Robinhood listed a cat meme coin on Thursday that is named after the company’s own rejected name. The token more than doubled within hours, then handed back most of the gain.
Cash Cat (CASHCAT) ran from $0.0853 to $0.2143 in the 15 hours around the listing. That is a 151% move, according to onchain trade data. The token now sits near $0.1185.
A Rally Built on a Name Robinhood Threw Away
CASHCAT is a joke about Robinhood itself. The project’s site says the broker was almost called Cash Cat. It points to a 2021 post by Chief Executive Vlad Tenev.
The token has no link to the company. Its own website is blunt about that.
“No. We just think Cash Cat is a really good name they shouldn’t have abandoned. This is fan fiction with a ticker,” reads an excerpt in CASHCAT website FAQ.
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That did not stop the listing. Robinhood made the asset tradable in its app and on Legend, its desktop platform for active traders.
One Hour Did Most of the Work
The buying arrived in a burst. CASHCAT opened the midday UTC hour at $0.1288 and touched $0.2143, a 66% jump inside 60 minutes. That single hour saw $17.2 million in trades, more than any other hour of the day, GeckoTerminal data shows.
The peak landed within 6% of the record high of $0.2288 set on July 11. Then the move unwound. CASHCAT now trades 42% below Thursday’s top.
The reason is size. The main trading pool holds about $5.3 million. Roughly $92.6 million changed hands in a day. When daily trading runs 17 times deeper than the pool itself, large sells move the price hard.
Buyers still outnumbered sellers over the day, at 31,267 buys against 19,088 sells. The meme coin’s current price puts its market value near $116.8 million, ranking it 232nd overall. Chain records show 48,710 wallets hold it.
Meme Coins, Not Stocks, Still Rule Robinhood Chain
Robinhood launched its own blockchain on July 1. The company built it on Arbitrum and pitched it as “purpose-built for real-world assets” such as shares and exchange-traded funds.
Traders chose cats instead. Meme trading took over the network in its first week, and tokenized stocks trailed meme coins by value through July. Daily trading volume climbed to a record during the frenzy.
Thursday showed the pattern again. Exchange volume across the chain reached $517.8 million, up 60% in a day. Total deposits sat at $433 million, DefiLlama data shows. One cat coin moved the whole network.
CASHCAT is up about 1,193% over 30 days and briefly crossed a $200 million valuation in July. Analytics firm Artemis has warned that this kind of speculation could complicate Robinhood’s tokenization plans.
Bubblemaps Flags Wallets That Bought Early
Onchain analytics firm Bubblemaps looked at who was buying before the news broke. It found newly created wallets that loaded up on CASHCAT.
Bubblemaps did not name the wallet owners or allege wrongdoing. Robinhood has not commented on the addresses.
The next test is simple. CASHCAT needs the new retail buyers to stay once the listing stops trending.