Memecoin trading is roaring back—but on a new blockchain with a different twist. In September, Robinhood Chain, launched by the fintech giant this summer, saw a surge in trading activity that involved not only tokens inspired by cats and other internet memes, but also stock tokens: digital assets designed to track individual companies’ share prices and backed by the underlying stock. The burst of trading, however, was short-lived.
Daily trading volume in memecoin-stock-token pairs jumped from virtually zero in July, when Robinhood Chain launched, to $443 million in early September, according to CryptoQuant. Since then, though, trading activity has fallen 96%.
The frenzy also brought a wave of token creation: About 26,000 new tokens were launched on the chain each day in September, according to Dune data, with the daily total reaching nearly 45,000 on Sept. 8. Most of these tokens achieved little or no volume after launch, and are today worth almost nothing at all, which is the fate of the vast majority of cryptocurrencies.
Robinhood Chain hasn’t been the only platform to see a recent surge in trading activity. In mid-September, Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, launched Arc, a blockchain built for Wall Street banks and other large institutions to move money and trade digital assets. On its first day open to public trading, memecoin launchpads generated more than $336 million in trading volumes on Arc.
These launches echo a familiar crypto pattern in which new blockchains and decentralized exchanges see memecoin speculation drive attention, retail interest, and early trading volumes. Solana offered one of the clearest examples in 2024 with Pump.fun, a platform that lets users create and trade tokens within minutes. At the height of that craze, TRON, the blockchain founded by Chinese entrepreneur Justin Sun, rolled out SunPump, a rival launchpad. Inevitably, though, the flurry of activity quickly subsided to almost nothing.
According to experts interviewed by Fortune, these newer blockchains are experiencing their own memecoin boom—and the outcome may not be much different.
“It’s a way for blockchains and/or new apps to attract money/activity into them, but it is not sustainable. Most of these assets/memecoins will trend to zero,” Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, told Fortune in a written statement.
Jim Thorne, chief market strategist at wealth management firm Wellington-Altus, agreed, comparing the memecoin frenzy to “trading Pokémon cards.” But he drew a distinction between the speculative trade and the technology underneath it, arguing that tokenization—turning assets into digital tokens that can be traded on a blockchain—is here to stay.
“Memecoin trading is an unfortunate distraction [from] the power of tokenization,” he said.
Thorne also noted that the September boom-and-bust cycle played out as the U.S. government was weighing major new rules for crypto. On Sept. 15, the Senate failed to advance the CLARITY Act, a bill that would have set nationwide rules for crypto markets. Over the course of the next few days, memecoin trading on Robinhood Chain and Arc surged.
“[It] was a short period where folks thought that we were going to go back to the wild, wild west after the Clarity Act failed,” Thorne said.
But when the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a five-year exemption allowing certain platforms to test blockchain-based trading of tokenized stocks under specific rules, the frenzy began to fade.