Robinhood Chain traders have found an unexpected way to use tokenised US shares: forcing investors to buy them before they can access newly launched meme coins. The strategy has generated substantial trading volumes, distorted prices and drawn a public rebuke from AMC Entertainment chief executive Adam Aron.
Robinhood Chain went live on 1 July as an Arbitrum Orbit Layer-2 blockchain designed around tokenised US equities. Its Stock Tokens are issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited and backed one-to-one by real shares held in custody.
The tokens offer economic exposure to the underlying companies and include dividend rights, but they do not provide voting rights or beneficial ownership. They are also unavailable to US persons.
For its first two weeks, the platform appeared to be another destination for speculative meme-coin trading. That changed when the launchpads long.xyz and Bankr introduced a feature that traders began calling the “RWA meta”.
RWA means “real-world asset”, a cryptocurrency term for putting traditional assets such as shares, commodities and bonds on a blockchain. In this case, however, the tokenised share is not simply traded. It becomes the asset needed to buy an entirely separate meme coin.
A creator can launch a meme coin against one of about 90 to 190 available Stock Tokens, including NVDA, HIMS, AMC and MSTR. Rather than using ether or a dollar-linked stablecoin, the token’s main Uniswap v4 liquidity pool is established as a pair between the meme coin and a Stock Token.
For example, a coin called MEME could be paired with tokenised AMC. Anyone wishing to buy MEME would first need to acquire AMC Stock Tokens and then deposit them into the MEME/AMC liquidity pool in return for MEME.
The AMC tokens remain in the pool. As new traders buy MEME, more tokenised AMC can become locked in the market, while the meme coin moves in the opposite direction.
That mechanism creates demand and trading volume for the Stock Token because each meme-coin purchase requires investors to obtain it first. It can also remove a large share of the token’s available supply from ordinary trading.
This is significant because the number of tokens circulating on-chain may be tiny compared with the hundreds of millions of real shares traded in US markets.
By 2 September, meme-coin and Stock Token pairs had recorded $217m in trading volume, compared with $127m in direct Stock Token markets. Earlier examples included Artificial Inu paired with NVDA, Saylormoon with MSTR and Clippy XP with MSFT.
The BONER token, launched on long.xyz around 20 August against tokenised Hims & Hers, showed how extreme the effect could become.
Over roughly 10 days, traders moved 31,198 of the 58,714 HIMS tokens then in existence into the BONER/HIMS pool. That represented 53% of the entire on-chain supply. A further 1,424 HIMS tokens were held in other meme-coin pools, leaving about 20,300 available for normal trading.
By contrast, Hims & Hers had about 233 million real shares. The blockchain market was therefore only a tiny fraction of the company’s actual equity market.
The timing of trading was crucial. Robinhood allows only licensed authorised participants to create or destroy Stock Tokens, and new tokens can be minted only while the New York Stock Exchange is open.
Cryptocurrency markets, however, continue operating at weekends.
When Wall Street closes on a Friday, meme coins can keep trading while the supply of Stock Tokens is fixed. If much of the available HIMS has already been placed in the BONER/HIMS pool, traders seeking more tokens have to compete for a very limited remainder.
The NYSE closed on Friday, 28 August, with Hims & Hers shares priced at $28.84. After a small post-market burn, the on-chain supply stood at 15,226.8 HIMS tokens. No additional tokens could be minted on Saturday or Sunday.
By Sunday evening, most of the remaining free supply was held in the BONER pool, while the standard HIMS/USDG market was only tens of tokens deep.
Automated market makers, or AMMs, made the imbalance particularly volatile. Unlike a traditional stock exchange, where buyers and sellers are matched directly, an AMM sets prices according to the quantities of each asset left in a liquidity pool.
When one asset becomes scarce, relatively small orders can therefore produce very large price movements.
At 23:36 UTC on Sunday, tokenised HIMS reached $61.15, 112% above the real share price at Friday’s close. Other reports recorded an hourly high of $132.64 on volume of only a few tens of thousands of dollars.
The underlying Hims & Hers business had not changed. Its larger tokenised market on Ondo continued to follow the real share price. The squeeze affected Robinhood’s thin weekend wrapper, rather than the company itself.
Robinhood’s overnight equity session reopened at 00:00 UTC on Monday, allowing authorised participants to operate again. The first 1,000-token mint was completed at 00:43:30 UTC.
Within 12 minutes, the premium had fallen from about 93% to roughly 12%. By 01:59 UTC, tokenised HIMS was trading at $29.31.
Between midnight and 09:54 UTC, 18,750 new tokens were minted in 294 separate events, more than doubling the supply. Market-making wallets sold those new tokens into the inflated market.
The incentive is straightforward: an authorised participant can purchase real HIMS at close to $29, mint an equivalent number of Stock Tokens and sell them at a substantially higher price. New tokens continue to enter the market until the price difference is no longer large enough to make the trade profitable.
That process also demonstrates why the activity does not amount to a short squeeze in Hims & Hers shares. Robinhood Stock Tokens are Jersey-issued securities that provide economic exposure. They are not shares registered with the company’s transfer agent and cannot be delivered into a conventional stock-loan system.
The overall scale is also too small to support that theory. The entire tokenised HIMS supply represented only a tiny share of the real company and about 0.1% of its reported short interest.
What traders had squeezed was the weekend supply of the wrapper.
When minting is restricted, a Stock Token can fall sharply below or rise several times above the value of its underlying share. Once new tokens can be created, arbitrageurs sell them into the premium and the price usually moves back towards the real equity.
The meme coin can behave differently. BONER remained more than 1,000% higher on the day after HIMS returned to its underlying price, because meme-coin buyers were trading on attention and narrative rather than on the value of Hims & Hers.
The same model has since been applied to AMC Entertainment through MEME, a token paired with tokenised AMC. MEME reportedly generated $73.5m in 24-hour volume, the largest figure among the stock-meme group. It had a market capitalisation of about $56m and approximately $2.6m in its main liquidity pool.
That development prompted a forceful response from AMC chief executive Adam Aron.
Aron said AMC had no connection with Robinhood’s tokens and did not endorse them. He questioned how a Jersey-based product could use AMC’s name without being registered as a US security.
He later described the arrangement as a “fictitious synthetic equity market”, called on Robinhood to stop trading AMC Stock Tokens and said outside legal advisers and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would be involved.
Robinhood chief executive Vlad Tenev responded, “What’s the concern?” Its chief legal officer Dan Gallagher, a former SEC commissioner, also rejected the demand and said Robinhood would not stop trading the tokens.
Robinhood’s position is that the Stock Tokens are clearly disclosed Jersey-issued products that provide economic exposure, rather than ownership of the underlying shares.
The dispute itself then became part of the trading narrative. AMC has a strong cultural association with meme-stock markets, and the exchanges between Aron, Tenev and Gallagher gave traders fresh material. Derivative meme-coin tickers appeared around the argument, turning the disagreement over tokenisation into publicity for the market being criticised.
The structure combines three separate incentives. Launchpads and creators earn fees as traders pursue a meme coin. Meme buyers create demand for its paired Stock Token and can reduce the freely available supply. If the wrapper then trades well above the underlying share, authorised participants can profit from creating fresh tokens when minting resumes.
Those participants have an advantage over ordinary meme traders because they can access new supply.
That is why a weekend price of $100 for tokenised AMC or $132 for tokenised HIMS does not indicate that the real shares will reach those levels when markets reopen. Once authorised participants can mint again, they can buy the cheaper real asset and sell newly created tokens into the inflated blockchain market.
The wider significance is that Robinhood built a permissionless blockchain around tokenised traditional assets, and traders quickly turned those assets into quote currencies for a meme-coin casino.
By early September, meme-coin and Stock Token pairs were recording more volume than direct Stock Token markets. BONER had also shown how locking a substantial proportion of a thin wrapper’s supply could send weekend prices sharply higher.
Further scrutiny may follow the AMC dispute, while traders could continue pairing new meme coins with whichever tokenised share offers the strongest narrative.
Unless the market structure changes, the pattern is likely to persist: meme traders can draw Stock Tokens into liquidity pools while Wall Street is closed, creating dramatic scarcity-driven prices. When traditional markets reopen, authorised minters can release new supply, capture the premium and push the wrapper back towards the real share price.
The meme coin may continue rising. The supposed stock squeeze is a different matter.
