AMC Meme Coin Surges 1,000x in 5 Hours on Robinhood Chain

At the close of U.S. equities trading on Thursday, AMC Entertainment closed at $2.54. The largest movie theater chain in the U.S. has a market capitalization of $2.27 billion, with 893 million shares outstanding, and no news was released on Thursday.

Half an hour after market close, a new trading pair appeared on Robinhood: AMC/MEME. The new coin’s full name is "A Meme Coin," with the abbreviation恰好 being AMC: MEME.

Then things started to get out of control.

Over a five-hour period, the MEME token surged more than a thousandfold, with its market cap rising from approximately $3 million to surpass $30 million, then $50 million, and approaching $150 million. During the same time, AMC’s own price also moved, jumping over 14% in after-hours trading and later expanding to 18%–20% in pre-market trading.

The CEO of AMC and the founder of Robinhood stayed up late at night arguing with each other on X.

To understand what happened, you need to look back at the history of AMC and Robinhood.

In 2021, a textbook-worthy short squeeze occurred between AMC and Robinhood.

On January 28 of that year, Robinhood restricted buys on a group of skyrocketing stocks, allowing only sells. The list included GameStop and AMC; retail investors watched prices plummet on the app and called the move a betrayal. Yet they couldn’t leave it: Robinhood was the most convenient entry point for retail investors at the time, and most of AMC’s bulls placed their orders there. In June of that year, AMC’s stock price surged above $72, becoming one of the most talked-about stocks in the U.S. Aron skillfully embraced this enthusiasm: he offered free popcorn to shareholders who signed up for Investor Connect, bonded with bulls on social media, and orchestrated successive share issuances at elevated prices—using retail investors’ money to repay debt and keep the company afloat, pulling it back from the brink of bankruptcy.

At that time, Aron was one of the most beloved CEOs among retail investors.

Five years later, the same company and the same CEO turned their focus to the same brokerage’s new offering: on-chain tokenized stocks. AMC’s name hasn’t changed, Robinhood’s name hasn’t changed—what has changed is the battlefield of the short squeeze, moved from New York’s order book to a 24/7 on-chain liquidity pool. And once again, what ignited the market was the same proven formula from 2021: attention, leverage, and the short squeeze narrative.

Robinhood Chain is a Layer 2 network launching in July 2026, marketed with the feature of "tokenized U.S. stocks": it creates digital copies of New York-listed stocks on-chain, enabling 24/7 trading accessible to non-U.S. users. These tokenized assets track the underlying stock prices and claim to be backed by the corresponding physical shares held in custody, but they do not grant voting rights or entitle holders to the actual stocks in their New York brokerage accounts.

The way meme coins are played has changed shape. Previously, creators would launch a meme and add ETH or USDT to the liquidity pool; now, they can add NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, or even a movie stock like AMC. The frontend path is well hidden: you see yourself spending stablecoins, but in the backend, your funds have already been converted twice—first into stock tokens, then into the meme pool. Even the project’s fee cut is settled in stock tokens.

Thus, the dollar price of the meme is reduced to a single formula:

How many stock tokens you can get for 1 Meme, multiplied by the dollar price of the stock token.

Double down. Bet that the meme will outperform the stock, while simultaneously putting your entire net worth on the stock’s price movement. If the stock rises, the meme’s dollar value is lifted; if the stock falls, even if the meme outperforms, your dollar gains will still shrink. AMC happens to be the asset with built-in narrative and memory: in 2021, it was shorted by hedge funds, rescued by retail investors, and shut down by Robinhood. Behind those five letters stand the emotions of an entire generation of retail traders.

This strategy has already been played on the Robinhood chain for a month.

For example, BONER, launched on August 20, directly paired with a tokenized shadow of Hims & Hers—a company selling men’s health products. BONER’s narrative was so straightforward it needed no translation: “hard currency,” a short squeeze against HIMS. It coincided with a weekend: the New York market was closed, and the issuer could barely mint new tokens, draining liquidity from the pool. On-chain HIMS surged from Friday’s closing price of $28.84 to $132.64—an increase of over fourfold. On Monday, the issuer minted 4,000 new tokens to bring the shadow back to earth, yet BONER continued to rise, driven purely by sentiment.

Next up is FATCOIN, which listed Eli Lilly's tokenized stock (LLY), sparking jokes about the "get fatter while losing weight" weight-loss drug trend—and surged 175 times in ten hours.

Executives from other companies didn't say anything, but AMC's CEO couldn't sit still.

What made the CEO furious was that on-chain activity had spilled over to his own stock's quote—a pool he couldn't control was trading under his company's name and price.

His first statement was blunt: Robinhood claimed to offer tokenized shares of over 190 companies, including AMC; this project has no connection to AMC, is unauthorized, and is not registered under U.S. securities laws—escalating in tone to call it "shameful, absurd, revolting, and unforgivable," and stating that the board would immediately retain external securities counsel.

Tenev replied, "What's it to me?"—and the market immediately entered its second leg.

Aron immediately fired back a second shot: he accused Robinhood of issuing products representing AMC shares through an offshore entity in Jersey, operating outside the scope of U.S. securities laws—a concern that is “nearly existential” for the company; AMC spends millions of dollars annually on securities compliance, while Robinhood’s “synthetic stock market” severs the link between trading and corporate financing and ownership. Traditional shareholders have voting rights, but token holders have none. He demanded that Robinhood voluntarily halt trading of AMC stock tokens, or else legal action will be taken to force a shutdown and an inquiry will be filed with the SEC.

By this point, the matter had spread from the pool to Washington.

The argument itself became part of the market movement. Each new round of backlash raised the discussion level; the higher the discussion, the stronger the buying pressure in the pool; the stronger the buying pressure, the higher the meme rose—and the higher the meme rose, the more restless the CEO became. It’s a closed loop, fueled by attention itself. What memes fear most is being ignored.

Set aside your emotions; what truly matters is the scale.

The total supply of tokenized AMC is approximately 1.33 million. This represents 0.15% of the 893 million outstanding shares. Around 746,000 tokens are locked in various pools, with the single MEME/AMC main pool holding 557,000 tokens—nearly half of the total supply. Approximately 700,000 tokens remain in wallets and stablecoin pools for price discovery.

Data on the underlying stock side is also available: short interest stands at 42.4 million shares, accounting for 4.78% of the float; average daily trading volume is approximately 40.25 million shares, equivalent to about $100 million to $120 million.

0.15% of the equity, even if fully bought, is still a fraction of the underlying stock's daily trading volume. To trigger a true short squeeze, a massive buy order in the underlying stock would be needed to move those 42.4 million shares short. AMC rose to $72 in 2021 because retail investors were buying actual shares listed on Wall Street, with volumes in the hundreds of millions of shares. Today’s on-chain pools are still orders of magnitude away from that scale.

Someone has already started accounting for AMC.

The algorithm works like this: When the MEME market cap reaches $150 million, one MEME is worth approximately $0.15. In the MEME/AMC liquidity pool, it takes over 30 MEME to exchange for one tokenized AMC. This implies that the tokenized AMC is valued at around $6, while the underlying stock is currently trading at $3. According to this math, the underlying AMC stock price would need to double to match the frenzy on-chain.

However, the exchange rate is not fixed—it’s determined in real time by the supply and demand within the pool. The more people buying MEME, the fewer AMC tokens you’ll receive. Additionally, the token supply is not fixed; the issuer can mint additional tokens at any time, as demonstrated by the 4,000 new BONER tokens issued on Monday.

But as one of the few innovative approaches in the crypto space this year, we deeply hope to hold the pricing power—to tokenize and successfully price a decades-old film industry asset. How incredible that would be.