Top Crypto Project to watch: Fomo, Bullpen, Ink & Robinhood

Settlement rails and on-chain derivatives venues only generate volume when users are there to trade, so the more contested position this cycle may be at the distribution layer rather than the protocol layer. Two groups are competing for it from very different starting points: consumer applications such as Fomo and Bullpen must build an audience before they can route any flow, while Kraken and Robinhood already have the audience, capital, and regulatory relationships in place. Both approaches depend on the same condition: the range of assets worth speculating on needs to keep widening, because an audience is only valuable if there is enough on-chain activity to capture. The current market expansion has started to provide that.

While Part 1 covered Arc, Tempo, Variational, and Ostium, this second installment focuses on Fomo, Bullpen, Ink, and Robinhood Chain, examining how consumer applications and established financial platforms are expanding access to on-chain markets.

Consumer access and institutional distribution are expanding the on-chain market

The addressable market for on-chain trading is widening as speculative activity expands across asset classes. Prediction markets, tokenized collectibles, perpetual contracts, and increasingly programmable real-world assets are creating new forms of participation beyond spot crypto trading. At the same time, the broader market is becoming increasingly gamified, making accessibility and interface design more important as platforms simplify how retail users discover assets, execute trades, and manage positions without extensive blockchain knowledge.

This creates an opportunity for aggregation layers that coordinate discovery, analytics, funding, and execution across multiple liquidity venues. As traders continue to navigate fragmented infrastructure, applications that control the user relationship and route order flow can capture more value, rather than the underlying execution venue alone. Improved onboarding can also expand the addressable user base by reducing the operational friction associated with wallets, bridging, gas management, and cross-platform execution.

A separate opportunity exists for financial institutions that already possess substantial customer bases, capital pools, payment infrastructure, and regulatory relationships. Their competitive advantage lies less in acquiring entirely new crypto users and more in converting existing financial distribution into programmable on-chain activity. Even a relatively small migration of assets from brokerage or exchange accounts into lending markets, liquidity pools, tokenized securities, and derivatives can generate meaningful liquidity compared with the current scale of most blockchain ecosystems.

Both models ultimately depend on conversion, not headline distribution alone. Consumer applications must turn easier access into recurring transactions and monetization, while institution-backed networks must convert existing customers and assets into persistent on-chain liquidity. These dynamics provide the basis for evaluating the projects positioned around this shift.

Notable projects positioned around these shifts

The projects below illustrate different approaches to converting consumer access and established financial distribution into active on-chain markets.

Fomo

Fomo is a consumer trading application designed to reduce the operational complexity associated with on-chain markets. Users can authenticate through Apple ID or email and access assets across chains without manually managing bridges or gas, while the same interface integrates execution, social discovery, trader profiles, leaderboards, and public trading activity.

The platform's distribution metrics show material traction: more than 625,000 users onboarded in its first year, over $4B in trading volume, and more than 110M social interactions. Fomo also reports that more than 68,000 first-time users executed digital asset purchases through Apple Pay, representing $25M in purchases. This traction was accompanied by a $17M Series A in 2025 and a $75M Series B in June 2026, led by Benchmark and Index Ventures respectively.

Fomo's strategic value is concentrated in the consumer funnel rather than the underlying liquidity layer. Retention through social discovery and unified identity would increase the value of its distribution layer as the tradable asset universe expands. The main constraint is dependence on third-party execution infrastructure, along with the need to show that social engagement translates into durable transaction retention rather than short-lived speculative activity.

Fomo’s recent monetization profile suggests that user growth is beginning to translate into meaningful transaction economics. DeFiLlama records approximately $1.18M in fees and revenue over the past 30 days, bringing its cumulative revenue to $3.21M and implying an annualized run rate of roughly $14.43M. The gap between the current run rate and cumulative revenue suggests monetization has scaled materially since the platform’s earlier operating period. For a consumer-facing trading application, this strengthens the case that simplified access and aggregated execution can support a meaningful revenue layer as activity scales.

Bullpen

Bullpen is a non-custodial trading terminal that aggregates liquidity across specialized on-chain venues. It routes perpetuals through Hyperliquid, major spot assets through Hyperliquid and UNIT, and long-tail Solana spot assets through Jupiter Ultra. Prediction-market access, market discovery, wallet analytics, and social data sit above these venues, letting the front end coordinate multiple trading workflows without owning the underlying liquidity.

This architecture addresses a structural problem created by market specialization. Liquidity is increasingly concentrated in protocols optimized for different products. A trader may prefer Hyperliquid for perpetuals, Jupiter for Solana spot execution, and Polymarket for event contracts. Bullpen can aggregate these venues without forcing users to rebuild their workflow every time liquidity migrates.

The model reduces the capital burden of bootstrapping every market internally, letting Bullpen focus on routing quality, discovery, and user experience while underlying protocols compete for liquidity. The project is backed by 6th Man Ventures and Delphi Ventures, with additional organic distribution rooted in crypto-native founder and community networks.

Under this model, Bullpen operates as an order-flow and attention layer above existing markets. The same modularity that enables broad venue coverage also creates its primary dependency: execution quality remains exposed to third-party fees, liquidity, and market structure. Sustained value will depend on maintaining competitive routing and a useful front end even as the dominant backend venues change.

Ink by Kraken

Ink is an Ethereum Layer 2 built on the OP Stack and developed by Kraken. Ink positions the network as a DeFi-focused environment with one-second block times, low fees, EVM compatibility, and deep integration with Kraken infrastructure. Its economic thesis rests on converting Kraken's established off-chain distribution into programmable on-chain activity, extending an existing customer and asset base into lending, trading, liquidity, and other DeFi services.

Kraken reported 5.7M funded accounts, $48.2B in assets on platform, and $2.0T in transaction volume during 2025. While Ink's current footprint remains nascent relative to that base, DeFiLlama records about $155M in DeFi TVL, down from a peak of nearly $600M amid the broader crypto market downturn, alongside $154M in stablecoins and $1.65B in weekly perpetual volume. This conversion gap defines the network's opportunity, since even a modest migration of Kraken users and assets would drive substantial growth relative to Ink's current on-chain footprint.

To narrow this gap, the network uses ecosystem programs to generate strategic incentives for users and developers. Ink also supports ecosystem incentive programs, with projects such as Nado and Tydro featured in its application directory. These initiatives aim to encourage user participation and support activity across the network. Ink's investment case depends primarily on Kraken's ability to convert its customer base into recurring on-chain behavior rather than temporary incentive-driven capital. A sustained transition could improve asset retention across trading, lending, yield, and other DeFi products, while weak conversion remains the principal risk because large exchange distribution does not automatically translate into durable blockchain activity.

Robinhood Chain

Robinhood Chain is a permissionless Ethereum Layer 2 built on Arbitrum and designed around financial services and tokenized real-world assets. Robinhood enters this market with a larger traditional distribution base than most crypto-native networks, with July 2026 operating data showing 28.5M funded customers and $355B in total platform assets.

The network converts that distribution into a programmable asset layer. Robinhood Stock Tokens are standard ERC-20 tokens that provide economic exposure to underlying shares and ETFs, which can be transferred and composed into on-chain applications through Robinhood Wallet in more than 120 countries, subject to jurisdictional restrictions. The company is integrating these assets with decentralized trading, lending, and collateral infrastructure.

Early network activity is already material. DeFiLlama currently records roughly $1.15B in DeFi TVL, about $1.08B in stablecoins, approximately $330M in active RWA value, and more than $6.13B in weekly DEX volume. Although this remains small relative to Robinhood's $355B platform asset base, the gap highlights the scale of capital that could migrate on-chain if tokenized products achieve sustained use.

One of the clearest examples of on-chain programmability is the emergence of Stock Token-denominated speculative liquidity. DEX Screener records an AI/NVDA pool on Robinhood Chain, while CoinGecko tracks multiple meme assets paired against the HIMS Stock Token. In these markets, the Stock Token acts as the quote asset, meaning a meme trading at 0.001 NVDA is priced relative to NVIDIA exposure rather than directly against the dollar.

This structure creates a two-layer return profile. The meme can gain or lose value relative to the stock, while the stock itself can also move against the dollar. Stock Tokens deposited into liquidity pools become part of the market structure rather than remaining passive brokerage positions, illustrating how tokenized equities can function as collateral, liquidity assets, and building blocks for new consumer products.

Conclusion

The broader signal is a shift in competitive advantage from isolated execution infrastructure toward distribution systems that can coordinate access, liquidity, and programmable financial activity. Consumer-facing applications can capture value by reducing fragmentation across venues, while financial institutions can extend established customer relationships into on-chain markets. In both cases, the critical variable is whether distribution converts into recurring liquidity and fee-generating behavior rather than temporary incentive-driven activity. Durable adoption will depend on retention, routing quality, liquidity depth, and the ability to support new forms of market participation under consistent risk controls. Distribution creates the initial advantage, but recurring transaction activity determines whether that advantage develops into sustainable on-chain economics.