🏴 FREE: Robinhood Chain’s Hook Economy

Make a trade on Robinhood Chain, and there’s a good chance a hook is pulling the strings.

These Uniswap v4 extensions decide who collects fees, how token launches open, whether a pool doubles as a game, etc. Builders on Robinhood’s L2 have registered more of them than on any other chain.

In today’s premium piece, I map out where hooks are showing up on the L2, which projects stand out, and how to explore them safely. Let’s catch you up!

— Peaster ✍️

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NEED TO KNOW

Coinbase Enables Borrowing Against Gold via Morpho

🪙 Coinbase just unlocked loans against gold. Eligible U.S. users (except New York) can now borrow USDC against PAX Gold via Morpho on Base, Coinbase Borrow’s first non-crypto collateral. Morpho says that Coinbase hookup already holds ~$3.4B in collateral.
🏛️ World Liberty is buying back WLFI. The Trump-family venture said it’ll fund a new WLFI buyback partly with USD1 reserve fees, days after Democrats flagged it as a likely Oversight target — and with WLFI down ~60% this year.
📈 And Kalshi lit up stock perps. Two days after the CFTC cleared single-stock perps, Kalshi went live on 50+ names and said traders moved over $300M that morning, though it’s also facing fresh legal heat from California tribes and Arkansas.

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ANALYSIS

A Field Guide to Robinhood Chain’s Hook Economy

Bankless Author: William Peaster

Robinhood’s CEO just gave hooks his blessing publicly.

On Nov. 5th, during a Robinhood Chain AMA on X, Vlad Tenev was asked whether hooks-based markets were something he wanted more of, or whether his focus was on tokenized stocks. His reply was “Both,” before adding that “hooks are what happens when people get creative on an open chain.”

— (@)

That’s a notable endorsement, but it’s also a description of what’s already happened. Robinhood Chain went live on July 1st, and in four months it’s become the most crowded testing ground for Uniswap v4 hooks anywhere:

The most registered hooks of any chain. Robinhood Chain has 1,206 of the 5,019 hooks in Uniswap’s public hook registry, ahead of Base (1,150) and Ethereum (1,133). And that’s only the curated list: Tackle’s onchain index has spotted 31,469 distinct hook contracts on the chain, attached to roughly 392,000 pools.

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Most trades run through one. A Bitquery census from early September found that 74.5% of Uniswap v4 trades on the chain went through a hook. I can’t find comprehensive data for what the scope looks like today, but presumably it’s still very substantial.
Real volume underneath. Uniswap v4 alone handled about $1.7B of trading on Robinhood Chain over the past week, and roughly $10.5B over the past 30 days, according to DefiLlama.

Accordingly, in this guide I’ll map out how this surge has played out and run through projects worth knowing and more. Let’s break down all the basics!

First, a quick refresher for anyone out of the loop.

A hook is a smart contract that a Uniswap v4 pool calls at set moments in its life, e.g. right before or after every swap, or whenever someone adds liquidity. That lets a pool run its own rules, like fees that move with the market, taxes that fund a creator, burns on every buy, limits on snipers at launch, and so forth.

Notably, a pool’s hook is fixed when the pool is created, and one hook contract can serve many pools at once. So a hook isn’t a feature bolted onto a market. In a direct sense, it is the market’s rulebook.

Back in May, I wrote about how V4 hooks are new terrain for onchain collectibles. That was definitely a niche focus, sure, but since then Robinhood Chain has turned that general, experimental terrain into an expansive city. Why that’s happened has stemmed from a handful of boons:

A strong DEX foundation. Uniswap v2, v3, v4, and UniswapX all launched alongside the chain, with Uniswap as the L2’s primary public AMM. As such, v4 (which pioneered hooks) has been a default option for builders from the start.
A brand-new asset class. Robinhood Stock Tokens trade around the clock onchain, even when the underlying stock markets are closed. That creates real design problems, e.g. how should a pool price NVDA at 2am on a Sunday? Hooks have become the preferred solution to these ends.
A speculative crowd and a launchpad war. Memecoins drove most of the chain’s early volume, and dozens of launchpads now compete on the rules baked into their pools. Those rules live in hooks.
Distribution. Uniswap’s app and API route trades into approved hook pools, so a good hook doesn’t need its own frontend to find traders.

In other words, Robinhood Chain gave hooks fresh assets, fresh users, and a dominant venue all at once. The results have led to a surge in onchain building.

…the full field guide — launchpads, stock-token markets, LP hooks, hook games, vampire pools, and how to stay safe — is in today’s premium piece.

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