Understanding the Big Trends and Opportunities on Robinhood

Author: Dayu, crypto KOL

I woke up in the middle of the night for no apparent reason and groggily scrolled through my feed, noticing that BONER was pumping hard. A bunch of overseas influencers were hyping it, comparing it to GME and FARTCOIN, with the most eye-catching term being: short squeeze.

At the time, I just thought the story was interesting.

After waking up properly in the morning and thinking it over again, I realized I had been asking the wrong question—nobody knows how much higher BONER can go. What's worth examining is the new structure emerging behind it: stocks, memes, and on-chain liquidity are truly coming together for the first time.

1. Why Robinhood Chain

Robinhood's DNA has always been stocks + retail + trading; it's not exactly a crypto-native company. This background determines its direction: if Coinbase, Solana, or another public chain were to tokenize stocks, that would be the crypto world trying to bring traditional finance on-chain. Robinhood doing this is the opposite—a brokerage with a massive stock user base is proactively moving traditional finance on-chain.

Robinhood already has about 28.5 million funded customers and roughly $355 billion in platform assets. It's a company with a huge financial user base, trading scenarios, and brand recognition, and it's building a new on-chain financial infrastructure for itself—I've emphasized many times that this bull market is the bull market of on-chain finance, nothing else!

Robinhood Chain's public chain mainnet officially launched on July 1, 2026. By the end of August, single-day DEX volume had already hit a record $989 million, TVL (total value locked) was about $708 million, and stablecoin supply was about $770 million, up 47% month-over-month—

This chain is only two months old, making it the fastest-growing chain in history. The trend is emerging.

2. Why Stocks Should Go On-Chain

Right now, memes are stealing the show on Robinhood Chain, but the core asset is Stock Token (on-chain stock).

Stocks on Robinhood aren't minted out of thin air. The official Stock Tokens are essentially tokenized debt certificates issued by Robinhood. Robinhood officially states that Stock Tokens are backed 1:1 by the corresponding underlying stocks, which are held by custodians.

But once stocks go on-chain, things start to change. Previously, one share of NVDA was just one share of NVDA; on-chain, one NVDA Token can be split into countless "fractionalized" trades, provide liquidity, serve as collateral, enter lending protocols, interact with other smart contracts, pair with memes, and spawn new leveraged products.

Stocks transform from an asset you can only buy and sell into a programmable asset.

3. Stocks On-Chain: Who Provides Liquidity? Who Trades?

Robinhood can put $1 billion worth of NVDA, HIMS, and SPCX on-chain, but "having assets" and "having a market" are two completely different things. Suppose a thousand stocks suddenly appear on-chain: why would users come? Who provides the initial liquidity? Who creates attention and community? Why would an average crypto user suddenly start trading HIMS?

Note that liquidity here isn't the same as in traditional finance. On-chain liquidity also refers to liquidity pools. On-chain stock trading differs from traditional market makers' order books; as long as there's a pool on-chain, it operates 24/7 without anyone manning it. But who builds the various pools? Who gives those pool builders "benefits"?

Most importantly, will anyone come to trade?

That's where memes come in.

Memes might be the natural tool for cold-starting on-chain stocks: stocks provide what memes lack most—real-world value anchors and narratives; memes provide what stocks lack most—attention, community, virality, and speculative liquidity.

The two complement each other perfectly—memes on Robinhood are becoming something different from before.

4. BONER: From Short Squeeze Narrative to Capital Consensus

Yesterday's BONER story is a case study.

It's paired with the on-chain HIMS Stock Token. The word BONER is common in English slang, meaning an erection, similar to how Chinese stock traders say "a rocket." And HIMS happens to be a company that treats erectile dysfunction, so the connection is cleverly made.

Driven by some overseas influencers, it skyrocketed to $70 million in a single day. In the process, a meme community that originally had nothing to do with HIMS suddenly formed an economic link with a real-world stock:

1. The more the meme rises, the more people buy, the more stock is needed

The more people buy BONER, the more HIMS Tokens enter the liquidity pool;

2. The meme starts to "short squeeze" the stock

If the entire ecosystem generates more demand for HIMS Tokens, stimulating new HIMS Tokens to be issued on-chain—for example, when the US stock market is closed and on-chain stock is insufficient, BONER rises, and the stock gets pushed to over 130, only to be pulled back to the market price of over 20 when the market opens.

Of course, the so-called HIMS "short squeeze" is still very early in terms of real-world scale—even BONER's own community website states that the current liquidity pool size is insufficient to cause a short squeeze on HIMS's actual stock; whether Stock Tokens are newly issued due to BONER trading cannot be simply equated. So the current "short squeeze" is more of a meme narrative. I don't think BONER or any other meme has the ability to squeeze Wall Street.

Its significance lies in being the first to run through the transmission path described above: previously, if a meme went up 100x, it was just a meme going up 100x; today, if a stock meme gets big enough, it theoretically can start to influence demand for the real-world asset it's paired with. Even if that force is only the size of a grain of sand today, the structure is already different.

According to Robinhood's 1:1 backing mechanism, newly issued Stock Tokens correspond to demand for the underlying stock assets.

Thus, a path that didn't exist before emerges: meme attention → on-chain trading volume → Stock Token demand → token issuance and liquidity → theoretically linked to the underlying real stock.

Some might ask: if I want to short squeeze or speculate on stocks, why would I play memes instead of directly buying stocks?

That leads to another question: why do people play memes? If you don't understand, you can check my previous articles; I've written quite a bit about meme perspectives.

Back to stock short squeezes, users are simply choosing what to buy, but after some deliberation, I found it hard to act because the short squeeze narrative has some inherent flaws: first, it's not unique. Find a small-cap, high-short-interest stock, pair it with a meme, and you can tell a short squeeze story. Stock A can play this game, and stocks B and C can too. The meme market fears this most: the same narrative copied a hundred times, nobody knows which one to buy, capital gets dispersed, and nothing takes off. BONER's real advantage right now isn't that "only it can short squeeze"; it holds something else: capital consensus. In the past two days, it's been clear that overseas meme leaders can form a united front. A few large accounts discover a relatively natural story early, buy in first, then spread it together, and liquidity and attention quickly concentrate on a single target.

The story itself isn't unique; consensus temporarily makes it unique.

How BONER plays out from here needs to be watched dynamically, but it has already proven one thing: the stock meme play has buyers.

5. LONG: The Organizational Layer of Stock Memes

A few days ago, I decisively gave the call: $PONS in the left hand, $牛來 in the right. For the former, it's the same thinking as today's question of which coin-stock meme to buy: I don't know which meme to buy, so I'll just buy the platform's token.

Is there such a platform on Robinhood Chain? Yes.

LONG is the most important issuance platform on Robinhood Chain, mainly issuing "meme coins paired with stock tokens." Currently, these stock-paired memes account for about a quarter of Robinhood Chain's stock-related trading volume.

But interestingly, LONG isn't just a token issuance platform; it's something with more imagination: the attention distribution layer + liquidity organization layer for stocks on Robinhood Chain.

Robinhood is responsible for bringing stocks on-chain; LONG is solving the next problem—how these stock tokens form communities, liquidity, and new trading demand.

In the short term, the loudest on-chain might be pure meme issuance platforms like PONS, with countless memes, massive fees and buybacks, but the fear is meme cycles cooling off;

In the long run, LONG's model has more room to grow. The play here will be more durable; the empowerment isn't as violent, but stocks, stock derivatives, leveraged products, and RWA are an infinite game. As a platform connecting both ends, the imagination is huge.

Of course, I'm still very bullish on $PONS in the short term. With such high revenue, such aggressive buybacks, and 30% already burned, compared to PUMPFUN, it's still priced at a 10-20% discount—logically, PONS will surpass PUMPFUN because capital, popularity, and the future of on-chain finance are all here. Also worth mentioning: PONS V2 now supports coin-stocks too!

6. Another Platform Token: AI

After sorting through all the above, I noticed AI. Its full name is Artificial Inu, paired with the on-chain NVDA Stock Token, born as "NVIDIA + AI + dog."

LONG hasn't issued a traditional platform token so far, but it's gradually placing AI at the core of its ecosystem.

On August 1, AI's market cap was only about $1.5 million; by August 30, it peaked at $135 million, and the NVDA pool's liquidity once exceeded $3.3 million—as the first-layer consensus of stock memes, it has already accomplished that.

Going forward, its utility starts to layer:

First, pairing asset. LONG later allowed new tokens to pair directly with AI. Think of ETH: countless new coins on Ethereum pair with ETH, and no smart contract mandates using ETH; everyone just knows ETH has the best liquidity, and liquidity attracts liquidity. The more AGI/AI, XXX/AI pairs there are, the more AI's role shifts from a "traded coin" to a "base asset you need to hold to participate in ecosystem liquidity." These two valuation logics are completely different.

Second, liquidity hub. As trading pairs multiply, trading routes may start passing through AI, gradually turning it into the ecosystem's intermediary currency.

Third, locking and burning. The LONG team recently disclosed that through mechanisms like Community Mode, AI trading pairs, and auto-burning, nearly $3 million worth of AI has been locked or removed from circulation; each new AI trading pair further locks or burns AI.

Fourth, capturing new business value. For example, LONG and Lighter are working on LongX: packaging leveraged positions from perpetual contracts into ERC-20 tokens that can be directly held and transferred. Put in 100 USDG, and it establishes roughly 3x leveraged exposure to NVDA at the base layer, then gives you an on-chain "3X NVDA spot-like asset" without having to manage margin, funding rates, or liquidation lines yourself.

Traditional finance has long proven that humans like simple leveraged products: 3x long and 2x long products always have buyers because ordinary users just want to press a button and say, "I want 3x long NVIDIA."

LONG officially states that LongX will continue to expand NVDA-related leveraged assets and channel some value back to AI. If this line works out, AI will be capturing more than just meme trading.

Fifth, ecosystem reserve asset. This is the furthest layer: if more and more LONG products, AI trading pairs, stock memes, and LongX products build liquidity around AI in the future, AI could gradually become the base asset of the entire LONG ecosystem.

I haven't seen LONG officially announce that "AI is the LONG token," but there's a rule in crypto: what you do matters more than what you're called. ETH is valuable not because its name includes "platform token," but because the entire Ethereum world needs it.

LONG's products continue to be built around AI; whether there's official certification doesn't need further explanation.

Intuitively: I'm bullish on the second half of RH's on-chain finance, and the AI coin will be very important.

7. SPACEHOOD: A Story You Get in Five Seconds

SPACEHOOD is a meme paired with SPCX.

Similar to the nearly $100 million BONER mentioned earlier, but with a market cap of just over $10 million. Although that coin performed strongly yesterday due to overseas KOLs banding together, I think from a long-term perspective, if a leader emerges among coin-stock memes, SPACEHOOD has a better chance.

The advantage is simple: any crypto user gets it in five seconds—SpaceX, Musk, meme, Robinhood, stocks on-chain, all in one.

If stock memes really take off, the easiest to spread will definitely be companies that carry huge cultural symbols in the real world, and SpaceX clearly falls into that category.

Mechanically, it's the same: the larger SPACEHOOD gets, the higher the demand for SPCX Tokens, theoretically increasing on-chain SPCX liquidity and demand. This meme is no longer completely floating in the air but starts to form a weak economic connection with a real-world company. Of course, this force is pitifully small right now—after all, SPCX's real-world daily trading volume is not even in the same order of magnitude as a $10 million meme. But if on-chain stocks heat up here, capital will eventually concentrate on the leader.

What if this Musk meme reaches billions or even tens of billions of dollars? By then, its fluctuations would directly affect SpaceX's stock, and Musk, as the person who understands memes best and cares most about SpaceX's stock, would likely be a mysterious guest for us holders.

Oh, and this coin is the first one publicly bought by the founder of the LONG platform!

8. Differences from Binance bStocks

Some might ask: Binance also has bStocks, so what's special about Robinhood? Binance's bStocks are also 1:1 backed, tradeable 24/7, self-custodial, and can enter BNB Chain's DeFi; seven weeks after launch, the officially announced bStocks scale has exceeded $500 million.

Actually, the key difference is no longer "whether stocks are tokenized," but the two companies' starting points:

1. Binance is still more focused on the business of selling stocks

Binance is more like the world's largest crypto trading venue, adding stocks as a new tradeable category. Users can buy directly on Binance's main platform, which is Binance's advantage and strength, growing very fast.

2. Robinhood Chain's ambition is to build an entire on-chain financial system around stocks.

Stocks aren't just for buying and selling; they can serve as AMM (automated market maker) assets, collateral, enter lending, pair with memes, enter perpetual contracts, become leveraged tokens, and eventually enter AI Agent automated trading systems, ultimately becoming a building block of the entire DeFi world.

Robinhood officially positions Chain as a financial public chain for tokenized real-world assets (RWA), and has already laid out Stock Tokens, DEX, lending, Morpho, Lighter perpetuals, and AI Agents all on this line.

Both will grow stock tokens.

But on Robinhood Chain, a crypto-native culture is emerging: stocks + memes + DeFi.

And AI stands right at this intersection.

9. Coin-Stocks Are Just Beginning

As long as you jump in and experience it, you'll discover how hot RH Chain is. Memes bring attention to stocks, stocks bring real-world anchors to memes, DeFi provides liquidity for both, and Robinhood provides users and underlying assets for all of it.

The highlight of financial innovation often isn't how much the first batch of assets ultimately rises, but that a market that didn't exist before is suddenly created. Robinhood Chain right now gives people a brand-new sense of excitement.

Of course, everything is still very early. Early means imagination, but also a higher failure rate—keep observing dynamically.

Previously, I said $PONS in the left hand, $牛來 in the right; that remains unchanged, and I continue to be bullish.

Today, I'll add: $AI in the left hand, $SPACEHOOD in the right.

Standing in the right place, even pigs can fly—hold onto the targets you can understand at a glance to fly the fastest.

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