Crypto Traders Are Pairing Meme Coins With Stocks on Robinhood—And It’s Working (Sort Of)

A meme coin known as BONER locked up greater than half the tokenized shares of Hims & Hers Well being on Robinhood’s blockchain over the weekend of August 30. The stunt briefly pushed the wrapped model of the inventory to $132.64, greater than 4 occasions Friday’s actual shut of HIMS inventory at $28.84.

The precise HIMS shares barely budged, however that’s not gonna cease the meme coin merchants from making an attempt once more.

Robinhood Chain, the corporate’s community that went stay in July, is a permissionless layer-2 chain that lets builders construct absolutely anything they need, together with meme cash that commerce straight towards tokenized shares as a substitute of stablecoins.

Tokenized shares are digital tokens meant to trace an actual share’s value one-to-one. Purchase the meme coin, and the inventory tokens you pay with get locked inside its liquidity pool, the crypto reserve that units the buying and selling value.

Ten days of shopping for pushed 31,198 of the 58,714 tokenized HIMS shares in existence into the BONER pool alone. Robinhood lets just one licensed accomplice mint or burn these tokens, so provide stayed fastened at roughly one tokenized share for each 4,000 actual ones. With the NYSE shut for the weekend and no stay value to examine towards, just a few thousand {dollars} of buying and selling was sufficient to maneuver it.

The aim was a brief squeeze, a scramble the place merchants who wager a inventory will drop get compelled to purchase it again at a rising value, pushing that value even larger. HIMS is a popular short target, with a couple of quarter of its actual shares offered brief on the NYSE.

However BONER’s own website admits the maths does not work: each tokenized HIMS share mixed equals simply 0.1% of that brief place.

BONER is not the one one working this playbook on a sequence the place meme cash have already outpaced tokenized stocks in buying and selling quantity.

Artificial Inu is pegged to tokenized Nvidia inventory, Saylormoon holds tokenized Technique shares and Clippy XP holds Microsoft. After all, there are a lot of different low-liquidity meme cash for these with a excessive danger urge for food.

The setup echoes 2021’s GameStop saga, when Reddit’s WallStreetBets discussion board piled into an actual brief squeeze that compelled hedge funds to cowl at an enormous loss. That squeeze moved precise shares on an actual inventory alternate. The BONER play solely moved a thinly traded IOU that reset as soon as the market reopened and new tokens obtained minted.

So whereas the meme coin pairs is probably not placing the squeeze on the focused shares like these GameStop merchants of outdated, these tokens are working to convey an entire lot of consideration, and liquidity, to the model new Robinhood Chain community.

For instance, Artificial Inu, which trades as AI, leads the meme-stock-pair craze with a $203 million market cap and $16.3 million in 24-hour quantity. The token’s important AI/NVDA pool is holding about $5.2 million in liquidity. Saylormoon, which borrows the MSTR ticker from Technique, has a $1.75 million market cap and $2 million in every day quantity towards roughly $450,000 in its major MSTR pool. Clippy XP, linked to tokenized Microsoft, sits at $1.69 million with $641,000 in volume and about $395,000 in its important MSFT pool.

And the most recent entrant, MEME, is paired with tokenized AMC inventory, which now has a $56 million market cap and $73.5 million in 24-hour quantity—the very best of the group—with $2.6 million in its important pool. The swimming pools, although, up to now solely maintain a negligible share of the underlying tokenized inventory provide.

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Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has embraced the pattern, beforehand saying that his firm’s chain “works nice for memes too,” although it was constructed to convey real-world belongings on-chain.

Tenev has his critics, after all, together with AMC CEO Adam Aron, who took to X yesterday to chastise Tenev and Robinhood over the tokenized shares of AMC that commerce on the app. Aron known as the follow “contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable, vile,” mentioned AMC has no connection to it, and questioned the scheme’s legality.

Robinhood took all of it in stride. “What’s the priority?” Tenev casually asked back.