Understanding in One Article: The Major Trends and Opportunities on Robinhood

Author: Dayu

Last night, I woke up for some unknown reason and, in a daze, scrolled through news and saw that BONER was skyrocketing. A bunch of big influencers overseas were shouting, comparing it to GME and FARTCOIN, and the most eye-catching term was: short squeeze.

At that moment, I just thought this story was interesting.

After waking up in the morning and thinking it over again, I realized I had asked the wrong question—nobody knows how much more BONER can rise; what’s worth pondering is the new structure emerging behind it: stocks, memes, and on-chain liquidity are truly combining for the first time.

1. Why Robinhood Chain

Robinhood's DNA has always been stocks + retail investors + trading; it cannot be considered a crypto-native company. This background determines the direction: if it were Coinbase, Solana, or another public chain doing stock tokens, that would be the crypto world trying to bring traditional finance on-chain; Robinhood doing this is exactly the opposite—it's a brokerage with a huge base of stock users actively moving traditional finance onto the chain.

Robinhood already has about 28.5 million funded customers, with platform assets around $355 billion. It is a company that already has a large financial user base, trading scenarios, and brand recognition, and it is building a new on-chain financial infrastructure for itself—I have repeatedly emphasized that this bull market is a bull market for on-chain finance, not anything else!

The mainnet of Robinhood Chain will officially launch on July 1, 2026. By the end of August, the daily DEX trading volume had already set a record of $989 million, with a TVL (Total Value Locked) of about $708 million, stablecoin supply around $770 million, and a month-on-month growth of 47%—

This chain has only been around for two months today, making it the fastest-growing chain in history, with trends emerging.

2. Why should stocks go on-chain

Currently, the most prominent asset on Robinhood Chain is memes, but the core asset is Stock Tokens, which are on-chain stocks.

The stocks on Robinhood are not printed out of thin air; the official Stock Tokens are essentially tokenized debt certificates issued by Robinhood. Robinhood officially states that Stock Tokens are backed 1:1 by the corresponding underlying stocks, which are held by custodians.

However, once stocks go on-chain, things start to change. Previously, one share of NVDA was just one share of NVDA; after going on-chain, one NVDA Token can be divided into countless "fragmented" trades, provide liquidity, serve as collateral, enter lending protocols, engage with other smart contracts, and pair with memes, leading to the derivation of new leveraged products.

Stocks transform from assets that can only be bought and sold into programmable assets.

3. Who provides liquidity for on-chain stocks? Who will trade?

Robinhood can put 1 billion NVDA, HIMS, SPCX on-chain, but "having assets" and "having a market" are two completely different things. Suppose a thousand types of stocks suddenly appear on-chain: why would users come? Who provides the first batch of liquidity? Who creates attention and community? Why would an ordinary crypto user suddenly trade HIMS?

Note that the liquidity mentioned here is different from traditional finance; on-chain liquidity also refers to liquidity pools. On-chain stock trading differs from traditional market makers' orders; as long as there is a pool on-chain, 24×7, without needing someone to monitor it, this requires liquidity pools, but who will build various pools? Who gives these pool builders "benefits?"

The most critical question is, will anyone come to trade?

At this point, memes emerged.

Memes might just be a natural tool for cold-starting on-chain stocks: stocks provide what memes lack the most—real-world value anchors and stories; memes provide what stocks lack the most—attention, community, dissemination, and speculative liquidity.

The two sides complement each other perfectly—memes on Robinhood are becoming something different from the past.

4. BONER: From short squeeze narrative to funding consensus

Yesterday's story of BONER is a sample.

It forms a trading pair with the on-chain HIMS Stock Token. The term BONER is commonly used in English slang, meaning "erect," somewhat akin to the Chinese saying "a pillar supporting the sky" in the stock market. Then HIMS happens to be a company that treats erectile dysfunction, cleverly linking the two.

With the influence of some overseas big accounts, it skyrocketed, reaching $70 million in a day. During this process, a meme community that originally had nothing to do with HIMS suddenly established an economic connection with a real-world stock:

1. The more the meme rises, the more people buy, and the more stocks are needed. The more people buy BONER, the more HIMS Tokens enter the liquidity pool.

2. The meme starts to "squeeze" the stock. If the entire ecosystem generates more demand for HIMS Tokens, it stimulates new HIMS Tokens to be issued on-chain—like when the US stock market is not open, if there aren’t enough on-chain stocks, and BONER rises, the stock could be pulled up to over 130, waiting for the market to open to balance back to the market price of over 20.

Of course, the so-called HIMS "short squeeze" is still very early from a real-world scale— even the BONER community's own website states: the current scale of this liquidity pool is insufficient to cause a short squeeze of HIMS's real stock; whether Stock Tokens are newly issued due to BONER's trading cannot be simply equated. So the current "short squeeze" is more of a meme narrative; I do not believe BONER or any other meme has the ability to short squeeze Wall Street.

Its significance lies in the fact that it has successfully run through the transmission path mentioned above for the first time: previously, if a meme rose a hundred times, it was just a meme rising a hundred times; today, if a stock meme grows large enough, it theoretically starts to influence the demand for the real asset it is paired with. Even if this force is currently as small as a grain of sand, the structure has already changed.

According to Robinhood's 1:1 support mechanism, newly issued Stock Tokens correspond to the demand for underlying stock assets.

Thus, a previously non-existent path has emerged: Meme attention → on-chain trading volume → Stock Token demand → Token issuance and liquidity → theoretically linking to the underlying real stocks.

Some may ask: if I want to short squeeze or speculate on stocks, why would I play with memes instead of directly buying stocks?

This leads to another question: why do people play with memes? If you don’t understand, you can refer to my historical articles for many viewpoints on memes.

Returning to the stock short squeeze, users are merely deciding which to buy, but I found it difficult to make a decision because the short squeeze story has some inherent flaws: first, it is not unique. Find a small-cap stock with a high short ratio, pair it with a meme, and you can tell a short squeeze story; Stock A can be played this way, and so can Stocks B and C. What the meme market fears most is this: the same narrative is replicated a hundred times, and everyone doesn’t know which one to buy, leading to scattered funds, and no one can rise.

BONER's real advantage now is not that "only it can short squeeze," but that it holds another thing: funding consensus. Over the past few days, it has been evident that overseas meme leaders can form a collective force. A few large accounts discover a relatively natural story in advance, buy first, and then spread it together, quickly concentrating liquidity and attention on one target.

The story itself is not unique, but consensus temporarily makes it unique.

How BONER will proceed is to be observed dynamically, but it has already proven one thing: the stock meme gameplay has buyers.

5. LONG: The organizational layer of stock memes

A few days ago, I decisively gave the judgment of left hand PONS, right hand PONS, right hand bull coming, which is actually the same thinking as today regarding which coin stock meme to speculate on: I don’t know which meme to buy, so I’ll just buy the token of this platform.

So, does Robinhood Chain have such a platform? Yes.

LONG is the most important issuance platform on Robinhood Chain, primarily issuing "meme coins paired with stock tokens"; currently, this type of stock-paired meme accounts for about a quarter of Robinhood Chain's stock-related trading volume.

Interestingly, LONG is not just a token issuance platform but something more imaginative: the attention distribution layer for stocks on Robinhood Chain + the liquidity organization layer.

Robinhood is responsible for moving stocks on-chain, while LONG is solving the next problem—how these stock tokens form communities, liquidity, and new trading demands.

In the short term, the loudest voices on-chain might be pure meme issuance platforms like PONS, with countless memes, massive fees, and buybacks, but the fear is the periodic cooling of memes.

In the long run, the space for LONG's model is larger; the gameplay here will be more sustainable, empowering without being so violent, but stocks, stock derivatives, leveraged products, and RWA are infinite games. As a platform connecting both ends, the imagination is vast.

Of course, I still have a very optimistic view of $PONS in the short term, given its high income, aggressive buybacks, and the fact that it has already burned 30%. Compared to PUMPFUN, it is still at a one or two-fold price—logically, PONS will surpass PUMPFUN because all the funds, popularity, and the future of on-chain finance are here. Additionally, it is worth mentioning that PONS's V2 also supports coin stocks!

6. Another platform coin: AI

After sorting through the above, I noticed AI. Its full name is Artificial Inu, paired with the on-chain NVDA Stock Token, originating from "NVIDIA + AI + Dog."

LONG has yet to issue a traditional platform coin but is gradually placing AI in a more central position within the ecosystem.

On August 1, AI's market cap was only about $1.5 million; by August 30, it had peaked at $135 million, with NVDA pool liquidity once exceeding $3.3 million— as the first layer of consensus for stock memes, it has already been achieved.

Going forward, its uses begin to stratify:

First, paired assets. LONG later allowed new tokens to directly form trading pairs with AI. Referencing ETH: countless new coins on Ethereum are paired with ETH; there is no smart contract that mandates the use of ETH, but everyone knows that ETH has the best liquidity, and liquidity itself attracts liquidity. The more trading pairs like AGI/AI, XXX/AI there are, the more AI's role shifts from a "traded coin" to a "basic asset that needs to be held for ecosystem liquidity." These two valuation logics are completely different.

Second, liquidity hub. As trading pairs increase, trading routes may start to pass through AI, gradually turning it into an intermediate currency within the ecosystem.

Third, locking and burning. The LONG team recently disclosed that through Community Mode, AI trading pairs, automatic burning, and other mechanisms, nearly $3 million of AI has been locked or removed from circulation; each new AI trading pair further locks or burns AI.

Fourth, accommodating new business value. For example, LONG and Lighter are working on LongX: packaging leveraged positions in perpetual contracts into ERC-20s that can be directly held and transferred. Put in $100 USDG, it establishes about 3 times leveraged exposure to NVDA at the underlying level, then gives you an on-chain "3X NVDA spot asset," without needing to manage margin, funding rates, and liquidation lines yourself.

Traditional finance has long proven that humans like simple leveraged products: three times long, two times long products have buyers year-round because ordinary users just want to press a button, "I want to go three times long on NVIDIA."

LONG officially states that LongX will continue to expand NVDA-related leveraged assets and allow some value to flow back to AI. If this line runs through, AI will not just accommodate meme trading.

Fifth, ecological reserve assets. This is the furthest layer: if more and more LONG products, AI trading pairs, stock memes, and LongX products build liquidity around AI in the future, AI may gradually become the foundational asset of the entire LONG ecosystem.

I have not seen LONG officially announce that "AI is the LONG Token," but there is a rule in the crypto world: what you do is more important than what you call it. ETH is valuable not because it has "platform coin" in its name, but because the entire Ethereum world needs it.

LONG's products continue to build around AI, and whether there is official certification goes without saying.

Intuitively: I am optimistic about the second half of RH's on-chain finance; this coin AI will be very important.

7. SPACEHOOD: A story you can understand in five seconds

SPACEHOOD is a meme paired with SPCX.

Similar to the nearly $100 million BONER mentioned earlier, but with a market cap just over $10 million. Although that coin performed strongly yesterday due to overseas KOLs banding together, I believe from a long-term perspective, if a leading coin stock meme is to emerge, SPACEHOOD has a greater opportunity.

The advantage is simple; any crypto user can understand it in five seconds: SpaceX, Musk, meme, Robinhood, stocks on-chain—all in one.

If stock memes really develop, the easiest to spread will certainly be those companies that already carry huge cultural symbols in the real world, and SpaceX clearly belongs to this category.

Mechanically, the larger SPACEHOOD's scale, the higher the demand for SPCX Token, which theoretically will increase on-chain SPCX's liquidity and demand. This meme will no longer float in the air but will start to establish a weak economic connection with a real-world company. Of course, this force is currently pitifully small; after all, the daily trading scale of SPCX in reality is not even in the same order of magnitude as a meme worth tens of millions of dollars. However, if on-chain stocks become increasingly popular, funds will ultimately concentrate on the leading ones.

What if this Musk meme reaches tens of billions or even hundreds of billions? At that point, its rise and fall will directly affect SPACEX's stock, and Musk, being the one who understands memes best and pays the most attention to SPACEX's stock, should be the mysterious guest for us holders.

By the way, this coin is the first coin publicly bought by the founder of the LONG platform!

8. The difference with Binance bStocks

Some may ask: Binance also has bStocks; what’s special about Robinhood? Binance's bStocks are also 1:1 backed, can be traded around the clock, self-custodied, and can also enter DeFi on the BNB Chain; in seven weeks since launch, the scale of bStocks announced by the official has exceeded $500 million.

In fact, the key difference is no longer whether stocks are tokenized but the starting points of the two companies:

1. Binance is still more inclined to do the business of selling stocks. Binance is more like the world's largest crypto trading venue, adding stocks as a new tradable category, allowing everyone to buy directly on Binance's main site, which is Binance's advantage and strength, growing very rapidly.

2. Robinhood Chain's ambition is to directly rebuild an on-chain financial system around stocks. Stocks are not just for buying and selling; they can serve as AMM (Automated Market Maker) assets, collateral, enter lending, pair with memes, enter perpetual contracts, create leveraged tokens, and even enter AI Agent's automated trading system, ultimately becoming a building block of the entire DeFi world.

Robinhood officially positions its Chain as a financial public chain aimed at tokenizing real-world assets (RWA), and has already laid out Stock Tokens, DEX, lending, Morpho, Lighter perpetuals, and AI Agents all along this line.

Both companies will grow stock tokens.

But on Robinhood Chain, a crypto-native culture is emerging: stocks + memes + DeFi.

And AI stands right at this intersection.

9. Stock memes are just beginning

As long as you jump in and feel it, you will discover how hot RH Chain is; memes bring attention to stocks, stocks provide memes with real-world anchors, DeFi provides liquidity for both, and Robinhood provides users and underlying assets for all of this.

The highlight of financial innovation often lies not in how much the first batch of assets ultimately rises but in the sudden creation of a market that originally did not exist. The current Robinhood Chain gives people a brand new feeling of excitement.

Of course, everything is still very early. Early means imagination, but it also means a higher failure rate, so keep observing dynamically.

Previously, I said, left hand PONS, right hand PONS, right hand bull coming; this remains unchanged, and I continue to be optimistic.

Today, I add one more day: left hand AI, right hand AI, right hand SPACEHOOD.

Standing at the windward side, even pigs can fly—holding onto those targets that can be understood at a glance will allow you to fly the fastest.

The above is purely personal research notes and holding records, not constituting any investment advice. Cryptocurrency assets are highly volatile; investment carries risks, and decisions should be made cautiously.