Robinhood launches DeFi lending as Robinhood Chain activity climbs after mainnet debut

Robinhood’s decentralized-finance push is adding a clearer early market structure after the launch of Robinhood Earn, a self-custodial lending product offering an estimated 7% APY on USDG deposits, with Ethena’s USDe emerging as the dominant collateral asset in the Morpho-powered vault behind the yield product. Robinhood Earn launched July 1 alongside Robinhood Chain and lets users lend USDG, the stablecoin issued by Robinhood, into a Steakhouse Financial-curated vault on Morpho, where borrowers post collateral sourced from Ethena’s USDe, Spark’s spUSDG and Maple’s SyrupUSDG. As of July 8, Ethena accounted for about $100 million of stablecoin supply on Robinhood Chain, roughly half of the more than $200 million circulating on the network, underscoring its early distribution advantage in the vault ecosystem. Insurance coverage for the product has been arranged through Lloyd’s of London and RELM for smart-contract and cyber-related risks. Earlier figures showed Robinhood Chain’s TVL climbing above $106 million and 24-hour Uniswap volume reaching $500 million within days of launch, while a $50 million Ethena deposit into the Steakhouse-managed USDG vault helped drive early growth. Robinhood had roughly 24 million funded accounts when it last reported figures, giving the rollout a potentially broad retail distribution channel, though smart-contract vulnerabilities, funding-rate compression tied to USDe’s design and regulatory scrutiny of yield products remain key risks to watch.