You sound like a grandfather lecturing a child.
Look, it's kind of our role now is to be grandfathers for the industry, you know.
Not a dividend.
It's a tale of two funds.
Now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.
Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways.
Trading firms who are very involved.
I like eat the ultimate.
DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Chopping Block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros: first we've got Tom, the DeFi maven and master of memes.
We've got Tarun, the giga-brain and grand poobah at Gauntlet.
And coming back, we've got Laura, CEO of the show. Welcome back, Laura.
And I am Haseeb, head hype man at Dragonfly. We're early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. See choppingblock.xyz for more disclosures. So the story of this week has been the rise of Robinhood Chain. We've alluded a little bit to what's going on on Robinhood Chain, but it seems to have hit a fever pitch recently. When Robinhood Chain first launched, there was a little bit of a peak, kind of started to come down, and people thought, "Oh, maybe this is a flash in the pan, kind of a one-hit wonder. Maybe got people a little bit excited." If you recall when we had ThreadGuy on the show, ThreadGuy was speculating that, "I don't really know that Robinhood is bringing in new users. These might just be people front-running other users who haven't shown up yet."
But now, all of a sudden, we've got this second rally in Robinhood Chain, and it seems to be much more explosive than the first. We are now seeing over 125,000 active wallets, 5.7 million transactions per day, $1.2 billion in DEX volume, $2 million in REV in a single day—REV standing for realized value or something, basically the total number of fees that are paid on a blockchain. So all of a sudden, there's a lot of economic activity happening on Robinhood, and a lot of this economic activity is being driven by some of the memecoins as well as some of the stock tokens that have been tokenized on Robinhood. We'll get to talking about some of those and what's happening there.
A lot of this has gotten people excited that hey, maybe in fact Robinhood Chain is working. We are onboarding real normies into crypto again, and all of a sudden there's a new distribution channel that's bringing people back online. This has led to a rally in Arbitrum, which of course they're built on top of the Arbitrum stack, and there's a kickback of fees that the Robinhood Chain generates to Arbitrum. There's also been a discussion about Ethereum, and of course Ethereum does get some of the fees, but a very small amount because these are just data availability fees. It's basically just paying for the right to publish certain data into the Ethereum blockchain, but it doesn't really capture any of the transaction fees or the value in the same way that Arbitrum is doing. So some people have argued, hey, look at this. It shows that there's almost no value that's being captured by the Layer 1. Isn't this bearish for Layer 1s even if it's bullish for Layer 2s or for some of the layers that are actually participating in the rally? Tom, what's your reaction seeing what's happening on Robinhood Chain? Is this the nail in the coffin for L1s being able to benefit from L2s built on top of them?
I thought Tarun was the Robinhood Chain guy.
Yeah, Robinhood Chain guy.
He was the one who was excited to talk about Robinhood Chain. I mean, I am surprised that you have a corpo chain that has this kind of activity. It's also not like—I mean, I guess they do have half the volume in these tokenized stocks, so it's not like totally memecoins, or it's these interesting kind of synergies, which I guess we're going to kind of talk about at some point. But yeah, I don't know. I'm curious what the reaction is internally at Robinhood. I'm sure when they were building this, it was like, "Oh, we have this beautiful vision of this new financial system and 24/7 stock trading and this global permissionless chain," and then it's like, "Oh no, people want to trade vulgar memecoins." There's something very human about it. I don't know.
Tarun, Mr. Robinhood, what do you have to say?
I don't know if I'm Mr. Robinhood, but I would say I enjoy seeing OHM forks show up again when it's like 2026.
Yeah, they're OHM forks. So the most interesting dynamic—and I think Tom is being a little too PC—
For those who don't know, OHM is an old, basically stablecoin-ish Ponzi scheme, basically the best way I can describe it. There were a number of OHM and OHM forks on Ethereum that blew up famously in 2022.
The real protocol survived. That's actually the more important thing, right? The original one is still around. I mean, their treasury is huge.
It did also spawn the (3, 3) meme, which still is around to this day, and I feel like it's outlived it actually.
Survived in the sense that Rome has survived, yes. It's like it ain't what it was.
Yeah, it's true. So anyway, the most interesting thing to me is people have basically—it's too bad Robert's not here because people have basically tried to do the thing he was doing. Do you remember when Robert bought a bunch of this public company and was going to—yeah.
An interesting thing is the OHM forks are sort of using memecoins in a creative way. They're not exactly OHM; the contracts are modified enough, but you can think of them as like some kind of memecoin launchpad where you launch a memecoin and you have to bond to the memecoin, but the asset you pair it with is an underlying stock. So the idea is sort of like, to mint this memecoin, you basically have to buy the stock and you lock some of it into the LP. Imagine you take $100 of stock, you mint, and $10 of your memecoin is locked and $90 is back to you. The 10 that's locked is to provide liquidity, just like this classic bonding curve type of thing, right? The interesting thing is that the stock pairing basically makes a memecoin almost like a token incentive for an individual stock.
If you think about the OHM case, you had OHM, locked OHM, and ETH, right? And ETH was like the stock, and so everything kind of revolved around that. The locked OHM was sort of used for liquidity to make sure that you could trade for ETH, and then the OHM itself was—I'm simplifying things; there's gOHM, sOHM, and some other tokens that we don't need to remind everyone of or of the brain damage from.
I saw the best minds of my generation—
Yeah, that's like that Jeff Hammerbacher quote about the best minds of my generation working in advertising, I guess. But anyway, the main point is that the memecoin is the incentive to mint the stock token. The most famous one that grew a lot over the weekend was the memecoin called BONER, which was paired with HIMS, the online drug retailer who is famous for having, in New York City at least, lots of ads of phallic symbols to represent ED medication you can buy from them on subscription.
The idea was the BONER token was paired with the tokenized Hims stock. Over the weekend, obviously, the Hims stock depegged from the last traded price quite substantially. "Peg" is the wrong word, but deviated from where it traded because—yeah, sorry, there's too many puns here. It's too good.
And so the BONER token kind of was used, almost became a liquidity incentive to mint the Hims token.
The BONER token had a liquidity incentive.
That's why this is beautiful, because you try to avoid any innuendo and you can't avoid it in this. But the most interesting thing is you're using the memecoin the way you use token farming incentives, right? Oftentimes a protocol might issue its governance token so that people deposit liquidity. Here, you're using it to incentivize people minting the RWA, growing the RWA, right? And I think the most interesting thing about this was the user base seems to kind of be like the Solana memecoin traders who were using FOMO, because the experience abstracted it away so much. I think it was like 90,000 of 125,000 addresses originated from FOMO. I saw some statistic like that. I didn't verify it, but FOMO tweeted something like that or said something like that.
That is an interesting thing of: memecoin traders are not loyal to a chain anymore. That was the first lesson I got from this, right? This Solana loyalty thing—there was certainly a time that was true. I think if there's any left, it's gone. But the second thing is using the memecoin as a liquidity incentive to mint this off-chain asset is sort of a very clever hack in some ways.
Well, okay, so I think it's stupider than what you're describing, because what you're describing sounds like the incentive—like maybe Hims is doing this in order to create—
No, no, I don't mean that Hims is trying to do this. I mean people are doing it as a joke, but incredibly they're optimizing Robinhood's KPIs, which are like increase the number of tokenized stock.
Well, it's worse than that. It's worse than that, right? What people are doing is they're getting really excited about this memecoin over the weekend, which is only kept in line by Hims tokenized stock trading with the true value, right? Because people are like, "Oh, this memecoin is running, better buy in now," you buy over the weekend, and Hims has depegged massively. So a bunch of people start buying this meme because they think it's going up, and people on Robinhood or on FOMO are buying it. Of course, on Monday morning when you can start to mint this stock again, everybody who's bought this stock or this memecoin is going to get destroyed by the people who can run the arb, right? So you are handing all of this money—every time one of these memecoins runs up, you're handing all this money in this big massive depeg to hedge funds. That's the thing that everyone's getting so excited about, and people seem to be relishing this.
Again, I think a thing about memecoins that is fundamental to them that I don't get and you don't get because we're unc's or plumbers or whatever the old people are called this cycle—
I think the plumber meme is like the people who were around in DeFi summer who are suddenly going back on-chain are the plumbers.
Yeah. So I'm sidelined. I didn't even download FOMO, I didn't try this. I feel kind of—
I feel like I'm enjoying it more from the reading the smart contract code side, which means my capital is kept away from this, but it's interesting to look at. It's kind of a very fun—this kind of feels like some weird mashup of DeFi summer with the GameStop mania, and then also reminds me of the LA Vape Cabal thing, where basically there's some element of, "Oh look, look at how much money we can lose a little bit."
Yes, exactly. There's entertainment value in losing money. That's what's happening, for sure. That's what's happening.
It's some kind of weird generational—it's sort of like the GameStop—
It's like financial Jackass. That's what this is.
I called it BDSM, but I think Jackass is probably a better girth description.
That also dates us, by the way.
Yeah, but the DeFi summer element is just kind of these super creative people. There's just sort of this frenzy, and all these people are getting in and they're doing all these wild things that they haven't done before. It's kind of like that feeling. To me, I'm watching all this, and obviously I'm older than I'm sure 99% of the people who are engaging in this, so I'm looking at this and I feel like there's something kind of generational. So I know normally we talk—
Yeah, meaning generational anti-wealth, losing all your money.
They're just stupid. What are you saying?
No, because it's not only about that. It's something about the tech. What I'm trying to say is that if we look at the GameStop thing, even that seemed kind of weird, right? Because GameStop obviously wasn't some amazing stock, right? So there is something about—
GameStop, there was a theory that, "Oh, we're going to short squeeze all the hedge funds and we're going to beat Wall Street."
Oh no, no, no, the same thing was here. The same thing was, "We're short squeezing all the hedge funds in Hims by trading this over the weekend."
That really was the meme?
There was a meme, and there was also another one. There was a memecoin called CINEMA which was paired with AMC, and that one was funny because Monday morning market opened and it depegged so badly. The tokenized stock was just trading way below the real one for a long time.
Oh, wow. The problem is that the math doesn't work. These tokenized stocks are tiny compared to the underlying stocks, which was different from GameStop, right? GameStop, it was like, "Oh, all of us are going to come together and we're this huge sea or school of fish."
I'm not saying the logic is the same. I'm just saying there is something about the mob coming and they can use this technology. With GameStop, they were doing things with actual stocks, but it's more like this kind of internet—it's sort of like 4chan meets DeFi meets stock tokens. Do you understand what I'm saying? It's more like an online behavior.
It kind of rhymes, yes. It kind of rhymes if you zoom way up.
That's what I meant about generational and cultural. That's what I'm talking about.
The problem—okay, so I think—
I'm not talking about the logic.
The logic obviously cannot work. Ask your AI. People have AI now, right? If you're like, "Hey, I have this idea that I think we can short squeeze people by buying a memecoin," ask your AI. It will be like, "Are you a fucking idiot? No, give me your keys. You're not allowed to touch this."
Yeah, no, I'm talking about behavior. That's what I'm talking about.
The other thing is there's no proletariat against Wall Street thing going on here. It feels to me much more like these are memecoins, these ones are running, here's a new game. You don't understand this new game. Every cycle there's a new game. This is an RWA-themed game because RWAs are the thing, and here's how you can play a stupid speculative game that is RWA-themed. That's what this feels like.
No, but I will say one thing that is kind of interesting is this meme mania got much more Uniswap v4 hook usage than Uniswap got in its entire time. A lot of important pieces—a lot of the forks of these Ethereum protocols, it wasn't like the code was wrong; they were just kind of launched in a weird market. They didn't have a fervor to incentivize people to build things. I think that's the interesting thing about this: there was no new code written. This is like a mashup of a lot of existing protocols. There's one OHM fork—I think that one is called Net Capital—and there's PAWNS, which is even more funny, that PAWNS is like the Uniswap v4 token, their v2 thing. I just think, hey, look, if something is going to incentivize people to go use this code that people wrote, and it's going to maybe at least temporarily increase the net supply of these tokenized RWAs, am I going to be complaining? Because otherwise, you kind of need some fervor.
Yeah, I was going to say with enough demand you can get new issuance, and total RWA issuance on Robinhood Chain has gone up. I think they're up to like $70–80 million. And so, for some of these low-cap public companies, you can imagine a world where—
$70–80 million total across the entire chain?
Okay. And how big is the base of RWAs or RWA equities?
You mean like $3 billion-ish?
Yeah, that also includes—
I feel like a lot of that are tokenized Treasuries and money market funds rolled up.
I think the $3 billion is equities. It's Ondo plus Backed plus xStocks is like three to four.
Yeah, I had to look this up recently.
Mainly what that tells you is this is not an accelerant for the tokenization boom.
No, but before they had basically no minting. There was sub a few million total, and over the weekend on Robinhood—so I'm just saying, look—
They came for the BONER, they stayed for the HIMS, and maybe the HIMS stays minted.
No. So I think the right way to understand this is that, you know, I often describe a lot of the memecoin stuff as casinos.
Why do you want people to have fun?
Why do you want people to have fun?
Because like a good casino operator, it's important how people have fun.
The hold rate is already like 6%.
So why are you making it worse with this kind of stuff? It's definitely going to result in capital destruction.
Yeah, I know. But see, honestly, I feel like this is kind of a very similar point to what I was making last time when I was on here and I was talking about MSTR and STRK, and you guys only were looking at it literally through the math. I was trying to explain that the larger point was about human psychology. I feel like sometimes you're so stuck in always looking at things like a VC. But look at the whole entire memecoin mania: you had 99% of all people losing money on this, but it went for a very long time, it's still going on, and you don't get it and you keep saying, "Oh, it doesn't make sense," and whatever. Yeah, okay, right, if you're looking at it super rationally through the numbers, right, it doesn't make sense. But that's what I was trying to say about it being a cultural thing. That's what I meant about my LA Vape Cabal comments. There's something where it's frankly just very nihilist, which I know is like the commentary about memecoins generally, but it is almost like—and I would even apply this to prediction markets actually also, because that's another place where, yeah, people lose money, but it's almost like—
Look, we are investors in prediction markets. We understand that people gamble and people do stupid stuff. People buy memecoins. Obviously, we invest in crypto, we get that. But there's a difference between, "Okay, I'm going to go buy some stock or some token or whatever that I think maybe it's 100x," and "I am going to play a game that I'm guaranteed to lose." That's bad. We should not encourage that. We should not talk about that as though that's okay.
I'm not making a moral judgment on it, which I agree with you, those aren't good things. All I'm trying to say is I'm watching this, and to me, that's why earlier I was saying I'm seeing something generational. I was talking about something generational or cultural, because I agree with you, it doesn't make sense, but we're seeing the same pattern over and over again.
Laura's an anthropologist. She's not passing judgment. Look, someone is getting some utility out of it. It's not financial utility, but it's some utility. I don't know what they're measuring it in.
No, people believe they are getting utility out of it.
Have you watched some of these streams? I don't think they're going to have money very soon if they keep doing this.
Okay, thank you. Thank you, grandfather. Thank you. You sound like a grandfather lecturing a child.
Look, it's kind of our role now is to be grandfathers for the industry. I get it, I get it. I'm just saying let them if they want to have fun. I'm not here to stop you.
Yeah. No, but I agree. So I agree with Haseeb. My comments before were observational, but I agree with Haseeb, and the reason why I agree that it's really not good is because with this bear market, we truly saw—it just really felt like retail evaporated. They just got super fucking wrecked. Like the whole memecoin thing, they just completely wrote off crypto. It's funny, I had Jeff Dorman on the show, and we were talking about how actually when you look at so many objective measures, crypto is in a better position than ever. I was saying, "Oh, but it makes sense that sentiment is down so bad despite the facts given the whole memecoin craze." And he couldn't understand what I was saying or he couldn't see that perspective, and I was so confused. How can you not understand this? It doesn't matter what the facts are. If you were in the trenches and you were losing money constantly, you were going to feel down bad, and you don't care like, "Oh, stablecoins are being adopted, we have the GENIUS Act." You don't care about the ETFs, you don't care about any of that stuff. It just doesn't matter. The fact that crypto is in a better position than ever just doesn't matter. So anyway, I agree with Haseeb, it is bad. My first points were just observational. Now I'm saying, if I'm going to make a judgment, I agree with Haseeb.
I just don't know what you can—you can't really stop people from—the point of a blockchain is to let them go.
Look, I'm not telling you, "Look, you're not allowed to deploy on fucking Robinhood Chain" or whatever. Obviously you can. But here's the perspective I come from, right? We started this year from the perspective of retail has been destroyed. The memecoin supply chain has just been absolutely scalping people, and all the people in the middle who are getting paid, like the LIBORAs of the world, and just all the scandals that have plagued memecoins right now. We're getting to a place where it's not just, "Oh, we're in this big Ouija board and some of them go up and some of them go down." Now literally you are mechanizing things that will definitely result in things going down. Even if nobody building the memecoin makes money, the hedge funds will make money.
So I think crypto has this way—and I think we talked about this last time with ThreadGuy on the show—that anytime there's a new primitive, crypto finds a way to remix it and create a new game, right? I thought that maybe it's going to be AI, there's a new AI capability and that's going to get people excited and it's going to drive a new cycle. Turns out it's RWA. What can you do new with RWA? I didn't think there was much, but turns out this is something you can do with RWAs that creates a new game, and it's pretty stupid. You're almost certainly going to lose money if you do it, but it's a new game. People clearly on Twitter did not foresee that this was how it would end up. But if you spent 10 minutes thinking about it and talking to your AI, they would tell you, "Here's exactly what's going to happen to your stupid memecoin."
In the future, I actually think there are going to be so many tokens and there's going to be so much value floating around all the time that I actually do think that—I know this is a weird thing to say—there will be ways where people entertain themselves and they lose money in the process. But is that that different from you literally go to a concert or you go to a comedy show and you're spending the money? Is it that different? Either way, you—
I think you need to torture yourself for about 12 hours and watch a bunch of streams. It's a worthwhile endeavor to understand that there's this entertainment value that's completely divorced from the memecoin. Watching someone lose their—it's a thing. You just have to respect that there's like a professional gambler. I understand that people gamble and it's fun, right?
Okay, but separate from gambling, let's talk about as entertainment. How much do you think you spend on entertainment a month?
It doesn't even matter what the amount is. Let's say it's $500. If you were to play around with these memecoins and you get entertainment value out of it, and you end up losing $500 a month on it, is it that different?
Yes, it's very different. It's very different. The reason why it's very different is that the person who is playing around with the memecoins, they don't think they're spending $500. They think they're making $500. They are deluded. And they are deluded because they've been informed by some memecoin influencer that, "Oh, you should get into this trade, you're going to make a bunch of money, you're going to get financial freedom, lever up your—"
That's why the memecoin thing was so bad last year. But what if they're doing this in a group chat and they're trading memes with their friends? Then, okay.
Are people who did this last year happy that they were like, "I got so much entertainment out of all the money I lost last year on memecoins"? Do you read this coin?
I'm not trying to say that you're wrong, but I'm just saying there's some demographic that this is an entertainment source.
You go to a casino, people in a casino know why they're there. They are not confused. They don't think they're making money. They know that they are being entertained. Nobody in the casino is telling them, "Actually, you're making money playing a slot machine," or "You're actually making money playing roulette." A casino is honest, straightforward, transparent. Right now, if you're buying a stock or if you're buying a crypto asset that represents a real thing, then you are potentially going to make money, and it's a matter of your judgment whether or not you succeed. If you are YOLOing into some memecoins that an influencer is telling you to buy, you are almost certainly losing money.
You and I know that. We have the stats. We saw what happened over Pump.fun buyers over the course of 2025. It's like 95% of people lost money, right? The odds are overwhelming that you are losing money doing this. The problem is not that people are losing money; it's that they think they're making money. That's the problem.
Tom, you haven't weighed in at all.
I don't know. I think it's almost sort of like a question of, is it strictly zero-sum? I think to your point, I actually think the entertainment value is the fact that there are paper gains for people, and that's the thing that—as long as no one sells, the thing goes up, and then people think that they're making money for a long period of time. So that's maybe the kind of pernicious thing that you're calling out, versus literally for a sports bet or playing roulette or something, there's just a very transactional dollar amount that sort of goes through and there isn't sort of this inflated paper wealth thing. I think that's the kind of thing that maybe traps people, or I think you feel it's kind of cruel.
Yeah, I think especially if you're designing these things, right? Obviously people are now copying this mechanism. It's the hot thing. I've been reading all these posts about, "Oh, this is the new meta," and blah blah blah blah. What does that mean? That means that the supply chain of memecoin grifters is out in full force and they're going to create a bunch of these, and they're going to market them, and they're going to hire the influencers, and they're going to do the whole thing. We know how this industry works. It was all gruesomely unveiled to us over the course of 2025 when the last cycle blew up. Those people aren't gone. They don't have anything else to do that's going to make them this kind of money.
Now, I do think this mechanism is so brutally inefficient that they will quickly move away from this, right? You only need a couple weekends before people realize, "Oh, don't do this one. This one is not good." It leads to a very short half-life. But the meta of, "Oh, find a memecoin and attach it to some RWA," that's definitely going to continue. And in principle, look, I think if you're buying memecoins, you're probably going to lose money. I think the data is pretty irrefutable on that. That said, as long as you understand what you're doing, cool. Have fun, do your thing. I just think there's a cynicism about the simplicity of saying, "Oh well, caveat emptor. What, are you going to regulate the blockchain?" No, that's not what I'm saying. But I am saying that we as a voice in the industry, I think it's important to kind of mark where you stand, because people make choices about what they advocate for and what they promote.
For what it's worth, I'm not trying to say you should go put—this is not me giving financial advice, but I think it's funny to watch. There's something fundamentally funny about this idea that with RWAs, no one can fucking organically induce them on-chain, right? Look at the number of RWA launches that have had trouble getting liquidity on-chain, getting users, getting distribution. And then this shitty memecoin is increasing RWA distribution in a way that—
We just established it's like—
No, no, no. The difference is actually a lot of the RWA issuance on-chain is mainly whale issuance in a lot of RWAs. This is all pure $5, $10 tiny retail bets. So I think there's kind of an interesting thing here: this is exciting to the GameStop small trader. It's not like I can disagree with your moralization; it's more that I just think how the fuck did they convince someone to incentivize RWAs? They're the hardest thing to incentivize because it's like the no-fun, anti-token industry part of crypto, and this thing found a way to shove a token in, right? That's the impressive part.
Yeah. I mean, the $70 million, that's also up 50% week-on-week, and some days there's several times more pure stock volume than memecoin and stock volume. So there is a possibility that maybe people stick around or maybe people go and they just use this as a primary venue for trading. I don't know.
More stock volume than meme volume? How's that possible?
On some days, yeah, versus the paired assets. People want to trade RWAs or they want to go buy some. It's not every day, but some days it is the case.
It's probably because they're depegging them so hard. That's what's—
Yeah, that's also possible. I haven't looked into it.
That's probably what that is. Wow, okay.
