If your platform has millions or tens of millions of customers and you are working out how to bring them onchain, Robinhood Earn is the best case study available today.

Start with two numbers pointing in opposite directions.

Robinhood has about 28.6 million funded customers. Yet CoinDesk Research estimated that trades identifiable as Robinhood app users made up only about 1–2% of activity on Robinhood Chain. The estimate depends on identity heuristics, the denominator and the period, but the scale is plain: Robinhood’s customers are almost invisible in onchain trading.

On the other side, by early October the chain’s largest protocol was Morpho, with about $580 million in TVL, and its largest stablecoin was USDG, at about $690 million. One important source of both was a single product: Robinhood Earn.

Public onchain data cannot tell whether depositors are existing Robinhood customers, and it cannot prove that Earn brought in every USDG on the chain. The contrast still needs explaining: customers are nearly absent from onchain trading, yet a deposit product embedded in the app became one of the chain’s biggest pools of capital.

One Button, an Entire Protocol Stack

Earn launched with mainnet on July 1. It was Robinhood’s first decentralized lending product inside its main app:

1. The entry point is the app. Eligible U.S. users act inside the Robinhood app, with no extra wallet to install and no DeFi to learn.
2. Assets sit in a self-custody wallet. USDG goes onchain through a self-custody wallet; Robinhood does not hold the assets.
3. Yield comes from onchain lending. Funds go into a Steakhouse-curated USDG vault on Morpho, where borrowers mostly post stablecoin assets from Ethena, Maple and Spark as collateral. Estimated yield: about 7%.
4. It is insured. Coverage through Lloyd’s of London and RELM protects against losses from cyberattacks and smart-contract bugs; the limit was not disclosed.

The user sees a high-yield savings button. Behind it sits a whole DeFi stack.

It grew fast:

The 7% Includes a Subsidy

The estimated 7% does not all come from lending. FalconX’s July 20 figures put the vault’s own yield at about 1.9% and the lending market at about 2.5%; rewards paid through the incentive platform Merkl filled the gap. Analysts estimated the mechanism could sustain the 7% target up to a vault of roughly $2 billion.

That does not make the subsidy unsustainable by definition. A subsidy is a customer-acquisition cost. What Robinhood bought with it is a first group of customers willing to keep deposits onchain and comfortable with a self-custody wallet. The real test is how much capital stays after incentives taper.

The Framework: The Distribution Switch

Put Earn next to onchain trading and one framework falls out:

A large platform’s customers do not move onchain on their own. The switch turns on only when a product is embedded in the platform’s main entry point.

Four conditions turn the switch on. Earn meets all four; third-party dapps meet none:

The framework lines up with the numbers. Identifiable app users supplied only about 1–2% of trading, while Earn, embedded in the app, drew substantial deposits. It does not rule out the role of subsidies, yield or other channels, but it offers a testable explanation: where the switch opened, the money came.

Where Is the Next Switch?

Use the framework to list the switches Robinhood could open next:

If the switch explanation holds, each new switch brings another wave of demand from Robinhood’s own customers. That will shape the chain’s second phase more than any subsidy.

If You Build Onchain Products

• The most effective way to reach a big platform’s customers is to become the backend embedded in its app, not a frontend onchain waiting for visitors. Morpho, Steakhouse, Spark, Ethena and Maple all got their flow behind Earn this way.
• Treat one action, platform endorsement and a clear return as design requirements. Ordinary users do not go onchain for its own sake.
• Retention after incentives taper is the only real test of whether a switch opened.

The Takeaway

Robinhood’s customers are not unwilling to go onchain. They are waiting for the platform to flip the switch. Earn was the first one flipped. When the next one opens, watch whether deposits and holders stay, not the volume.

If you ran a large platform, which onchain product would you put in the main app first?

— Adapted from Robinhood Goes Onchain: A Broker’s First Year, Chapter 6, “Earn: The Only Switch Robinhood Turned On”

The full book (17 chapters, 48 figures, first 3 chapters free to read): https://pickful.ai/books/qx7q

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