Robinhood Chain’s memecoin boom is already imploding

Robinhood’s newsroom called its new blockchain, Robinhood Chain, “AI-native and purpose-built for real-world assets.” By the end of week one, those assets — mostly memecoins — totaled roughly $13 million. But those memecoins keep dying.

By midday Thursday, a memecoin called MIZUKARA had gone to zero on Robinhood Chain, on roughly $67 million of trading volume.

It was one of dozens of MIZUKARA pools deployed in under a day. Each fresh incarnation stepped over the corpse of the last.

None of this was in the pitch. Robinhood launched the chain at a London event on July 1, pitching it for tokenized stocks for customers in more than 120 countries.

The next morning, CEO Vlad Tenev told CNBC, “If an asset is not tied to an underlying utility, it’s not a productive asset. What’s the benefit of making a million different memecoins?”

The market then spent a few days actually using it. On July 7, Tenev posted his revision: “While we’re building robinhood chain to be the best chain for RWA … it works great for memes too.”

Memecoin promoters showed up, and he couldn’t stop them.

Two days later he declared, “Robinhood Summer is here,” boosting a colleague’s tally of 17 million transactions and more than $1 billion in DEX volume.

Robinhood Summer lasted two days

The boom in Robinhood Chain memecoins ran through NOXA, a launchpad responsible for some 60,000 tokens, more than three-quarters of everything deployed on the chain.

NOXA collected more than $12 million in fees in two weeks.

Yet that same Saturday morning, NOXA complained that bots were “spamming and copying new tokens every hour” and switched off its own token deployer.

Two days later, its website went dark; NOXA blamed a Cloudflare issue. It also burned 40% of its own token supply.

By July 14 it had resurfaced as a bare-bones page, announcing, “People loved the cat, it has been liberated,” and handed 100% of ongoing trading fees to token creators.

Some traders called the exit a soft rug, crypto slang for a team that walks away without formally stealing anything. A Binance Square message board user posted a post-mortem, finding no direct evidence of the revenue-split dispute rumored to be behind it.

NOXA’s own explanation reads, “DeFi summer is still happening.” It probably isn’t.

Read more: OpenAI to Robinhood: That’s not our stock, bro

Robinhood Chain launchpad pauses

Vlad.fun, a launchpad that borrowed the Robinhood CEO’s first name, soon arrived and then, just as quickly, pulled the plug. On Wednesday, it announced, “We’re pausing VladFun” after discovering what it described as “a serious internal integrity issue at launch involving members of our team.”

In plain English, the launchpad is investigating its own people, and its legal team is involved.

Pons, a rival launchpad two days old, spent the same afternoon batting away reports of a front-end token-approval bug.

The team insisted the damage was tiny, saying, “As of right now, 0.60 NOXA tokens were impacted worth roughly $0.66 USD.”

Its proprietary token price fell by about a third over the following day anyway.

Hacked accounts and poisoned tickers

Robinhood Chain token casualties are stacking up faster than most people can catalog.

When hackers hijacked SpaceX-affiliated X accounts to shill a token called SCATMAN, it spiked to a roughly $2 million market cap before the creators pulled the liquidity.

Another token simply named 1 ran from $800,000 to about $15 million on a rumor that a wallet linked to Tenev was buying.

It collapsed 93% when traders worked out that the wallet was a long-compromised demo address. A livestream had exposed most of its seed phrase a year earlier.

Even CASHCAT, the chain’s flagship memecoin and NOXA’s liberated cat, has lost more than half its value since July 11.

Protos has already documented memecoins making up more than three-quarters of two days’ trading on the chain, a CASHCAT holder losing $56,000 to a hacked smart contract, and a scam coin that emptied $600 from one buyer in seconds.

A spokesman previously told Protos, “Robinhood Chain is permissionless. This is a common issue across permissionless chains.”

Which is a longer way of saying that graveyards join new neighborhoods.

To be fair, the chain itself is thriving by the numbers Robinhood prefers to publish. Total value locked has climbed steadily to nearly $200 million, and daily DEX volume peaked near $880 million last Saturday.

Still, the RWA infrastructure this chain was purpose-built for are still worth a meager $13 million, nowhere close to the tens of billions of dollars on competing blockchains.

NOXA collected nearly that much in memecoin fees in two weeks, and even NOXA quit to focus elsewhere.

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