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Usually, he buys them with cryptocurrencies such as Ether or Solana. Robinhood Markets Inc. has thrown a different kind of asset into the mix: Stock Tokens, digital securities designed to track individual stocks and backed 1:1 by the corresponding shares. Because they can circulate on the same open crypto markets as memecoins, traders can pair the two in a liquidity pool and swap one directly for the other. That means Low, a 27-year-old in Singapore, can swap a token tied to Snap Inc. or Nvidia Corp. for a memecoin — and back again. A familiar company is no longer just something to invest in; it can become part of the meme trade itself. Wall Street has spent years promoting tokenization as new plumbing for traditional finance. Robinhood Chain’s recent burst of speculative trading showed another use case: stock exposure is becoming the raw material for crypto speculation, making some of its riskiest bets feel more like stock investing. Robinhood casts that openness as a way to broaden access to financial markets. It also means outsiders can build new trades around public companies without those companies creating or controlling them. AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer Adam Aron hit out against the trend last month. After learning that a token tied to AMC was trading through Robinhood without the theater chain’s involvement, he demanded that Robinhood stop. Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev pushed back. Read more: 5 world market themes for the week ahead More than five years after the meme-stock boom, retail traders are building another layer of stock speculation on a permissionless blockchain. US regulators are also beginning to make room for tokenized trading. The Securities and Exchange Commission last month granted temporary exemptions allowing certain venues to trade tokenized US stocks onchain under specified conditions. The shift comes as retail trading pushes further beyond the traditional market day: Robinhood said this week it plans to offer weekend trading in US stocks, alongside leveraged perpetual futures on some cryptocurrencies. “We tokenize stocks, and the first thing people do with it is meme it,” said Eric Conner, a longtime crypto investor. “I think that’s just a sign of the times and a sign of the future.” Robinhood says each Stock Token is backed 1:1 by the corresponding shares held by a custodian, and each has a live onchain price feed tied to the underlying stock. But that reference price doesn’t dictate the price inside a decentralized liquidity pool, where trading depends on the tokens available and prices can diverge when liquidity gets stretched. Under Robinhood’s existing structure, Stock Tokens aren’t shares themselves and don’t give holders voting rights in the underlying companies. A Robinhood representative declined to comment. Daily trading volume in memecoin-stock-token pairs peaked at around $440 million in early September before falling fast, according to Dune data compiled by X user @adam_tehc. Some of the Stock Tokens that became popular pairings were tied to an exchange-traded fund tracking the S&P 500, Nvidia, SpaceX and Meta. Those tokens — which can also trade independently of the memecoins — reached a combined market value of roughly $69 million at their peak, according to RWA.xyz. Conner is betting the trend has further to run. He bought a memecoin paired with Hims & Hers Health Inc. when its market value was about $600,000. Within roughly a week, he said, it had climbed to about $80 million. “That obviously made me a little bit more interested in the whole thing,” Conner said. “Pretty much everyone holding one of these meme stocks is interested in the underlying stock going up, and I think that’s why the general stock communities will probably embrace this,” he said. “It’s my theory that each major stock will have a meme stock kind of winner and community behind it.” Read more: Bleak Winter! Why analysts are hinting at painful October even after 8 weeks of Nifty correction? The Hims trade exposed another ripple effect: the new markets can become detached from the stocks beneath them. During a weekend in late August, one liquidity pool came to hold an outsized share of the tokenized Hims supply as the token rose to more than four times the price of the underlying stock. Hims shares themselves barely moved when US markets reopened Monday. Mostly, those distortions have stayed onchain. Then there was Farmmi. Shares of the tiny Nasdaq-listed mushroom seller surged as much as 321% on Sept. 2 before falling from their peak. Before the move, traders on Robinhood Chain had piled into a memecoin named after one of Farmmi’s mushrooms. It was paired with an unofficial Farmmi token that had no link to the actual shares. At its peak, the memecoin was valued at roughly 10 times the company itself. Tanay Ved, an analyst at Talos, said Farmmi showed what can happen when “memecoin retail speculation and virality collide with 24/7 markets onchain.” Market Plumbing ‘Permissionlessness’ trading is a crucial break with earlier retail manias. Put simply, Robinhood doesn’t have to create the memecoin, and the public company doesn’t have to participate in the market forming around its stock. “I think it is interesting because it shows that in the on-chain environment, like things you can permissionlessly build,” said Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital. “Who knows what else we might find out with tokenized stocks one day?” In AMC’s case, even the chief executive’s attempt to stop it became part of the speculation. After Aron took aim at the AMC token, traders rallied around a coin called A Meme Coin, or MEME, paired with tokenized AMC shares. At its peak, MEME was valued at nearly $150 million. Traders “think it’s more bullish that the CEO doesn’t like it and he can’t stop it, at least not immediately,” said Rahul Patel, a crypto founder and longtime memecoin trader. While retail fads come and go, blockchain-powered finance may end up changing how day traders perceive risk over the long haul. “My friend who will not buy memecoins will at least be motivated to try this because it does look like the stock market with the boring part gone,” said Low. (What's moving Sensex and Nifty Track latest market news, stock tips, Budget 2025, Share Market on Budget 2025 and expert advice, on ETMarkets. Also, ETMarkets.com is now on Telegram. For fastest news alerts on financial markets, investment strategies and stocks alerts, subscribe to our Telegram feeds .) Subscribe to ET Prime and read the Economic Times ePaper Online.and Sensex Today. Top Trending Stocks: SBI Share Price, Axis Bank Share Price, HDFC Bank Share Price, Infosys Share Price, Wipro Share Price, NTPC Share Price (What's moving Sensex and Nifty Track latest market news, stock tips, Budget 2025, Share Market on Budget 2025 and expert advice, on ETMarkets. Also, ETMarkets.com is now on Telegram. For fastest news alerts on financial markets, investment strategies and stocks alerts, subscribe to our Telegram feeds .) Subscribe to ET Prime and read the Economic Times ePaper Online.and Sensex Today. Top Trending Stocks: SBI Share Price, Axis Bank Share Price, HDFC Bank Share Price, Infosys Share Price, Wipro Share Price, NTPC Share Price
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