Robinhood Chain’s Early Momentum Is Being Driven By Meme Coins, Not Tokenized Stocks

Robinhood spent over a year building a blockchain around the idea that users want to trade tokens tied to the world’s most valuable companies. But since Robinhood Chain debuted two weeks ago, digital assets with cute pictures and funny names have led the charge.

Although the Ethereum layer-2 scaling network offers users a way to trade tokenized versions of firms like Apple and Nvidia, initial activity on Robinhood Chain has been fueled by interest in meme coins, analysts at investment bank Bernstein shared in a Monday note.

“Early trading volumes on Robinhood Chain were led by meme coins, but [it] shows strong liquidity and traction from crypto-native traders,” they wrote, while emphasizing the retail brokerage’s growing focus on products and services tied to real-world assets.

The analysts noted that the network has quickly become a top-five destination for trading assets on-chain, facilitating $3.1 billion in cumulative trading volume over the past seven days via decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap and PancakeSwap.

Meanwhile, around 65,000 users have gained exposure to $13 million in so-called stock tokens, which are available in over 120 countries but not in the U.S., the analysts added. 

On Monday, around 25,000 wallets held Cash Cat, according to Blockscout. At a market cap of $150 million, the token modeled on a picture of a cat is the most valuable meme coin on the network, based on market cap. Other names include Wen Lambo, Tendies, and Hoodrat.

Bernstein referenced Robinhood’s efforts to push user activity beyond tokenized assets, focusing on decentralized lending through a partnership with DeFi protocol Morpho and perpetual futures through an arrangement with DEX Lighter.

On Monday, shares of Robinhood changed hands around $111, according to Yahoo Finance. Over the past month, the company’s stock price has climbed 19%, almost erasing year-to-date losses that have coincided with a downturn in the crypto market.

BitMine Chairman Tom Lee—an investor in Dastan, the parent company of Decrypt—argued on X this weekend that the early success of Robinhood Chain has bolstered Ethereum’s perception as money, because transaction fees are denominated in the digital asset.

Nearly a year ago, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev described tokenization as “the biggest innovation in capital markets in over a decade” on an earnings call, while referencing tokenization around a dozen times.

At the time, he predicted that “criticisms about crypto assets being sort of like not tied to anything of fundamental value or mostly meme-based” would go away because of the technology’s potential to link tokens to assets with fundamental utility.