According to official disclosures from the token launch platform LONG, 23% of the tokenized NVDA shares on Robinhood Chain have been locked into the community treasury of the meme coin AI (Artificial Inu). This was achieved through a previously unseen pricing mechanism: AI is directly paired with the tokenized NVIDIA shares, NVDA, and every transaction involving the purchase or sale of AI is first converted into NVDA before being added to the liquidity pool. In the past, meme coins were typically paired with ETH, SOL, or stablecoins—this 23% has gradually accumulated through this novel approach.
This mechanism, known as "token-stock pairing," does not alter the underlying asset backing the tokenized stocks, but rather changes the portion of tokens circulating in the market. The price correction of tokenized stocks fundamentally relies on the combined functioning of real asset backing, the issuance and redemption mechanism, and secondary market liquidity. The issue arises when a large volume of NVDA is drawn into Meme liquidity pools, reducing the amount of tokens actually available for trading, arbitrage, and repricing in the market.
This mechanism has been one of the key drivers behind the recent surge in Robinhood Chain transaction fees: over the past 24 hours, on-chain fees reached $3.75 million, exceeding the combined fees of Solana, Ethereum, and Base during the same period, with total accumulated fees rising to $18.6 million—a record high. This includes contributions from pure meme issuance platforms like Pons, which alone generated over $5 million in fees in a single day, as well as platforms like LONG and bankr that integrate stock tokens into their pricing mechanisms—though not the sole source of fees, these platforms introduced the new variables that fueled this surge.
Stocks have become chips.
When Robinhood Chain launched, its main highlights were tokenized stocks, 24/7 trading, and crypto-native AI. However, the real drivers of traffic and fees came from certain Launchpad projects—such as bankr and LONG—that introduced novel token-stock pairing mechanisms: when launching new memecoins, the liquidity pools no longer used ETH or stablecoins, but instead directly utilized tokenized U.S. stocks on-chain. Over 90 tokenized U.S. stocks—including NVIDIA (NVDA), Tesla (TSLA), Apple (AAPL), and SpaceX (SPCX)—were used as liquidity pools, leading to the creation of previously unseen trading pairs on the decentralized exchange Uniswap, such as AI/NVDA and BONER/HIMS.
This was not an officially planned product by Robinhood. In a later interview, CEO Vlad Tenev admitted that developers had created a liquidity pool the company had never designed, combining memes, crypto assets, and stock tokens—products “we never anticipated ever doing.” Funds used to purchase these memes are paid upfront in ETH, then converted into stock tokens at the backend before entering the meme pool—each speculative trade thus generates real trading volume for the stock tokens. On August 31 alone, trading volume for meme pairs tied to stock tokens reached $93.1 million; on the same day, stock token trading volume surged by approximately $40 million in tandem, with the two trends mutually reinforcing each other. Trading volume for stock tokens generated through meme-stock pairings now accounts for about one-third of Robinhood Chain’s total RWA (real-world asset) trading volume, second only to direct stock token trading.
Who makes steady profits during the hype?
In this round of hype, the parties collecting fees are the ones truly profiting, not the bettors.
Launchpad takes issuance fees and transaction royalties; Robinhood Chain, as the underlying network, collects network transaction fees through gas fees; according to a cooperative agreement that returns 10% of net protocol revenue, a portion of these fees flows to the Arbitrum ecosystem—according to Arbitrum Foundation’s semi-annual report released on September 2, the overall gross margin of Arbitrum DAO’s protocol revenue for the first half of 2026 exceeded 97%; since the mainnet launch on Robinhood Chain in July, authorization fees alone contributed 35% of Arbitrum DAO’s monthly revenue. On a corporate level, this unexpected validation confirms the path Robinhood has been building for years: from launching cryptocurrency trading in 2018, to opening tokenized U.S. stocks to international users in 2025, and now launching its own Robinhood Chain mainnet this year—the company has never been testing whether “crypto-stock pairing” can go viral, but whether “building its own chain” can generate revenue through transaction fees. This at least proves one thing: Robinhood is transforming a business that previously served merely as a trading gateway into an infrastructure capable of directly generating on-chain transaction fees.
Blockchain data platform Token Terminal shows that, as of September 1, the average transaction fee on Robinhood Chain has risen to $0.33—more than 64 times higher than at the beginning of August and over a hundred times higher than Base during the same period. Users have begun jokingly referring to it as the "noble chain." While the official wallet still provides fee subsidies for eligible swaps, these subsidies will end on September 29. Data from the on-chain analytics platform Dune reveals that, over the past 30 days, traders on Robinhood Chain who executed at least one trade had a profit-to-loss ratio of 4:6. The situation is even more dire on FOMO App, one of the primary trading interfaces: among approximately 477,000 trading addresses over the past 90 days, over 94.27% are in loss, and only about 0.14% have profited more than $1,000. As transaction costs rise, the barrier to entry for ordinary participants grows steeper—while Robinhood Chain’s own fee revenue continues to swell. Regardless of which specific meme coin ultimately profits or loses, as long as trading continues, network fees are consistently captured by the chain and its associated protocols.
The entry barrier has also been removed. Robinhood’s self-custody wallet, Robinhood Wallet, and trading app Fomo allow users to purchase these meme coins directly using credit cards via Apple Pay or Google Pay without identity verification. These transactions are classified under MCC 5815—originally designated for e-books and digital movies within the Visa and Mastercard systems—rather than the typical category for crypto transactions. This further reduces payment friction for buying meme coins, lowering the barrier for funds to enter the meme pool.
Float thinning
The rules of the arbitrage mechanism itself have not changed; what has changed passively is the prerequisite on which it operates: the circulating supply.
Robinhood's officially issued stock tokens are issued and backed by underlying actual shares held by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited, and are only available for subscription and redemption by authorized participants. When the on-chain token price deviates from the actual stock price, arbitrageurs can theoretically bring the price back in line through subscription and redemption. This mechanism functions effectively only if there is sufficient circulating supply in the market to allow arbitrageurs to buy and sell at any time.
What stock token pairs do is precisely subtract from this premise. By turning stock tokens into meme quote assets and liquidity base pools, a large amount of floating supply is no longer readily accessible to arbitrageurs but is instead locked into Uniswap pools, retrievable only by selling the corresponding meme. The fact that 23% of NVDA is locked in the treasury of a single AI-themed meme project is the most direct result of this subtraction—this meme achieved nearly a 10x gain in one week, with its market cap briefly reaching $100 million, and the locked ratio continues to rise with trading volume. Therefore, as more stock tokens are locked into meme liquidity pools, price corrections between the market price and the reference asset price will rely more heavily on remaining liquidity and new supply, making short-term deviations more likely.
A fake sample verified the same vulnerability.
This risk played out in real time on Robinhood Chain on the evening of September 2, with an undignified ending.
A few days ago, the meme coin BONER sparked a surge in market sentiment through a "short squeeze" narrative, prompting capital to seek the next target capable of replicating this strategy. Crypto KOL Rune then hinted that he planned to purchase approximately 37.4% of a Nasdaq micro-cap stock—whose short interest stood at a staggering 92.3%—for around $1.8 million over-the-counter, with intentions to tokenize it and pair it with a meme coin to execute a short squeeze. The community quickly identified the target: Farmmi, a Chinese company specializing in agricultural products such as shiitake mushrooms and wood ear fungus. On the evening of September 2, the tokens FAMI and its paired meme coin JINQIAN were launched, collectively reaching nearly $240 million in trading volume within minutes. JINQIAN’s implied market cap surged to $73 million, while FAMI peaked above $53 million. At the same time, Farmmi’s actual stock price spiked intraday by 350%, and FAMI’s on-chain peak market cap briefly reached roughly ten times Farmmi’s real market value.
A reversal quickly emerged. The community uncovered that FAMI’s total supply of 37.43 million tokens was minted in a single deployment transaction through two minting operations, with the deploying wallet retaining 38% for itself and deploying a contract named PoolRepricer to manage pricing—there was no clear issuer, no share redemption mechanism, and no connection whatsoever to the actual Farmmi stock. Rune later clarified that his previous post claiming “$1.8 million spent to acquire equity” was AI-generated, with fabricated and exaggerated figures, and that this on-chain FAMI token was not issued by him. Once the truth came to light, both FAMI and JINQIAN plummeted, with their market caps shrinking to approximately $4.9 million and $2.7 million, respectively.
FAMI and NVDA are two entirely different cases: NVDA has real underlying holdings; the coin-stock pairing merely weakens its arbitrage correction capability. FAMI, from start to finish, is nothing but a liquidity trap disguised as a "shadow stock," with no real underlying holdings at all. Yet both cases reveal the same underlying risk: when a company’s float is sufficiently thin and the on-chain narrative is strong enough, speculative activity on-chain can rapidly spill over into the real stock market, creating price correlation. Whether this correlation represents a genuine distortion or merely emotional resonance requires further evidence.
Launchpad becomes an asset distribution layer
This is not the first time Robinhood Chain has sparked controversy over its "wealth creation effect." In 2021, Robinhood faced congressional hearings and dozens of class-action lawsuits after restricting users from buying stocks like GameStop that were wildly popular among retail investors; CEO Vlad Tenev publicly apologized. The core issue then was platform power—who has the right to hit pause on users during a frenzy. This time, the central debate has shifted to asset authenticity: when anyone can unilaterally create a meme coin using a stock ticker, it remains unanswered whether the arbitrage mechanism can withstand the pressure of massive token locking.
For Robinhood Chain, the true significance of stock-token pairs isn't that another popular meme has emerged, but that a launchpad has, for the first time, transformed from a homogenous token emission platform into a distribution layer connecting speculative traffic with real financial assets. This will force other blockchains and platforms to reconsider a key question: if stocks can serve as paired assets for memes, could other TradFi assets like gold also be tokenized? Farmmi has already provided a troubling example— even a fake token with no real underlying holdings was able to distort actual stock prices through narrative. What might happen when switching to asset classes with lower liquidity and looser regulation? No one yet knows.
The content in this article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. The market carries risks; invest with caution.