On September 4, Adam Aron, CEO of AMC, the largest movie theater chain in the U.S., publicly demanded on X that Robinhood “voluntarily cease trading AMC stock tokens,” warning that if Robinhood did not comply, the company would engage securities attorneys to explore legal avenues to force a halt. Robinhood’s Chief Legal Officer, Dan Gallagher—formerly a commissioner at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—retorted directly: “We understand U.S. securities law quite well; we won’t ‘cease.’ Bring your lawyers here, and we’ll give them a lesson.” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev endorsed the stance with a single post: “We stand behind Stock Tokens.”
While AMC and Robinhood are still trading barbs, Solana has already replicated this "crypto-stock pairing" strategy.
Who can decide on stock tokens?
Aron’s core allegation is that Robinhood’s stock tokens, issued through an offshore entity in Jersey, are essentially "tokenized debt instruments" with no voting rights, no shareholder rights, and cannot be sold to U.S. users, thereby undermining AMC’s future fundraising capacity. Robinhood maintains that its Stock Tokens are tokenized products offered to qualified non-U.S. users and rely on Chainlink for underlying asset price data. The proper classification of this structure and whether it violates U.S. securities laws remain legally contested.
This is not the first time Robinhood has done this. In 2025, it launched "OpenAI Tokens" and "SpaceX Tokens" in the European market; OpenAI publicly distanced itself, stating these tokens were not equity in the company. U.S. securities law has yet to provide a clear answer on who has the authority to tokenize a company’s stock and to whom it can be sold—yet the tokenized stock sector has already reached a scale of approximately $2.91 billion.
Robinhood's model has been copied.
Just days after this heated debate, StonkFun, a launch platform on Solana, surpassed $1.5 million in daily revenue, ranking among the top earners and outpacing established launch platforms like Pump.fun and derivatives platform Hyperliquid. On September 7, Raydium, Solana’s decentralized exchange, announced an upgrade to its launch infrastructure, LaunchLab: new tokens are no longer restricted to pairing only with SOL—previously requiring a raise of 85 SOL to automatically migrate to Raydium’s liquidity pool—and can now pair with any asset supported by the platform. StonkFun was the first partner to integrate this upgrade; following integration, its native token STONK surged over 250% in a single day, reaching a market cap of approximately $140 million.
STONK is a direct replication of the "stock pairing" narrative—it is paired with SPYx, a tokenized product issued by Backed Finance, and its price gains indirect exposure to the S&P 500 through SPYx; holders have no ownership of the underlying ETF shares, mirroring exactly Robinhood’s model of "tokenized debt instruments." In response to a tweet about StonkFun, Solana’s official X account wrote: "We stand behind Stonk Tokens"—a clear reference to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s exact words from just days earlier, attempting to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the lawsuit to draw attention to its own ecosystem’s similar narrative.
The privacy-themed token ZCAT, which emerged simultaneously, uses the same pairing mechanism but is paired with the privacy coin Zcash (ZEC), allowing holders to continuously receive ZEC dividends. Its market cap once surged above $120 million, with renowned trader Ansem’s comment, "imagine. $ZCAT," driving significant attention.
Hot money is beginning to switch chains.
Behind this narrative replication lies a competition between two blockchains for the same pool of transaction volume. According to analyst Bedell of Deutsche Bank, citing data from DeFiLlama, Robinhood Chain’s daily on-chain revenue hovered below $200,000 in mid-August, then surged to nearly $500,000 on August 29, followed by four consecutive days of doubling: $1 million on August 30, $1.92 million on August 31, $3.38 million on September 1, and $4.01 million on September 2. Over five days, total revenue reached $10.8 million, with approximately $5.4 million attributed to Robinhood’s own fee income—exceeding Deutsche Bank’s original full-quarter revenue forecast for Q3. This surge served as one of the primary reasons Deutsche Bank raised its price target for Robinhood from $115 to $136. However, analysts also noted that there remains insufficient visibility into the sustainability of this revenue growth trend.
According to DeFi researcher Ignas, over the past 24 hours, bridged funds on Solana increased by approximately $18.8 million, while funds on Robinhood Chain decreased by about $47.8 million. This corresponds to a collective surge in a batch of trading infrastructure tokens on Solana—RAY rose approximately 60%, JUP increased about 21%, ORCA climbed around 12%, and MET rose roughly 13%. Ignas believes that, relative to the overall fund sizes on both chains, this movement is still modest; however, some traders may be taking profits from Robinhood ecosystem meme coins and shifting to Solana to bet on a similar dynamic playing out again. This assessment is currently his personal observation based on on-chain data and has not yet been cross-validated by broader datasets.
Asset tokenization is just the beginning.
The "coin-stock pairing" spawned by the Robinhood Chain ecosystem has introduced a new trading paradigm to the meme market: instead of purchasing just an independent meme token, investors now hold on-chain assets whose prices are linked to assets that already have market values—even though this linkage does not grant holders ownership of the underlying asset. StonkFun and ZCAT emerged almost simultaneously, both representing novel experiments enabled by the same infrastructure upgrade—Raydium had just lifted pairing restrictions, creating a broader experimental space for this new type of combination.
Moreover, more值得关注的是，随着 stocks, ETFs, and other real-world assets increasingly move on-chain, how they will ultimately be recombined and transform the trading and liquidity structure of on-chain markets.
The content in this article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. The market carries risks; investments should be made with caution.