Weekly Recap: Tokenized Stocks Mania

gm, Defiers!

Robinhood Chain collected more in fees this week than any other blockchain, and the tokenized stocks it was built to carry spent the week coming apart from the companies they reference.

The fee line moved first. Users paid $4.45 million in gas on Tuesday, 82 times the network's total eleven days earlier and more than Ethereum, Solana and Tron combined. Pons took $4.89 million in launchpad fees on Monday against pump.fun's $1.72 million, crypto trading terminals cleared their first billion-dollar day since January 2025 with 91% of GMGN's trades settling on the chain, and Uniswap Labs bought PONS four weeks after opening a competing launchpad. Robinhood absorbs the gas inside its own wallet app through Sept. 29.

The wrappers went next. A memecoin called BONER held 53% of the tokenized Hims & Hers float over the weekend and printed the stock token at $132.64 against a $28.84 share. On Wednesday a memecoin named after a mushroom variety in Farmmi's own annual report ran the Nasdaq company's shares up as much as 321%, trading against a FAMI “stock token” Robinhood never issued. Thursday evening AMC chief executive Adam Aron told Robinhood to halt trading in its AMC token, and Robinhood's chief legal officer told him to send his lawyers.

The institutional version of the same trade kept moving. Twenty-one banks and asset managers, among them Wells Fargo, Fidelity and Capital One, said they will incorporate a joint dollar-stablecoin issuer this year. The SEC proposed transfer agent rules that name blockchain recordkeeping. Nomura's Laser Digital will set risk parameters for institutional lending markets on Euler, and Coinbase filed notice registrations toward single-stock perpetuals in the US.

Elsewhere, Cronos validators restarted their chain from a block four seconds before the Tectonic exploit, discarding 10,961 blocks and one hour and 54 minutes of everyone's transactions. Fogo has produced no block since Aug. 29.

Enjoy!

WATCH

Tokenized Stocks and Memecoins: Revolutionary Primitive or Retail Wipeout?

Camila Russo hosted Glider co-founder Brian Huang and Ethlabs founding member Binji Pande on Friday, hours after AMC's chief executive demanded that Robinhood stop trading a token referencing his company's shares. Huang argued that the venue matters more than the wrapper, and that AMMs guarantee no best execution the way US brokers do. Pande called the price gaps a supply problem, and a six-dollar tokenized AMC print “bad market structure.” Watch the full conversation.

Top Stories This Week

AMC's CEO Told Robinhood To Halt Its Stock Token. Robinhood Told Him To Send Lawyers

Adam Aron called Robinhood's stock tokens “contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable, vile” on Thursday evening, then asked the broker on Friday to “voluntarily CEASE AND DECIST the trading of AMC stock tokens,” saying AMC's outside securities counsel had been asked whether it can force a halt. Dan Gallagher, Robinhood's chief legal officer and an SEC commissioner from November 2011 to October 2015, answered at 10:16 a.m. ET: “We know a little something about the U.S. securities laws and will not ‘DECIST.’ Send your lawyers and we'll educate them.” The token's onchain supply reached 1,499,255 from 157,844 the evening before, one token for every 600 AMC shares outstanding, and its $200.8 million of 24-hour volume across 30 pools ran on $6.7 million of liquidity. Robinhood issues the tokens from Jersey to non-US buyers with no registration and no issuer consent, which leaves AMC no contractual lever and the SEC as Aron's only route.

Robinhood Chain Gas Fees Jump 82-Fold In 11 Days To Top Every Other Chain

Robinhood Chain users paid $4.45 million in gas on Sept. 2, 82 times the network's total on Aug. 22 and more than any other blockchain that day. The base fee reached 23 times its 0.02 gwei floor as trading through Pons and the terminals routing order flow onto the chain filled blocks. Gas at that level makes Arbitrum's 10% license cut the DAO's largest income line, and Robinhood absorbs the fee inside its own wallet app through Sept. 29, which keeps most retail users from ever seeing the number they generate. Applications on the chain earned $14.3 million in 24 hours against Robinhood's $2.13 million of gas on Monday, and $1.49 billion of DEX volume put the network second among all chains behind Solana. On Sept. 29 the subsidy stops, and the market finds out how much of this volume was ever price-sensitive.

'Money Mushroom' Moved A Nasdaq Penny Stock, But Its 'Tokenized Stock' Is A Memecoin Too

Farmmi sells dried mushrooms and trades bulk cotton and corn out of Lishui, in Zhejiang province, and has until February 2027 to close above a dollar for ten straight sessions or lose its Nasdaq listing. On Wednesday its shares traded as high as $0.50 from Tuesday's $0.1187 close, up as much as 321%, on 806 million shares against a 5.2 million daily average. The buying started with a memecoin named after a mushroom variety in the company's own annual report, trading against a FAMI token that one wallet minted in a single transaction, kept 38% of, and repriced twice through a contract it wrote itself. Robinhood has never issued a Farmmi stock token. Its genuine ones carry the issuer in the name and hold supply in the thousands, and its HIMS token has 2,215 mint events against FAMI's two. FAMI reached $1.83 in its USDG pool at 10:45 a.m. ET, the same five-minute bar in which the Nasdaq stock set its high; Farmmi needs ten consecutive closes above $1.00 to cure its listing deficiency, and the shares got halfway there.

21 Financial Institutions Commit to Joint Stablecoin Venture

Twenty-one banks and asset managers said Tuesday they will incorporate a jointly backed company in the second half of 2026 to issue a dollar stablecoin, targeting a market launch in the first half of 2027 and the euro after that. The release names no chief executive, no ownership split, no company name, no blockchain, no custodian and no reserve manager, and carries no quotes from any of the 21. Eight of the ten banks that said in October 2025 they were studying the idea are on the new list; Barclays and BNP Paribas are gone, and thirteen firms joined, among them Capital One, Fidelity Investments, Wells Fargo, WisdomTree, BBVA and Standard Bank. Six of the 21 also back The Clearing House's tokenized deposit network, which targets the same half-year, and JPMorgan, furthest along in tokenized deposits with JPMD, is absent. Tether and Circle hold 83% of a $310 billion market; the consortium has a target date and a member list, and no product for eighteen months.

Cronos Restarts Chain by Rolling State Back to Before the Tectonic Exploit

Cronos validators restarted the chain from block 90,896,189, four seconds before the attacker deployed the contract that drained the lender Tectonic. The rollback discarded 10,961 blocks, one hour and 54 minutes of everyone's transactions. PeckShield tracked about $74 million across three addresses; onchain investigator MASTR put gross outflow near $119.5 million once a contract deployed 12 days earlier is counted, with $32.6 million of bad debt left inside the protocol. The $6.29 million already bridged to Ethereum is beyond the rollback's reach, and CRO fell 7.9% to $0.05548. A validator set that can rewind two hours of finalized state to undo a lending exploit has answered a question about Cronos that no documentation does.

Other Stories

The AMC Fight Turned Into An Industry Argument Over Which Tokenized Stock Model Wins — Dinari co-founder Gabriel Otte called Robinhood's and Ondo's stock tokens “indisputably worse for the end investors than even common stocks” on Friday; Uniswap founder Hayden Adams compared them to early stablecoins. Three models split $2.91 billion of tokenized equities, and the SEC sorted them into separate legal categories in January.

A Memecoin Called BONER Has Cornered Half the Tokenized Hims & Hers Float — The BONER/HIMS pool on Robinhood Chain held 31,198 of the 58,714 tokenized Hims & Hers shares in existence. With the NYSE closed on Sunday night, $39,000 of buying took the token to $132.64 against an equity that closed Friday at $28.84. Only BBVI can mint more, and it did on Monday.

SEC Proposes Transfer Agent Rules for Blockchain-Based Share Records — The Sept. 1 proposal names blockchain recordkeeping and uncertificated securities among the technologies the rules would cover, and treats distributed-ledger operating models as risks agents must manage. Chair Paul Atkins, Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda voted to approve; comments run 60 days from Federal Register publication.

Polymarket Launches Perps With 20x Leverage — Sixty-seven contracts across 36 stocks, 24 crypto assets, four commodities and three indices, at up to 20x, on the international site Americans are barred from. Its 0.04% entry taker fee undercuts Hyperliquid's 0.045%.

Uniswap Labs Bought Pons Token for 'Long-Term Alignment' — The purchase came four weeks after Uniswap Labs opened a rival launchpad on Robinhood Chain that out-launched Pons on its first day. Neither side disclosed the size, the price or the wallet.

Coinbase Files SEC Notices in Bid to Bring Single-Stock Perpetuals to US — A Form 1-N for Coinbase Derivatives and a Form BD-N for Coinbase Financial Markets, both dated Sept. 1. Chief Policy Officer Faryar Shirzad called the filings a first step and said CFTC product approval comes next.

Fogo Mainnet Has Been Stopped For 46 Hours With No Restart Timeline — Validators halted the network on Aug. 29 after the theft of 400 million FOGO from the Fogo Foundation, 10.3% of circulating supply. The Foundation's halt notice is still its most recent statement, and KuCoin has deposits and withdrawals disabled.

Trending on The Defiant

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That's it for today — have a great weekend! If you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends!