Cosmos Labs Co-CEO Barry Plunkett Calls dYdX-Robinhood Arcus Partnership a Rational Shift to RWA

Cosmos Labs co-CEO Barry Plunkett said dYdX’s partnership with Robinhood to launch Arcus reflects a “rational choice” as dYdX faces growing competitive and market pressures. According to Foresight News, Plunkett wrote on X that dYdX previously demonstrated it could run serious operations on-chain, but in recent years has encountered challenges from newer perpetual-contract competitors such as Hyperliquid and Lighter, a broader downturn in DeFi, and pressure from Web2.5 products including Kalshi. Plunkett said the move to partner with Robinhood, which he described as having strong distribution capabilities, and to pivot toward real-world assets (RWA) fits the current environment. On the potential impact to ATOM, Plunkett said he expects it to be very limited. He noted that dYdX Chain remains a sovereign chain, and that its fees, security, and value accrual contribute little to ATOM. He also said the ATOM community did not pay for dYdX’s earlier migration to Cosmos. Plunkett added that the development further supports the Cosmos team’s view that for teams with distribution strength and leading products, owning the underlying platform is important. He said Cosmos is currently focused on building tokenized deposit solutions for banks.