Robinhood's cryptocurrency-equity pairing is a hit, and Solana is starting to replicate it.

On September 4th, Adam Aron, CEO of AMC, the largest movie theater chain in the United States, publicly demanded on X that Robinhood "voluntarily stop trading AMC stock tokens," and stated that if Robinhood did not comply, the company would have its securities lawyers investigate whether it could legally force them to stop. Robinhood's Chief Legal Officer, Dan Gallagher—a former commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—directly retorted: "We know a little about U.S. securities law, and we won't 'stop.' Call your lawyers, and we'll teach them a lesson." Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev retweeted in support, simply writing, "We stand behind Stock Tokens." While AMC and Robinhood are still locked in a war of words, Solana has already replicated this "coin-stock pairing" strategy. Aron's core accusation is that Robinhood's stock tokens, issued through a Jersey offshore entity, are essentially "tokenized debt certificates" with no voting rights, no shareholder rights, and cannot be sold to US users, thus eroding AMC's future financing capabilities. Robinhood, on the other hand, insists that its Stock Tokens are tokenized products aimed at eligible non-US users and that they provide underlying asset price data through Chainlink. The classification of this structure and whether it violates US securities laws remain legally controversial. This isn't the first time Robinhood has done this. In 2025, it launched "OpenAI tokens" and "SpaceX tokens" in the European market. OpenAI publicly distanced itself at the time, stating that these tokens were not its equity. Who has the right to put a company's stock on the blockchain and to whom it can be sold remains a question without a clear answer under US securities law—and the tokenized stock sector has already reached a scale of approximately $2.91 billion. Robinhood's approach was copied. Just days after this fierce competition, the launch platform StonkFun on Solana surpassed $1.5 million in daily revenue, climbing to the top of the revenue charts and surpassing established launch platforms Pump.fun and derivatives platforms Hyperliquid. On September 7th, the decentralized exchange Solana officially announced an upgrade to its LaunchLab launch infrastructure. New tokens are no longer limited to pairing with SOL (previously, the threshold was 85 SOL to automatically migrate to Raydium's market-making pool), and can now be paired with any asset supported by the platform. StonkFun was the first partner to integrate this upgrade. After integration, its own token, STONK, surged by over 250% in a single day, pushing its market capitalization to approximately $140 million. STONK itself is a direct replica of the "stock pairing" narrative—it is paired with SPYx, a tokenized S&P 500 product issued by Backed Finance. The price indirectly gains exposure to the S&P 500 through SPYx, and holders have no ownership of the underlying ETF shares. The logic is exactly the same as Robinhood's "tokenized debt certificate" system. When Solana's official X account responded to a tweet about StonkFun, it wrote "We stand behind Stonk Tokens." This response clearly borrowed from Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev's words from a few days earlier, attempting to capitalize on the controversy surrounding the lawsuit to gain attention for its own ecosystem's similar narrative. Meanwhile, the privacy-themed cat coin ZCAT emerged, using the same pairing capabilities, only paired with the privacy coin Zcash (ZEC), allowing holders to continuously receive ZEC dividends. Its market capitalization once surged past $120 million, and this surge in attention was sparked by a comment from renowned trader Ansem: "imagine. $ZCAT." Behind this recurring narrative is the competition between two blockchains for the same volume of transactions. According to Deutsche Bank analyst Bedell, citing DeFiLlama data, Robinhood Chain's daily on-chain revenue hovered below $200,000 in mid-August, jumped to nearly $500,000 on August 29, and then doubled for four consecutive days—$1 million on August 30, $1.92 million on August 31, $3.38 million on September 1, and $4.01 million on September 2, totaling $10.8 million over five days. Of this, approximately $5.4 million was recorded by Robinhood. Robinhood's fee income has already exceeded Deutsche Bank's original overall estimate for its third-quarter revenue—one of the main reasons why Deutsche Bank raised its target price for Robinhood from $115 to $136. However, analysts also point out that there is still insufficient visibility into the sustainability of this revenue growth momentum. According to DeFi researcher Ignas, Solana bridging funds increased by approximately $18.8 million in the past 24 hours, while Robinhood Chain funds decreased by approximately $47.8 million. This corresponds to a collective surge in the previous batch of Solana trading infrastructure tokens—RAY rose by approximately 60%, and JUP rose by approximately 21%. ORCA rose approximately 12%, and MET rose approximately 13%. Ignas believes that compared to the overall capital scale of the two chains, this migration is not large, but some traders may be taking profits on Meme tokens in the Robinhood ecosystem and moving to Solana, betting on a repeat of the same logic. This judgment is currently only his personal observation based on on-chain data and has not yet been cross-validated by a wider range of data. Asset on-chaining is just the beginning. The "coin-stock pairing" spawned by the Robinhood Chain ecosystem has brought a new trading method to the Meme market: what you buy is no longer just an independently operating Meme, but an on-chain asset with a price correlation to an asset that already has a market price, even if this correlation itself does not grant the holder ownership of the underlying asset. StonkFun and ZCAT emerged almost simultaneously, essentially new attempts brought about by the same infrastructure upgrade—Raydium's recent relaxation of pairing restrictions has provided greater experimental space for this new combination method. Furthermore, what deserves even more attention is how, as more and more real-world assets such as stocks and ETFs enter the blockchain, they will ultimately be recombined, thereby changing the trading and liquidity structure of the on-chain market.