On September 4, AMC CEO Adam Aron publicly demanded on X that Robinhood “voluntarily halt trading in AMC stock tokens,” saying that if Robinhood refused, the company would ask securities lawyers whether it could force a halt through legal action. Robinhood Chief Legal Officer Dan Gallagher—a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission commissioner—responded directly: “We know a little something about U.S. securities law. We will not be ‘halting.’ Bring your lawyers; we’ll educate them.” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev reposted the exchange in support, writing only: “We stand behind Stock Tokens.”
While AMC and Robinhood were still trading barbs from afar, Solana had already replicated this “coin-stock pairing” model.
Who Gets to Decide on Stock Tokens
Aron’s central accusation is that Robinhood’s stock tokens are issued through an offshore Jersey entity and are essentially “tokenized debt instruments”: they carry no voting rights or shareholder rights, cannot be sold to U.S. users, and could impair AMC’s future ability to raise capital. Robinhood, meanwhile, maintains that its Stock Tokens are tokenized products for qualified non-U.S. users, with Chainlink providing underlying-asset price data. How that structure should be classified, and whether it implicates U.S. securities law, remains legally disputed.
This is not the first time Robinhood has done this. In 2025, it introduced “OpenAI tokens” and “SpaceX tokens” in the European market; OpenAI publicly distanced itself at the time, stating that the tokens were not its equity. U.S. securities law still offers no clear answer to who has the right to put a company’s stock on-chain or decide who can buy it—yet the tokenized-stock sector has now reached a scale of roughly $2.91 billion.
Robinhood’s Playbook Is Copied
Just days after the public dispute, Solana launch platform StonkFun exceeded $1.5 million in daily revenue, climbing near the top of the revenue rankings and surpassing the established launch platform Pump.fun and derivatives platform Hyperliquid. On September 7, Solana decentralized exchange Raydium announced an upgrade to its LaunchLab launch infrastructure. New tokens are no longer limited to pairing with SOL—previously, they had to raise 85 SOL before automatically migrating into Raydium’s market-making pool—and can now pair with any asset supported by the platform. StonkFun was the first partner to integrate the upgrade; after the integration, its native STONK token rose more than 250% in a day, and its market capitalization reached roughly $140 million.
STONK itself is a direct reproduction of the “stock-pairing” narrative. It is paired with SPYx, a tokenized S&P 500 product issued by Backed Finance. Its price indirectly gains exposure to the S&P 500 through SPYx, while holders have no ownership rights in the underlying ETF shares—the same logic as Robinhood’s “tokenized debt instruments.” Solana’s official X account replied to a StonkFun-related post: “We stand behind Stonk Tokens.” The response clearly borrowed Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s words from a few days earlier, seeking to use the attention around the legal dispute to draw interest to the similar narrative in its own ecosystem.
The privacy-themed cat coin ZCAT, which emerged at the same time, uses the same pairing capability but is paired with privacy coin Zcash (ZEC); holders can continually receive ZEC distributions. Its market capitalization briefly exceeded $120 million, with one “imagine. $ZCAT.” post by prominent trader Ansem helping drive attention.
Hot Money Starts Switching Chains
Behind this narrative replication, two chains are competing for the same pool of trading volume. Citing DeFiLlama data, Deutsche Bank analyst Bedell noted that Robinhood Chain’s daily on-chain revenue had remained below $200,000 through mid-August, then jumped to nearly $500,000 on August 29 and doubled for four consecutive days thereafter: $1 million on August 30, $1.92 million on August 31, $3.38 million on September 1, and $4.01 million on September 2—for $10.8 million over five days. About $5.4 million of that counted as Robinhood’s own fee revenue, already exceeding Deutsche Bank’s prior estimate for its total third-quarter revenue. That was one of the main reasons Deutsche Bank raised its Robinhood price target from $115 to $136. The analyst also noted, however, that there is still insufficient visibility into the durability of this revenue momentum.
According to DeFi researcher Ignas, bridged capital into Solana rose by about $18.8 million in the past 24 hours, while Robinhood Chain saw roughly $47.8 million leave. At the same time, several Solana trading-infrastructure tokens rallied: RAY gained about 60%, JUP 21%, ORCA 12%, and MET 13%. Ignas believes the migration is still small relative to the total capital on the two chains, but some traders may be taking profit on Robinhood-ecosystem memes and moving to Solana to bet that the same logic will play out again. For now, that remains his personal observation based on on-chain data and has not been corroborated by broader data.
Putting Assets On-Chain Is Only the Beginning
The “coin-stock pairing” born in the Robinhood Chain ecosystem has introduced a new way to trade memes: buyers are no longer purchasing only an independently operating meme, but an on-chain asset that forms a price connection with an asset that already has a market price—even if that connection grants no ownership of the underlying asset. StonkFun and ZCAT emerged almost simultaneously and are essentially new experiments enabled by the same infrastructure upgrade: Raydium’s newly loosened pairing restrictions happen to provide a larger space for this type of combination.
More importantly, as stocks, ETFs, and other real-world assets increasingly move on-chain, the question is how they will ultimately be recombined—and how that will reshape the trading and liquidity structure of on-chain markets.
This content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution.