The Arbitrum Foundation will host its Singapore Founder House on October 23 to 25, offering up to $300,000 in prizes to early-stage teams building on Arbitrum One or the newly launched Robinhood Chain. The three-day in-person program is preceded by a three-week online Buildathon that began September 14 and runs through October 4, lowering the barrier for founders across Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and South Asia to qualify before committing to travel. Applications are open at luma.com/openhouse-singapore; prospective applicants should check that page directly for current Founder House eligibility windows, as no separate application deadline for the in-person event has been confirmed in official sources.

The prize pool is denominated in USDG, the Global Dollar stablecoin issued by Paxos and distributed through a consortium of more than 130 institutional partners including Robinhood, Kraken, and Mastercard. USDG is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar and backed by dollar deposits and short-term Treasury equivalents held in segregated, bankruptcy-remote accounts. Its circulating supply sits at roughly $2.75 billion as of mid-2026, with approximately $206 million in daily trading volume recorded in August. The use of USDG rather than USDC or USDT may suggest Robinhood's preference for its own stablecoin network within its builder ecosystem.

Prize allocations break down as follows: the General Track awards $120,000 across three places ($60,000, $40,000, and $20,000); the Robinhood Chain Founder-in-Residence award carries $60,000; the Robinhood Chain Innovation Award offers $30,000; Best Promising Products adds $20,000; and a reserved grants pool accounts for the remaining $70,000. Top finishers are also invited into an eight-week mentorship program run jointly by the Arbitrum Foundation and Robinhood Chain. Evaluation on Demo Day will involve representatives from the Arbitrum Foundation, Offchain Labs, and Robinhood Chain.

What Robinhood Chain Is and Why It Matters for Southeast Asia

Robinhood Chain is a permissionless Ethereum Layer-2 network built on Arbitrum's dedicated blockchain infrastructure. It launched its mainnet on July 1, 2026, following a public testnet that recorded 4 million transactions. The chain runs on 100-millisecond block times with ETH as the gas token, native support for ERC-4337 account abstraction (a standard that enables smart contract wallets and sponsored transactions), and a sequencing model that prevents the fee-priority front-running common on other networks. At launch, its partners included Uniswap, Chainlink, Alchemy, BitGo, and Pleiades, a proprietary-trading automated market maker.

The strategic case for builders targeting retail adoption is Robinhood's existing distribution: roughly 28 million customers across 38 countries, with Stock Token access available in more than 120 countries (though certain jurisdictions, including the US, carry restrictions that builders should verify for their target markets). "Decentralized finance unlocks possibilities beyond what traditional finance can offer, but historically, it has required technical expertise to navigate. We're bringing the best of traditional finance and DeFi together, and in doing so, expanding financial ownership to every corner of the globe," said Johann Kerbrat, SVP and General Manager of Crypto and International at Robinhood, at the mainnet launch.

Singapore as a Regional Builder Hub

Singapore hosts more than 2,300 crypto and blockchain companies, with 968 funded firms having collectively raised approximately $6.99 billion. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) operates a Digital Payment Token licensing framework that provides institutional credibility, and MAS has been consulting on formal stablecoin legislation under proposed amendments to the Payment Services Act (readers should verify the current status of this consultation before acting on this context). That regulatory environment makes Singapore a natural venue for a program focused on tokenized equities and stablecoin payments. The Singapore event is timed shortly after Singapore Blockchain Week, adding further regional relevance for teams already present in the city.

The six core verticals for the Singapore program are tokenization (covering real-world assets and equities), AI agents, DeFi, privacy, payments, and consumer and social applications, each carrying particular relevance for Southeast Asia. A bonus track is available for projects built in Rust, C, or C++.

Stablecoin-based cross-border payment infrastructure addresses real demand across remittance corridors connecting Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam to diaspora communities elsewhere. On the tokenization side, Singapore's institutional base, including sovereign wealth funds such as GIC and Temasek as well as DBS Bank's tokenization experiments, represents a natural demand pool for the product categories Robinhood Chain is designed to support.

The program's broader track record offers useful context. The New York Founder House in March drew 473 applications and selected 88 teams, with $340,000 awarded. London in July attracted more than 490 registrations and 140 builders, with a $300,000 pool split among 64 submitted projects. Liquida, which tokenizes UK government bonds, won the top prize. EdenFi, a multicurrency stablecoin app targeting Africa and diaspora remittance corridors, was recognized as a notable honoree in the London competition, illustrating the range of markets represented in the program.

Network Context

ARB, Arbitrum's governance token, was trading near $0.17 as of mid-September 2026, with a market cap of roughly $1.1 billion and 24-hour trading volume between $353 million and $438 million. The token posted a gain of more than 50% over the seven days prior, coinciding with the publication of Arbitrum's first-half 2026 progress report and the rollout of the ArbOS 61 "Elara" upgrade on August 20. Elara introduces multidimensional gas pricing across several cost dimensions (covering compute, storage reads and writes, storage growth, history growth, and calldata) and quadruples smart contract capacity, with direct relevance for the complex contracts common in DeFi and tokenization applications.

Arbitrum One's total value locked stood between $1.25 billion and $1.42 billion in mid-2026, according to DeFiLlama, with a 30-day increase of approximately 13.8 percent.

The Singapore event closes out a $1.8 million global program backed in part by Robinhood Chain's $1 million commitment across the series. The Buildathon's online phase is still accepting participants through October 4. Teams holding an MVP, prototype, or early-stage product ready to deploy on Arbitrum One or Robinhood Chain are eligible to apply.