Meme Coins Are Going Vertical Again
567: The Robinhood Meme Mania
Morning guys.
Hope your week is going well so far.
Welcome to our new subscribers. If you want to get up to speed with the top posts from Arb Letter this year you can find them below:
Today we’re going to dive into the resurgence of meme coin rippers (this time on Robinhood chain), what I think is going to be the conclusion to the Iran saga, and some major happenings across equity markets.
Next week we will dive back into E-Commerce for those of you who are working to make money online this year.
Let’s get it.
Financial Markets
The biggest theme has been continued weakness across AI and semiconductor names after an incredible run over the past year, with profit-taking weighing on many of the market's biggest winners.
At the same time, capital has rotated into more defensive areas of the market as investors await the start of second quarter earnings season and look for clues on whether corporate America can continue justifying these insanely lofty valuations.
With a fairly light economic calendar, Wall Street's attention looks to be shifting toward the latest Federal Reserve meeting minutes, which definitely revealed a central bank that remains far from unified. Odds for no change on rates in July sit at almost 80% as of now on prediction markets.
"If there were people in households or the business sector, in the financial markets, who thought that this central bank was going to be comfortable with an inflation objective above 2% — well, I guess they'd be disappointed."
— Kevin Warsh
While it seems officials unanimously agreed to leave interest rates unchanged in June, the discussion makes it pretty clear that policymakers are still wrestling with persistent inflation risks.
Yesterday Polymarket announced launching Polymarket Institutional Research, a publication exploring the intersection of Polymarket with the global financial system - you can sign up to receive it here. They did a cool piece on Anthropic yesterday
Oil prices pushed sharply higher this week as traders priced in the possibility of additional supply disruptions
Meta META 0.00%↑ announced it will be investing around $10 billion to build its first data center in Canada (UnusualWhales)
Nearly half of American adults under 30 are living with a parent (WSJ/Unusual Whales)
SK Hynix is said to price its U.S. offering at $149 per ADR (Polymarket Money)
Despite the weakness over the last few sessions, some AI adjacent names are up now in premarket (9:09 AM ET).
AMD 0.00%↑ is up 3% and Micron MU 0.00%↑ is up on news that they will be committing up to $3 billion to secure key parts of its domestic supply chain.
The plan includes $500 million in strategic financing for GlobalWafers America’s 300mm wafer facility in Sherman, Texas and a 10-year raw silicon wafer supply agreement (NewsAZ).
Robinhood’s $CASHCAT Goes Absolutely Vertical & The Return of Meme Season?
On the heels of our post about crypto bottoms, it appears that meme coins are once again sparking off in an insane way.
The last 48 hours have been a pretty meaningful shift in crypto market psychology, and Robinhood HOOD 0.00%↑ has become one of the biggest beneficiaries. It all started with Robinhood CEO and Covid era villian Vlad Tenev, tweeting out the following below.
Since that post traders have flooded into Robinhood Chain, the company’s new Layer 2 blockchain built on Arbitrum.
While the long term vision for the network is tokenizing real-world assets like stocks, ETFs, and other financial products, Tenev’s comment that the chain “works great for memes too” lit a fuse under its meme coin ecosystem.
You will be sad to hear (or happy if you bought it) that a new animal meme coin has made more millionaires over night. $CASHCAT is Robinhood’s leading memecoin right now. Apparently this was almost was Tenev named Robinhood.
The quick math was $100 yesterday is now $200,000. One early trader turned $838 into $1.05M.
Think about that.
As of last night the rankings on Robinhood Chain were:
1. $CASHCAT - $130M Market Cap
2. $ARROW - $16M Market Cap
3. $HOODIE - $12M Market Cap
4. $DIH - $4M Market Cap
5. $JUGGERNAUT - $4M Market Cap
Robinhood Chain is built on top of Arbitrum, one of Ethereum’s leading Layer 2 networks (that we have mentioned before). Rather than creating an entirely new blockchain from scratch, Robinhood is leveraging Arbitrum’s technology to process transactions faster and at a fraction of Ethereum’s normal cost.
Think of Ethereum as the interstate highway. During rush hour, traffic gets congested and tolls become expensive (sometimes absurdly so).
Arbitrum builds an express lane alongside that highway, bundles thousands of transactions together, and then settles them back onto Ethereum. Users get lower fees and quicker transactions while still benefiting from Ethereum’s security.
This is why the announcement matters for Arbitrum holders. Robinhood Chain is expected to route its activity through Arbitrum's infrastructure, with roughly 10% of the chain's fees flowing back to the Arbitrum ecosystem.
In other words, if Robinhood succeeds in bringing millions of users onto its blockchain for tokenized stocks, stablecoins, DeFi, or even meme coin trading, Arbitrum will benefit directly from the increased network activity.
Might be worth looking at ARB again.
Also, Chainlink is the official data and cross-chain oracle provider for the Robinhood Chain. Chainlink powers interoperability between Robinhood Chain and other blockchains through its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP).
Think of it as plumbing that allows assets and information to move securely between different blockchain networks rather than being trapped inside a single ecosystem.
So why is this all popping off again?
Couple reasons I think. Here’s what’s driving it:
First Retail speculation is back
The biggest change isn’t necessarily fundamentals, it’s sentiment and risk on appetite. After months of relatively cautious trading, it looks like retail traders have started rotating back into higher-beta assets:
Meme coins
Small cap altcoins
Robinhood favored crypto names
High volatility growth stocks
That’s usually one of the later phases of a crypto rally, when investors move beyond Bitcoin into increasingly speculative assets.
But right now it appears to be shaking up the typical order of things.
Also - Meme coins are benefiting from liquidity
When degen liquidity returns, the order of operations USUALLY looks something like:
Bitcoin
Ethereum
Large cap alts
Mid cap alts
Meme coins
We have covered this many many times before in other guides, but over the past couple of days, traders have clearly been moving further out on the risk curve. Part of that is the sheer direness of the economic situation most young people face and part of it I think is accessibility and ease of use of platforms like Robinhood, Phantom Wallet, etc.
It’s also interesting.
Regardless of what you think of historical patterns or cycles, these meme coin frenzies sometimes take place in a vacuum, where macro and other factors bear no weight on sentiment. I wouldn’t discount the potential signal this activity has for the rest of the market though, clearly liquidity is re-entering crypto.
Whether this develops into another full fledged meme season contagion remains to be seen, but the psychology is familiar. A hot new way to easily trade meme coins with hype? First it was Phantom Wallet then it was PumpFun and right now, it appears to be the Robinhood Chain.
Trade carefully.
People forget far too fast lol.
This is the same company that ended up restricting trading on GME 0.00%↑ at the peak of the 2021 meme stock madness effectively preventing buys and allowing sells to go through. They fixed the market with Citadel. They also got fucky with Solana in 2023 by delisting it.
I’d be very careful buying into the hype BUT if you choose to gamble, get in and get out man. Some of the lower market cap guys will likely run but when they roll over it will be a bloodbath.
If you want to get involved, you’ll need to use a self-custody wallet rather than the standard Robinhood app. Users can connect wallets like Robinhood Wallet, MetaMask, or Coinbase Wallet, transfer ETH or other supported assets onto the network, and then interact with decentralized applications built on the chain.
Once your funds have been bridged over, you can connect to decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap to buy, sell, and trade tokens, including the meme coins that have exploded over the past few days.
Robinhood’s longer-term vision extends well beyond memes, however. The company plans to use the network to support 24/7 trading of tokenized stocks, perpetual futures, and eventually AI powered crypto trading, positioning Robinhood Chain as a full fledged on chain financial ecosystem rather than simply another place to speculate on meme coins.
Let’s keep tabs on this, could start to get wild. I will be talking about some plays on Robinhood Chain and how to trade the memes in the Discord this weekend as I explore it.
Other Crypto News
Tokenized stocks have grown by 50% in the past month alone, with the launch of DTCC trading ( CoinTelegraph)
Chainlink, DeepBook, and Lido ranked as the top three DeFi projects by development activity in Santiment’s latest monthly report (CoinTelegraph)
A group of 17 banks from six continents is preparing to test the Swift blockchain ledger, moving tokenized deposits closer to real use cases (BitcounFoundation) - we are going to definitely do a post on the implications of this soon
Aave V4 nearly doubled in June. User deposits climbed from $119M to $232M, up about 94% in a month (MSB Intel)
Global News
More back and forth with Iran this week that is contributing to market chop.
The situation has not fully cooled off. Even after the initial relief rally, the rhetoric and retaliation risk are still hanging over the market.
The reported death of a U.S. Navy Commander Gabriel Edward only raises the stakes, because once American personnel are killed, the odds of a cleaner diplomatic off ramp usually get worse. Trump’s rhetoric this week matched that, when he said in an interview:
"I don't want to deal with them anymore, they are scum”
But again it keeps flopping, he came out later yesterday and said:
"They called a little while ago. They want to make a deal so badly — I just don't know if they're worthy of making a deal. I don't know that they're going to honor the deal. That's the problem."
For now, markets are trying to treat it as contained. But that can change quickly if the conflict starts ramping up existing threats to oil infrastructure, shipping lanes, or the Strait of Hormuz. You can still cop a Strait of Hormuz Yacht Club T Shirt HERE.
The Daily Mail is reporting that a deadly bacteria found in major US city's water system was traced to Mark Zuckerberg's $800m data center
Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Al-Zaidi said this week that Iraq will announce a political cooperation and economic partnership with the United States (BRICSNews)
The United States has approved the sale of long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Thursday (The Defense Post)
Muhammad ranked as the top baby name for boys in England and Wales for the third consecutive year (BRICSNews)
A severe fire at a shoe factory in southeastern China left casualties on Thursday (CNN)
Comrade Mamdani in New York pissed off even more people this week by sharing a graphic showing all the immigrant neighborhoods in New York City. The only problem? He conveniently left out Italians, Irish, and other cultures.
You know what he didn’t forget to include? African, Asian, and Latin communities.
This movement and ideology within the left is continuing to gain momentum. AOC’s odds of being the Democratic nominee in 2028 sit at 15% on Polymarket right now.
Short one today. I will see paid subs on Tuesday.
Enjoy the rest of the week guys. I will be ripping Crimson Desert (sick game so far) and checking out Robinhood Chain this weekend.
See you on X and the Discord.
Andy