When crypto last boomed in 2024 and 2025, memecoins were all the rage. Traders flocked to blockchains like Solana or the app Pump.fun to launch their own dog-themed, cat-themed, or frog-themed tokens. Even two presidents got involved. (While President Donald Trump’s memecoin made a killing, Javier Milei’s landed the Argentine president in hot water.)
Then, the “memecoin trenches,” as traders jokingly called them, started dozing off. Some investors caught on that the game was often rigged, and others started chasing other speculative assets like perpetual futures or prediction markets. But, last week, the trenches appeared to have woken up—if even just a little bit.
In early July, the online brokerage Robinhood, which has made serious investments into crypto, publicly launched its own blockchain, a layer-2 network built on top of Ethereum. The initiative was a long time coming and part of the public company’s broader thesis that financial institutions will increasingly tokenize assets, or issue products like stocks within blockchain wrappers.
Trading volume on Robinhood Chain exploded out of the gate, rising from just over $200,000 on July 1 to more than $500 million nine days later, according to data from the crypto analytics provider DefiLlama. But that volume wasn’t from real-world assets, another term for tokenized financial products. Instead, trading came from the trenches.
Within days of Robinhood Chain’s launch, memecoins became some of the most traded assets on the network. One memecoin, Cash Cat, notched a market capitalization of around $150 million on Friday, according to the crypto analytics provider CoinGecko. (The name is a callback to the early days of Robinhood, when Tenev and his cofounder Baiju Bhatt first called their company CashCat, according to a New Yorker profile.)
That Robinhood’s newest crypto product is now a haven for memecoin trading shouldn’t be a surprise. The company has repeatedly profited off of joke-inspired investing. In 2021, the online brokerage was at the center of the improbable rise of GameStop’s stock. And, in the second quarter of that year, 62% of the company’s crypto revenue came from purchases and sales of the original memecoin, Dogecoin.
Still, Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president of crypto, remained on message when I reached out for comment. “We are laser-focused on one mission: building the most secure, scalable, and seamless foundation for real-world assets,” he said.
But, in a post on X, Tenev appeared to lean into memecoin mania: “While we’re building Robinhood Chain to be the best chain for RWA [real-world assets]… it works great for memes, too.”
Ben Weiss
benjamin.weiss@fortune.com
@bdanweiss
DECENTRALIZED NEWS
Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin behemoth sold $216 million in crypto, which is Strategy’s largest Bitcoin sale ever. (Fortune)
Founded in 2018, the DeFi veteran Gauntlet raised $125 million from the Japanese financial conglomerate SBI Holdings in a Series C funding round. (Fortune)
The Justice Department sent a memo to attorneys in June, advising them that they should expect less cooperation from Binance on crypto cases. (The Information)
The prediction market Polymarket submitted an application to the CFTC to offer margin trading to U.S. users. (Bloomberg)
The public company that the Trump sons worked with to stockpile their crypto firm's token is looking to sell its core business. (WSJ)
MAIN CHARACTER OF THE WEEK
Matt Huang, the managing partner of the crypto VC Paradigm, announced Wednesday that his firm raised $1.2 billion for a new fund focused on crypto—as well as AI, robotics, and “other areas of the technical frontier.”
MEME O' THE MOMENT
Never sell your Bitcoin… unless you decide to sell $216 million worth of Bitcoin.
