUIDL tokenized treasury becoming the default reserve for Ethena's whitelabel stablecoins.
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