Author: Nancy, PANews
Last night, Hunter Biden’s meme coin, LAPTOP, experienced wild volatility, plunging over 99% after opening—a crash that was hardly surprising. More noteworthy is that the on-chain frenzy driven by Robinhood Chain appears to be cooling down sooner than the market anticipated.
Popular meme coins experience a collective pullback; Robinhood Chain temporarily stalls
Recently, highly popular meme tokens on trending blockchains have generally experienced a pullback, and market sentiment has begun to cool down from its previous frenzy.
According to GMGN data, over the past 24 hours on Robinhood Chain, Pons fell by 12%, AI dropped over 14%, CASHCAT declined by approximately 5%, MEME fell nearly 22%, microduck dropped 48%, ORBIO decreased by 21%, and PAIR plunged over 34%. On BNB Chain, MarsCoin fell 11.7% during the same period, NiuLai dropped over 25%, and 4Stock declined nearly 27%. On Solana, USELESS fell over 19%, and ZCAT dropped approximately 15%.
As the primary catalyst for this on-chain surge, Robinhood Chain has seen a particularly noticeable cooldown. According to Dune data, as of September 9, the daily trading volume on Robinhood Chain’s DEX dropped to $1.9 billion, a decline of over 48.6% from its historical peak of $3.7 billion on September 4; although the daily number of meme coin launches continues to rise, daily trading volume has steadily fallen to $360 million, down over 56.9% from its peak of $850 million; on-chain RWA trading volume has also declined to $330 million, a 59.5% drop from its peak.
As on-chain activity cools, revenue has also declined significantly. According to DeFiLlama, since Robinhood Chain’s daily on-chain revenue hit a record high on September 4, it has steadily dropped to $1.42 million, a nearly 74% decline from its peak of $5.44 million. During the same period, daily application revenue fell from $5.6 million to $2.69 million, a 51.9% decrease.
Renowned DeFi researcher Ignas points out that the current coin-stake Meme narrative relies on trading volume and fees rather than fundamentals. Once volume declines, dividends, buybacks, and token burns will decrease accordingly, reducing traders’ incentive to hold, which typically leads to increased selling pressure. Projecting annual returns based on current fee levels essentially assumes that market momentum will never cool down—an unrealistic assumption.
However, looking at the TVL changes, Robinhood Chain’s TVL has only declined by 0.7% from its peak, indicating that capital has not yet significantly withdrawn; the drop in trading activity has not yet turned into large-scale fund outflows.
Compliance risks and homogenized competition are putting the stock meme narrative to the test.
In fact, this on-chain cooldown was not unexpected.
On one hand, declining external risk appetite has led to broad weakness in the crypto market, intensifying cautious sentiment among on-chain funds. On the other hand, following substantial prior gains, some capital has begun to take profits, while the listing of the Meme coin LAPTOP has further exacerbated capital drainage and risk-aversion effects.
More importantly, the stock meme narrative itself is beginning to face challenges.
On the Robinhood Chain, the meme coin BONER, originally centered around the short-squeeze narrative, once pushed market sentiment to a peak. Large amounts of capital flooded into stock token pairing pools, creating a clear wealth-generation effect in the short term and driving simultaneous increases in on-chain trading volume and stock token turnover. However, as meme coins like JINQIAN were exposed as shell schemes designed for harvesting, the FOMO sentiment in the market quickly cooled, and the Wall Street short-squeeze narrative began to face scrutiny.
Moreover, tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain face legal and compliance risks stemming from public condemnations by publicly traded companies. The heavily traded crypto meme coin MEME, linked to the publicly traded company AMC, prompted AMC’s CEO, Adam Aron, to publicly state that AMC had no involvement, authorization, or endorsement of such token products tied to AMC stock, and he questioned their legality. He added that the company would engage external securities counsel to review the matter and may file an inquiry with the SEC. Aron also strongly criticized Robinhood for promoting offshore Stock Tokens on its U.S. website, arguing that Robinhood is effectively circumventing the spirit of securities laws and creating unauthorized synthetic markets.
In response, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev strongly stated that after the company’s IPO, its shares will become transferable assets, and other financial institutions should be able to create financial products referencing those shares without requiring the issuer’s permission. While public companies have the right to control the rights and obligations associated with their own issued shares, they cannot control other companies issuing securities referenced to their stock. Robinhood tokenized shares are issued by an independent entity and are backed by the underlying shares; therefore, automatic approval from the public company is not required.
However, this standoff has not fully alleviated market concerns. Most tokenized stock products are essentially on-chain representations of stock prices and do not correspond to legally valid ownership records. Previously, related Pre-IPO products tied to Anthropic and OpenAI saw their tokens plummet after official announcements declared unauthorized SPVs and tokenized equity transfers invalid, further intensifying market worries about the legal status and actual rights associated with such products.
On the other hand, launchpads on BNB Chain, Solana, and Base have also rolled out stock token features. For example, the leading launchpad Pump.fun recently introduced customizable trading pairs, allowing tokens to be paired with tokenized U.S. stocks, major crypto assets, metals, and other assets.
As more blockchains and platforms join, attention that was once concentrated on a few leading projects on Robinhood Chain has begun to spread across multiple chains and a large number of new launches. The vast majority of projects have extremely short lifespans, and even the leading projects are continually losing traction to new arrivals, diluting both capital and attention. The high failure rate of new launches further dampens market participation.
Additionally, soaring transaction costs on Robinhood Chain, combined with limited profit potential, have dampened overall trading activity. Dune data shows that over the past 30 days, 37.6% of traders on Robinhood Chain realized profits, while 62.4% incurred losses. On Fomo, more than half of the addresses incurred losses, with profit-making addresses accounting for approximately 45.4%; however, most of these profitable addresses earned less than $100, and very few achieved substantial profits.
However, some stock Meme launch platforms are also beginning to explore new growth pathways. For instance, Nate, founder of Long.xyz on Robinhood Chain, posted that over the coming days, the focus will be on building a distribution channel independent of public blockchains, crypto markets, and Meta cycles. He believes the current market still underestimates the potential of stock markets in terms of narrative, distribution channels, and capital scale. Leading trading pairs on Long.xyz have already begun developing their own independent narratives and distribution channels. Once no longer reliant solely on Crypto Twitter (CT), scale could increase by 1,000 times and become more PVE.
The current cooling of Robinhood Chain doesn't necessarily mean the end of the stock meme narrative, but whether it can re-attract liquidity and trading enthusiasm remains to be seen.