Crypto Traders Are Pairing Meme Coins With Stocks on Robinhood—And It’s Working (Sort Of)

A meme coin called $BONER locked up more than half the tokenized shares of Hims & Hers Health on Robinhood’s blockchain over the weekend of August 30. The stunt briefly pushed the wrapped version of the stock to $132.64, more than four times Friday’s real close of HIMS stock at $28.84.

The actual HIMS shares barely budged, but that’s not gonna stop the meme coin traders from trying again.

Robinhood Chain, the company’s network that went live in July, is a permissionless layer-2 chain that lets developers build just about anything they want, including meme coins that trade directly against tokenized stocks instead of stablecoins.

Tokenized stocks are digital tokens meant to track a real share’s price one-to-one. Buy the meme coin, and the stock tokens you pay with get locked inside its liquidity pool, the crypto reserve that sets the trading price.

Ten days of buying pushed 31,198 of the 58,714 tokenized HIMS shares in existence into the $BONER pool alone. Robinhood lets only one licensed partner mint or burn those tokens, so supply stayed fixed at roughly one tokenized share for every 4,000 real ones. With the NYSE shut for the weekend and no live price to check against, a few thousand dollars of trading was enough to move it.

The goal was a short squeeze, a scramble where traders who bet a stock will drop get forced to buy it back at a rising price, pushing that price even higher. HIMS is a popular short target, with about a quarter of its real shares sold short on the NYSE.

But $BONER‘s own website admits the math doesn’t work: every tokenized HIMS share combined equals just 0.1% of that short position.

$BONER isn’t the only one running this playbook on a chain where meme coins have already outpaced tokenized stocks in trading volume.

Artificial Inu is pegged to tokenized Nvidia stock, Saylormoon holds tokenized Strategy stocks and Clippy XP holds Microsoft. Of course, there are many other low-liquidity meme coins for those with a high risk appetite.

The setup echoes 2021’s GameStop saga, when Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum piled into a real short squeeze that forced hedge funds to cover at a massive loss. That squeeze moved actual shares on a real stock exchange. The $BONER play only moved a thinly traded IOU that reset once the market reopened and new tokens got minted.

So while the meme coin pairs may not be putting the squeeze on the targeted stocks like those GameStop traders of old, these tokens are working to bring a whole lot of attention, and liquidity, to the brand new Robinhood Chain network.

For example, Artificial Inu, which trades as AI, leads the meme-stock-pair craze with a $203 million market cap and $16.3 million in 24-hour volume. The token’s main AI/NVDA pool is holding about $5.2 million in liquidity. Saylormoon, which borrows the MSTR ticker from Strategy, has a $1.75 million market cap and $2 million in daily volume against roughly $450,000 in its primary MSTR pool. Clippy XP, linked to tokenized Microsoft, sits at $1.69 million with $641,000 in volume and about $395,000 in its main MSFT pool.

And the latest entrant, MEME, is paired with tokenized $AMC stock, which now has a $56 million market cap and $73.5 million in 24-hour volume—the highest of the group—with $2.6 million in its main pool. The pools, though, so far only hold a negligible share of the underlying tokenized stock supply.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has embraced the trend, previously saying that his company’s chain “works great for memes too,” even though it was built to bring real-world assets on-chain.

Tenev has his critics, of course, including $AMC CEO Adam Aron, who took to X yesterday to chastise Tenev and Robinhood over the tokenized shares of $AMC that trade on the app. Aron called the practice “contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable, vile,” said $AMC has no connection to it, and questioned the scheme’s legality.

Robinhood took it all in stride. “What’s the concern?” Tenev casually asked back.