Author: rb809rb

Robinhood Chain launched, filled with memecoins, briefly ranked third among DEXs, and the “Solana killer” talk started immediately. Then you look at the actual numbers. Solana has 27 times the value locked and 2 million more users. This is not a flippening. It is a fair fight over the wrong metric.

Within days of Robinhood Chain going live, the comparison wrote itself. A memecoin frenzy sent the chain’s DEX volume past $3 billion in a week; it briefly cracked the top three networks by daily DEX volume, and crypto Twitter did what crypto Twitter does: it declared a Solana killer.

The parallel was tidy. Solana also grew through a memecoin boom, so surely Robinhood was running the same playbook toward the same destination. Then you pull the actual data, and the tidy story falls apart. Solana has roughly 27 times Robinhood Chain’s value locked and millions more users.

The one metric where Robinhood looked competitive, raw volume, is the flimsiest number on the board. This piece is about whether Robinhood Chain can flip Solana, and the short answer is no, not close, and the more interesting answer is that flipping Solana was never the right frame.

The scoreboard

Start with the numbers, because the numbers settle most of the argument before it starts.

Solana, as of mid-July 2026, carries around $4.93 billion in total value locked, does roughly $1.91 billion in daily DEX volume, has more than 2 million active addresses, and generates about $3 million in daily application revenue. These are the metrics of a mature, heavily used layer-1 with a deep DeFi ecosystem, years of accumulated liquidity, and a large, sticky user base.

Robinhood Chain, roughly 2 weeks after launch, sits at around $185 million in value locked, having posted more than $3 billion in DEX volume across its first week. Depending on the day and the source, its TVL has been quoted between $185 million and $312 million, with the higher figure heavy on stablecoin deposits. Active addresses are counted in the hundreds of thousands cumulatively, not the millions active.

Line the durable metrics up, and the gap is stark. On value locked, Solana leads by a factor of roughly 27 to one against the lower Robinhood figure, and still around 16 to 1 against the higher one. On active users, the gap is larger still. On application revenue, Solana’s ecosystem earns real fees across a diverse set of protocols; Robinhood Chain’s revenue is concentrated in memecoin trading and inflated by incentives. There is exactly one metric where Robinhood looked competitive in its first fortnight, and that is raw DEX volume, where a memecoin frenzy briefly pushed it into the same conversation as networks many times its size.

That single metric is doing all the work in the flippening narrative, and it is the metric that deserves the least trust.

Why volume is the wrong number

Volume is seductive because it is large and it moves fast, and it is misleading for the same reasons.

Robinhood Chain’s $3 billion first week was overwhelmingly memecoin trading. $CASHCAT alone generated roughly $98 million in a single day, about 17% of the chain’s entire DEX volume, and the broader wave of Robinhood-themed tokens, Cash Dog in Hood, Little John, Hoodrat, drove most of the rest.

Memecoin volume is the most transient category of on-chain activity there is. It arrives with attention and leaves with it, and it leaves no infrastructure behind. A chain doing $3 billion in memecoin volume this week can do a fraction of that next month, as the 33% single-day $CASHCAT drop after its launchpad exited already showed.

Then there is the subsidy. Robinhood Chain ran a 90-day gas fee subsidy from launch, which makes transactions artificially cheap and inflates transaction counts and, indirectly, trading activity. Any volume comparison during the subsidy window is measuring a promotion as much as organic demand. The honest read of that number will only be available once the subsidy expires and users start paying real costs.

Value locked, by contrast, is sticky. It represents capital that has chosen to reside on the chain, in lending protocols, liquidity pools, and asset-management strategies, and it does not evaporate with a memecoin’s attention cycle. Solana’s ~$4.93 billion in TVL is the accumulated result of years of protocols, integrations, and users committing capital. Robinhood’s ~$185 million is a 2-week-old figure heavily weighted toward stablecoin deposits and speculative liquidity. TVL is the metric that predicts whether a chain is durable. Volume is the metric that predicts whether it is currently trending. They are not the same, and the flippening narrative relies entirely on the second.

The bull case for Robinhood

The strong case for Robinhood Chain does not run through on-chain metrics at all, and the people making the flippening argument are looking in the wrong place because the actual advantage is off-chain.

Robinhood has roughly 28 million customers across 38 countries and more than a decade as one of the largest retail investment platforms in the United States. That is a distribution asset no crypto-native chain possesses. Solana had to acquire its users one at a time through the slow, expensive work of crypto adoption.

Robinhood already has tens of millions of funded accounts belonging to people comfortable trading both stocks and crypto, and it can put its chain in front of them inside an app they already use. If even a modest fraction of that base becomes active on-chain, the user numbers change quickly. Brand equity and distribution are exactly what earlier tokenization projects lacked, and Robinhood has both in abundance.

The memecoin-as-ignition argument also has real historical support. Solana itself grew through a memecoin cycle: BONK, WIF, and the Pump.fun era, before it produced serious infrastructure and institutional adoption. Base followed a similar arc. Speculative trading bootstraps the liquidity, the market makers, the tooling, and the attention that serious applications later need. In this reading, Robinhood Chain’s memecoin phase is not a failure to attract real activity; it is the normal first stage, and judging a 2-week-old chain by its TVL is like judging Solana by its 2021 numbers.

And Robinhood is playing a different game entirely. Its chain is built for tokenized stocks and real-world assets, a category Solana is also chasing but where Robinhood brings brokerage licenses, custody relationships, and regulatory infrastructure that a crypto-native chain has to build from scratch. If the RWA thesis plays out, Robinhood competes on ground where its traditional-finance credentials are an advantage, not on the DeFi metrics where Solana is years ahead. The flippening question assumes the two chains want to be the same thing. They may not.

The bear case for Robinhood

The skeptical case is that Robinhood Chain has attracted exactly the kind of activity that does not convert, and that the gap to Solana is not a head start Robinhood can close but a structural difference it may never close.

The mercenary-liquidity problem is the core of it. Memecoin traders are loyal to activity, not to chains. They arrived on Robinhood Chain because that is where the new-launch action was, and they will leave for the next chain offering quicker profits without a second thought. The Noxa launchpad that powered the entire boom generated roughly $12 million in fees and then stopped accepting launches and went dark within 11 days of the chain’s launch. That is not the behavior of infrastructure settling in; it is the behavior of an extraction cycle moving through. When the memecoin attention leaves, the question is what remains, and right now what remains is roughly $12.8 million in actual tokenized real-world assets, the thing the chain was built for.

The convert-the-traffic problem compounds it. Robinhood’s 28 million customers are a distribution asset only if they can be moved on-chain, and there is no evidence yet that memecoin degens and Robinhood’s retail stock traders are the same people or that 1 becomes the other. The chain’s current users may have almost no overlap with the tokenized-asset investors Robinhood hopes to serve. Distribution is potential, not conversion, and the conversion has not been proven.

Then there is the structural point that on-chain metrics are not a race Robinhood is quietly winning. Solana continues to outperform Robinhood Chain across essentially every DeFi metric despite the new chain’s loud debut, and Solana is not standing still. It has its own institutional momentum, its own tokenized-asset push, its own SBI partnership for on-chain financial markets in Japan. Robinhood is not catching a stationary target. It is entering, 2 weeks old, a competition against a network with a multi-year head start that is itself accelerating. Closing a 27-to-1 TVL gap against a moving, growing competitor is a different proposition than the volume charts suggest.

The Base comparison nobody makes

The flippening debate fixates on Solana, but the more instructive comparison is Coinbase’s Base, because Base is the closest thing to a control group for exactly what Robinhood is attempting, and it complicates both the bull and bear cases.

Base launched in 2023 as a corporate-backed Ethereum layer 2, built by a licensed, publicly traded American financial company with a large existing user base, aimed at bringing mainstream users on-chain. That is Robinhood Chain’s template almost exactly. And Base’s early growth, like Robinhood’s, ran heavily through memecoins before it developed into a more diversified ecosystem. So Base is the case study for whether a corporate chain can convert a speculative launch into durable activity, and the answer it offers is genuinely mixed.

On the bull side, Base did convert. It built real DeFi, real stablecoin activity, and real applications on top of the initial speculation, and it became one of the larger L2s by several measures. Coinbase’s distribution, tens of millions of users, mattered, and the memecoin phase did function as ignition rather than as the whole story. That is the precedent Robinhood is betting on, and it is a real one: a corporate chain did turn a speculative launch into something lasting.

On the bear side, Base did not flip Solana either, and it had a 2-year head start on Robinhood plus a parent company that was crypto-native from birth. If Base, with Coinbase’s crypto-specific expertise and a longer runway, sits alongside Solana instead of above it, the idea that Robinhood Chain will vault past Solana looks even less plausible. And Base has its own value-capture questions as an Ethereum L2, the same ones that apply to Robinhood Chain, where the base layer captures little of the economics. Base shows the corporate-chain model can work; it also shows that working means becoming a significant chain, not dethroning the incumbent. That is the realistic ceiling for Robinhood Chain too: not flipping Solana, but earning a durable place alongside it, and only if it converts the way Base did rather than fading the way most launch-frenzies do.

What a flippening would actually require

The word “flippening” gets thrown around loosely, so it is worth being precise about what would have to happen for Robinhood Chain to actually surpass Solana, because the specifics show why the headline math is not close.

Flipping Solana is not one event; it is a set of them across separate metrics, and they do not move together. On total value locked, Solana holds roughly $4.93 billion against Robinhood Chain’s ~$185 million, a gap of about 27 times. Closing that does not mean matching Solana’s memecoin volume for a week. It means persuading serious capital, lending markets, stablecoin issuers, restaking protocols, and asset managers to park billions on a corporate L2, which is a trust-and-time problem that speculative volume does nothing to solve. TVL is sticky precisely because it represents commitment, and commitment is the thing a memecoin wave cannot manufacture.

On active addresses, Solana runs above 2 million against a far smaller base on Robinhood Chain, and the composition matters more than the count. Solana’s addresses span DeFi users, NFT traders, payment apps, and memecoin degens across a mature ecosystem. Robinhood Chain’s early activity is concentrated in memecoin speculation and a gas subsidy that inflates the raw transaction figure. An address trading $CASHCAT once is not equivalent to an address running a lending position, a payment flow, and a staking allocation. The headline number can converge while the underlying engagement stays a chasm apart.

On application revenue, Solana generates around $3 million daily from a diversified base of protocols. Robinhood Chain’s revenue is thin and skewed toward the launchpad-and-memecoin complex that already showed it can evaporate in days when Noxa went dark. Sustainable app revenue requires applications people use for reasons other than speculation, and building that catalog is measured in years of developer adoption, not weeks of viral trading.

Then there is the structural ceiling nobody in the flippening conversation mentions: Robinhood Chain excludes US persons from its flagship products. Stock Tokens are barred to Americans, wallet perpetuals are barred to Americans, and the chain’s entire regulated-RWA thesis is aimed at a user base that cannot legally touch its marquee offerings from Robinhood’s home market. Solana has no such wall. A chain competing for global L1 dominance with its largest potential market fenced off from its best products is running the race with a weight the incumbent does not carry.

Put those together, and the flippening is not a single line for Robinhood Chain to cross. It is four separate lines, on four metrics that move at different speeds for different reasons, at least one of which is capped by regulation. Memecoin volume, the one number Robinhood Chain can actually post, is the least sticky and least predictive of the set. That is why the honest answer to the headline is not “not yet.” It is “not close, and the gap is wider than the volume charts make it look.”

The verdict

So will Robinhood Chain flip Solana? On the metrics that matter, no, and not close, and not soon.

The value-locked gap is roughly 27 to 1. The user gap is larger. The revenue gap is structural. The only metric where Robinhood was competitive is raw volume, which is the least durable measure available, is dominated by transient memecoin trading, and is inflated by a temporary gas subsidy. A chain does not flip a mature layer-1 by winning the one number that evaporates when attention moves on. Every durable indicator points to Solana remaining well ahead for the foreseeable future.

But the question contains a flawed assumption, and that is the more useful thing to say. “Flip Solana” treats the two chains as competitors for the same prize, and they may not be. Solana is a general-purpose, crypto-native layer-1 with a deep DeFi ecosystem built by and for crypto users. Robinhood Chain is a corporate settlement layer built by a licensed brokerage to bring tokenized stocks and real-world assets to a retail base that already trades on Robinhood. Their overlap right now is memecoins, which is precisely the activity neither of them was built for and which will belong to whichever chain is currently paying attention. The lasting competition, if there is one, is over tokenized real-world assets, and that race has barely started.

The honest framing is this. Robinhood will not out-DeFi Solana; that is not a contest it is positioned to win and probably not one it is trying to win. What Robinhood can do is convert a slice of 28 million existing customers into on-chain users of tokenized-asset products, on rails where its brokerage credentials matter more than its DEX volume. If it does that, it does not need to flip Solana, because it will be winning a different game. If it does not, the memecoin volume fades, the chain settles back to its $12.8 million of real assets, and the flippening talk looks like what it probably is: a volume chart mistaken for a verdict. The number to watch is not DEX volume and not the gap to Solana. It is whether tokenized real-world assets on Robinhood Chain grow, and Robinhood’s July 29 earnings are the first real look.

Frequently Asked Questions

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. It compares blockchain networks and company strategies, not the merits of any token. Memecoins are highly speculative, and most participants lose money. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy any asset or use any platform. Always do your own research. On-chain figures move quickly and are accurate as of July 17, 2026.

Ethereum’s best marketing line was that using it destroyed it, that every transaction burned $ETH and shrank the supply. Then the network solved its scaling problem, activity fled to layer 2s, and the burn collapsed. The scaling worked. The scarcity did not survive it.

For about eighteen months, Ethereum had the best story in crypto, and the story was a paradox: the more people used the network, the rarer its token became. Every transaction burned a little $ETH, and when the network was busy enough, it burned more than it created. Supply went down. The community called it ultrasound money, a deliberate jab at Bitcoin’s “sound money,” complete with a bat emoji and a movement.

For a while, the data backed it up. Then Ethereum did the thing it had promised to do for years, which was to scale, and scaling broke the story. Activity moved to layer-2 networks that pay almost nothing to the base chain, the burn collapsed, and $ETH quietly went inflationary again. This is the story of how Ethereum’s greatest technical success dismantled its best economic narrative, and whether a December upgrade can put the pieces back.

What ultrasound money actually meant

The mechanism is worth getting exactly right, because the whole debate turns on it.

In August 2021, Ethereum activated EIP-1559, which changed how transaction fees work. Instead of paying miners directly, every transaction now pays a base fee that is burned, permanently removed from circulation. The busier the network, the higher the base fee, and the more $ETH destroyed. On its own, that is just a fee-burning mechanism. It became a monetary thesis when Ethereum switched from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in the September 2022 Merge, which cut new $ETH issuance by roughly 90%, because the network no longer had to pay energy-intensive miners.

Put the two together, and you get the ultrasound thesis. Issuance dropped to a trickle after the Merge. Burning continued with every transaction. If burning exceeded issuance, total $ETH supply would shrink over time, making the asset deflationary. And a deflationary asset with growing demand should, in theory, appreciate. Ethereum would become harder money than Bitcoin, whose supply still grows, hence “ultrasound.” The tracking site ultrasound.money existed to display exactly this: supply ticking down, day by day.

For a stretch after the Merge, it happened. Supply fell back toward and below the level it sat at during the Merge itself. Burns outpaced issuance. The narrative was not hype; it was, for that window, an accurate description of the data. That is what made it powerful, and what made its reversal so awkward.

How scaling broke it

The break came from Ethereum solving its most famous problem, and the irony is total.

Ethereum’s scaling strategy is to push transactions off the expensive base layer and onto layer-2 rollups, networks like Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base that process transactions cheaply and then post compressed data back to Ethereum for security. The base layer becomes a settlement and target=”_blank”>daily burn dropped to as low as 50 to 70 $ETH. The base layer had lost its primary fee source. With issuance running around 1,700 $ETH per day and burn collapsing well below that, the equation flipped: Ethereum began creating more $ETH than it destroyed. By various measures across 2025 and into 2026, net annual inflation ran somewhere between roughly 0.2% and 0.8%, depending on the window. $ETH supply crossed back above its Merge-era level. The deflation was over.

The mechanism that made ultrasound money true, EIP-1559 burning at scale, had not been removed. It had been bypassed. The activity simply moved to a layer where the burn does not happen in any meaningful amount. Ethereum scaled successfully and, in doing so, severed the link between usage and scarcity that the entire thesis depended on.

The bull case: it still works, just differently

The response from Ethereum’s defenders is not denial. It is reframing, and parts of it are genuinely strong.

The first point is that elastic scarcity is the actual feature, not permanent deflation. Ethereum was never designed to deflate forever at a fixed rate. It was designed to burn in proportion to demand, which means it becomes deflationary when the network is busy and mildly inflationary when it is quiet. During periods of high mainnet activity, above roughly 16 gwei average gas, burn still exceeds issuance, and $ETH still goes net deflationary, temporarily. The mechanism works exactly as designed; it is just that a scaled network spends more time in the quiet regime. In this reading, ultrasound money was always conditional, and the condition is demand, not a promise.

The second point is that issuance is still radically lower than before. Even mildly inflationary, Ethereum issues roughly 90% less $ETH than it did under proof-of-work. Compared to Bitcoin, which currently inflates at around 0.8% annually on a fixed schedule, Ethereum’s roughly 0.2% net inflation in calmer periods is actually lower. Both assets inflate in 2026; Ethereum, by some measures, inflates less. The “harder than Bitcoin” claim survives in a narrow, technical form even without net deflation.

The third point is that the supply figure overstates the sell pressure. Roughly 28% to 30% of all $ETH is locked in staking, earning yield and not circulating. The tradeable float, $ETH actually available on exchanges, is meaningfully smaller than the headline supply number, and it shrinks as more $ETH is staked. A modestly inflating total supply with a large and growing staked portion is a very different pressure than the raw inflation number suggests. Demand from ETFs, treasury companies, and staking can absorb 0.2% inflation without difficulty.

And the fourth point is simply that the store-of-value case never rested on deflation alone. As long as demand for Ethereum’s blockspace, its role as settlement for stablecoins, tokenization, and DeFi, grows faster than supply, price can rise regardless of whether supply ticks up 0.2% a year. Scarcity was a nice story. Utility is the real thesis.

The bear case: the narrative was load-bearing

The skeptical reading is that the ultrasound story was not just marketing, that it was doing real work in the investment case, and that losing it matters more than the reframing admits.

The blunt version comes from the on-chain data and the people watching it leave. Daily network fee revenue on Ethereum fell from near $40 million in early 2025 to a local low around $10 million in 2026. That is not just a burn problem; it is a value-accrual problem. If the base layer captures little fee revenue because activity happens on rollups that pay it almost nothing, then holding $ETH is a bet on an asset whose own network is monetizing its users poorly. Some analyses have tied this directly to developer attrition and reduced whale support, framing the end of ultrasound money as the end of a period when $ETH had a clean, quantifiable reason to appreciate.

The deeper problem is structural and hard to argue away: a scaled, efficient Ethereum is less deflationary than a congested, expensive one. This is the tension at the center of the whole debate. The very thing that makes Ethereum better as infrastructure, cheap transactions, more capacity, activity on fast rollups, is the thing that reduces the burn. Ethereum cannot simultaneously be the cheap, high-throughput settlement layer it wants to be and the fee-burning deflationary asset the ultrasound thesis needed. Those are in direct conflict, and the roadmap chose scaling. The asset thesis was, in a real sense, sacrificed to the technology roadmap.

Then there is the value-capture question that rollups sharpen. Layer 2s use Ethereum for security and pay it a pittance for the privilege. Robinhood’s own chain is an example: analyses of corporate L2s show the base layer capturing a rounding error of the economics while providing the security that makes the whole arrangement credible. If Ethereum’s future is thousands of rollups settling to it cheaply, then Ethereum is providing enormous value and capturing little of it, and no amount of narrative reframing fixes a value-capture problem that lives in the fee structure.

The fix nobody is talking about

Which brings us to December 2025, and the upgrade that was designed, in part, to address exactly this, and that most of the market ignored.

The Fusaka upgrade activated on December 3, 2025. Its headline features were about scaling further, PeerDAS and expanded blob capacity. But buried in it was EIP-7918, the “blob base fee bound,” which is the most direct attempt yet to repair the burn. The problem Dencun created was that blob fees could collapse to near-zero, one wei, when execution costs dominated and blob demand was soft, which meant rollups consumed Ethereum’s capacity almost for free and burned almost nothing. EIP-7918 sets a floor: it ties the minimum blob fee to the execution base fee, roughly the execution base fee divided by 16, so that even in quiet periods rollups pay a meaningful minimum, and a minimum stream of $ETH gets burned.

The modeling is striking. Fidelity Digital Assets analyzed what would have happened if EIP-7918 had been active since blobs launched, and found that on 93% of days since the 2024 Dencun upgrade, the adjusted fee would have exceeded the actual fee, generating an estimated additional $78.6 million, roughly 24,641 $ETH, in cumulative blob-fee revenue. Blockworks noted that had the mechanism been introduced in June 2025, burnt blob fees would have been nearly 8x higher. The intent is explicit: restore a floor under the burn so that as stablecoins, DeFi, and tokenization migrate to rollups, $ETH still captures value from that activity instead of subsidizing it.

The honest caveat is that this is a floor, not a restoration. EIP-7918 prevents the burn from collapsing to zero; it does not recreate the thousands-of-$ETH-per-day burn of the congested mainnet era. Whether it produces measurable, sustained deflation depends on how much activity flows through blobs and how high execution base fees run, and the market is still watching. It is a serious, well-designed attempt to reconnect usage and scarcity. It is not a return to 2022.

Sound money versus ultrasound money, honestly compared

Because the entire thesis was built as a shot at Bitcoin, it is worth putting the two monetary models side by side without the tribalism, since the comparison is more interesting than either camp admits.

Bitcoin offers fixed scarcity. The supply schedule is written into the protocol, capped at 21 million coins, and halves on a predictable timetable roughly every four years. A holder knows today, with certainty, what Bitcoin’s issuance will be in 2030 and 2040. That certainty is the entire product. Bitcoin does not react to demand, does not burn, does not adjust; it simply issues on schedule toward a hard cap, and its current inflation runs around 0.8% annually, trending toward zero over decades. The trade-off Bitcoin holders accept is that the base layer offers little native utility and no yield. You hold it for the certainty, and you give up productivity in exchange.

Ethereum offered, and to a degree still offers, elastic scarcity. Supply responds to network demand: high usage burns more and can push $ETH net deflationary; low usage burns less and lets mild inflation through. The appeal was a token that becomes scarcer precisely when it is most used, tying the asset’s scarcity to the network’s success. The trade-off, which the L2 era exposed, is that elasticity cuts both ways.

A demand-responsive supply is only deflationary when demand is high on the layer that burns, and Ethereum deliberately moved demand to layers that do not burn. Bitcoin’s rigidity, often criticized as inflexible, turned out to be the thing that made its monetary promise keepable. Ethereum’s flexibility, often praised as sophisticated, turned out to be the thing that made its monetary promise conditional.

The honest scorecard is that these are different products for different buyers, not better and worse versions of the same thing. Bitcoin sells certainty and asks you to forgo utility. Ethereum sells utility and asks you to accept that its scarcity depends on how that utility is used. The ultrasound-money era was the brief window when Ethereum appeared to offer both, certainty of deflation and utility of a working network, and that window closed not because Ethereum failed but because it succeeded at scaling.

A holder choosing between them in 2026 is really choosing between guaranteed scarcity with no yield and demand-driven scarcity with staking yield and network utility. Framed that way, the loss of ultrasound money is less a defeat than a clarification: Ethereum was never going to be Bitcoin, and the burn was hiding how different the two bets actually are.

What this means for holding $ETH

Strip away the narrative fight and the practical question is whether the ultrasound story mattered to the price, and the uncomfortable answer is that it is hard to tell, because $ETH has underperformed through the entire period regardless.

The clean way to see it: the ultrasound thesis was strongest right after the Merge, and it has been dismantled steadily since Dencun in March 2024. Over that same window, $ETH has been a persistent underperformer against both Bitcoin and its own former highs. Either the market was pricing the loss of the deflation narrative, or the market never cared about the narrative and $ETH’s problems lie elsewhere, in L2 value leakage, in competition from Solana, in the sheer difficulty of the modular roadmap. Both readings are defensible, and they point to different conclusions about whether fixing the burn fixes the price.

The most honest framing is that ultrasound money was a proxy for a real question that has not gone away: does Ethereum capture value from its own success? When the network was congested and expensive, the answer was visibly yes; the burn made it legible. When the network scaled and cheapened, the answer became murky, and the burn stopped telling the story. EIP-7918 is an attempt to make the answer legible again by putting a floor under value capture.

Whether it works will show up not in the marketing but in two numbers over the next year: net $ETH supply, and base-layer fee revenue. If both turn up meaningfully, the thesis has a second life. If they do not, then ultrasound money was a phase, not a property, and Ethereum’s investment case has to stand on utility alone, which is a harder, slower, less tweetable argument than the one that shrank the supply.

Frequently Asked Questions

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. It describes monetary mechanics and network upgrades whose effects are uncertain and still developing. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Always do your own research. Figures on supply, burn, and inflation move continuously and are accurate as of July 17, 2026.

SBI Holdings has completed the acquisition of a majority stake in Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinhako, marking another move in the Japanese financial group’s expanding digital asset strategy across Asia.

The transaction closed on July 16 after receiving approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), bringing Coinhako under SBI’s corporate structure. The acquisition follows a number of digital asset initiatives by SBI, including its agreement to acquire Japan’s Bitbank and its partnership with Ondo Finance to support the tokenization of Japanese equities using its yen-backed stablecoin.

Coinhako Becomes Part of SBI’s Digital Asset Business

SBI Holdings announced that it has acquired a controlling interest in Holdbuild Pte. Ltd., the parent company of Coinhako. The transaction combined a capital injection along with the purchase of shares from existing investors, although the companies did not disclose the financial terms.

Following the completion of the deal, Coinhako officially became an SBI Holdings subsidiary. Through its entity Hako Technology, the exchange operates under a Major Payment Institution (MPI) license issued by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

The acquisition also gives SBI access to Coinhako’s network of more than 400,000 customers, as well as its established operations and regulatory experience across Southeast Asia.

SBI Outlines Cross-Border Digital Asset Strategy

SBI Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Yoshitaka Kitao said the acquisition supports the group’s objective of connecting digital asset exchanges across multiple jurisdictions.

According to Kitao, the company plans to create a global digital asset network that allows investors to participate in markets without being limited by national borders or currency barriers. He also described Singapore as an important market because of its advanced regulatory framework for digital assets.

SBI said Coinhako will become part of its broader digital finance business, which includes its yen-backed stablecoin JPYSC. The company also plans to expand services related to tokenization, stablecoins, blockchain-based finance, and cross-border payments linking Japan with Southeast Asia.

Coinhako co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Yusho Liu said the partnership will provide the exchange with broader institutional support and access to SBI’s financial ecosystem. He added that the company intends to use those resources to continue developing digital financial services across the region.

Related: SBI Holdings to Acquire Crypto Exchange Bitbank in $288 Million Deal