To Robinhood: Don’t build a meme coin blockchain

Author: Jon Ma
Source: Artemis
Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

Why the tokenized stocks track is the core path for Robin to achieve $300k in revenue by 2030

Dear Vlad, John An: Less than a month after launch, Robinhood Chain is off to a strong start, rapidly advancing toward its goal of inclusive, accessible finance for everyone:

• More than 300k daily active addresses
• Spot decentralized exchange (DEX) daily trading volume surpasses $100 million, ranking third on the public chain leaderboard
• Stablecoin circulating supply reaches $300 million
• Annualized daily fee revenue from the public chain exceeds $40 million
• Total value locked (TVL) exceeds $300 million, with data contributed jointly by projects such as Morpho, Ethena, and Uniswap

Artemis Robinhood Chain data dashboard:

I got involved in Robinhood’s Pre-IPO round investment as early as 2019, when I worked at the hedge fund Whale Rock. In 2020, I also followed the full Coinbase listing roadshow. My initial motivation for founding the Artemis platform was to guide the market to focus on crypto and stock-market assets with long-term, real-world value—not on speculative memecoins.

Last week, when I opened my Robinhood wallet, I was deeply disappointed: the assets available for trading on the platform are almost all memecoins. I bought a small amount of $CASCHAT , and within just three days, my account received an airdrop of a bunch of nameless tokens with no value at all—one of which is even called “meaningless coin.”

There’s no denying that today Robinhood Chain’s spot DEX trading volume is firmly ranked third in the industry.

But the vast majority of on-chain trading volume comes from all kinds of memecoins—animal-themed tokens, Vlad-and-Robinhood-related themes, and broadly entertainment-style token after token. Robinhood, please don’t turn your own public chain into a memecoin-only track.

Base, the public chain developed by Coinbase, offers many lessons that Robinhood Crypto can learn from, and even today Base’s scale still far exceeds that of Robinhood Chain.

Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong has also spoken publicly, firmly stating that they want to steer users toward application scenarios with real-world, on-the-ground value.

I understand the appeal of memecoins: they can quickly attract early users, win over partners to bring liquidity and trading volume, and many people enter with the mindset of “coming for the memecoin, leaving room for real applications.” On Base, big independent protocols like Aerodrome also rely on memecoin-driven traffic to grow and build a mature business model.

But memecoins only lead to user losses and destroy market trust.

Looking back at a number of Base memecoins that launched in early 2024, this year their prices have fallen another 90%, and the cumulative drawdown from their 2024 peak has reached as much as 99%.

Memecoins have no long-term staying power—they harm users’ interests and further make ordinary retail investors develop aversion toward blockchain.

At the same time, the rampant memecoins on-chain deepen the inherent stereotypes held by Wall Street and major hedge funds: Robinhood is merely the short-term trading software spawned during the GameStop (GME) memestock frenzy back then.

Such negative public opinion will only keep compounding, without any positive value.

Wall Street is already very hard to get to view Robinhood objectively—don’t repeat the mistake in 2021 that damaged the brand image.

Instead of directing traffic and resources to memecoins, focus on Arcus (the long-established perpetual DEX built by the former dYdX core team) and tokenized stocks, concentrating liquidity and ecosystem attention here. I’m very supportive of the fact that Arcus already supports spot trading of tokenized stocks for users worldwide.

Over the past decade, stock assets have experienced long-term upward market trends, supported by real fundamentals.

Robinhood Chain should truly push forward the real-world assets (RWA) track, enabling more investors worldwide to trade individual stocks and Pre-IPO company equity around the clock. Platforms like RWA.xyz and Artemis are also very willing to help Robinhood present relevant, real-world deployment scenarios.

Robinhood’s biggest downside logic is very clear: growth of users in the U.S. domestic market has already peaked. The platform has 27 million funded accounts, and investment banks predict that in fiscal year 2028 it can increase to only 31 million to 32 million at most—meaning very limited room for growth.

And what I see as Robinhood’s core upside logic is this: by leveraging Robinhood Chain, the platform can reach over 100 million incremental overseas users. Overseas investors can trade tokenized stocks, prediction markets, and stablecoins—this public chain will become a massive traffic gateway for Robinhood’s main APP front-end.

Tokenized stocks with real demand for around-the-clock trading are best evidenced by Hyperliquid’s Trade.xyz—large numbers of users trade tokenized shares of real entities like Hynix. Hynix’s real annual revenue reaches $68 billion, making it a high-quality underlying asset with actual operating value.

Let’s do a simple projection of the growth outlook: assume that by 2030, Robinhood Chain’s monthly active users exceed 1B. Today, the platform’s average annual revenue per user (ARPU) is about $171. Overseas users generate revenue through transaction fees paid via the public chain; the take rate is below that of the main APP. If we estimate annual revenue per user at $100, then annual revenue of $10 billion can be achieved by the C-end consumption business alone, far exceeding the investment banks’ 2029 fiscal year revenue expectation of $8.78 billion.

Vlad, John An—your hands hold an excellent opportunity. By unlocking crypto industry-wide inclusive finance through asset tokenization, you can realize the core vision.

Please don’t waste a great hand and end up as a memecoin public chain.

Wall Street institutions, all users, and investors worldwide will all be grateful for this.

Sincerely,
Jon Ma

Robinhood’s senior user since 2017