Dear Robinhood, please do not build a memecoin chain.
Why Tokenized Equities, not memecoins, will help Robinhood get to $10B+ of revenue in 2030.
Dear Vlad and Johann,
Robinhood Chain is off to a fast start to democratize finance for all in <1 month.
>300K Daily Active Addresses
>$1B Daily Spot DEX Volume (#3 among chains)
>$300m of stablecoin supply
+$40m Annualized Daily Fees on Robinhood Chain
>$300M+ in TVL driven by Morpho, Ethena, Uniswap, etc
Artemis Robinhood Chain Dashboard: https://www.artemis.ai/create/dashboard/334077439341928255
I invested in Robinhood back in 2019 at Whale Rock (L/S Hedgefund) in a pre-IPO round and covered the Coinbase IPO roadshow back in 2020. I started Artemis to focus people on investing in real enduring assets in crypto and equities vs speculate on memecoins.
I was horrified and sad when I went into my Robinhood Wallet last week and saw that I could really only trade meme coins and in just 3 days since buying a nominal amount of $CASCHAT, I’ve been air dropped a ton of random and meaningless tokens (including a token called “Pointless Coin”)
Yes, Robinhood is #3 in spot DEX volume today.
BUT, majority of DEX volume is still primarily meme coins (animal memes, vlad and robinhood memes, or general memes). PLEASE, Robinhood DO NOT build a meme coin chain.
There’s a lot of learnings for Robinhood Crypto from Coinbase’s Base as it’s still a much larger chain today.
Brian Armstrong even doubled down on the quote of steering folks to real and enduring use cases in his reply.
I get the temptation as meme coins are a great way to attract early users, partners that drive liquidity and volumes (come for the memes, stay for real use cases). Large independent projects are able to flourish like Aerodrome which dominate volumes on Base and has built a real business model)
But memecoins lose people money and destroy trust.
Look no further than the Base meme coins that were launched in early 2024 that are down another 90% this year. (Down 99% from the peak in early 2024).
Meme coins AREN’T durable and hurt customers and further alienates retail from using blockchains.
Also memecoins on Robinhood Chain further the sentiment from Wall Street and Hedgefunds that Robinhood is the meme stock trading app embroidered in the GME / meme stock mania of early 2021.
Tweets like these don’t help:
Wall Street struggles to understand Robinhood as is. DO NOT double down on what hurt the brand in 2021.
Instead, focus liquidity and attention on the Robinhood Wallet and ecosystem on Arcus (former dydx team, OG / early leading perp DEX) and tokenized stocks. I love that Arcus today allows anyone in the world to trade spot tokenized stocks globally.
These stocks are up only in the last decade.
Please ACTUALLY focus on RWAs on Robinhood chain to expand financial access to more and more investors who can trade stocks and pre-IPO companies. Teams like RWA.xyz and Artemis would gladly help highlight these use cases.
Robinhood’s biggest bear case is its fully saturated the U.S market with 27m funded accounts and the street modeling to 31-32M funded accounts in FY2028 which is not explosive.
My bull case for Robinhood is access to 100M+ more international investors who can now invest in RWAs, prediction markets, stablecoins, public companies and pre-IPO stocks through Robinhood Chain and act as an early top of funnel for Robinhood App.
There’s real demand for 24/7/365 tokenized stocks -- look no further than Trade.xyz on Hyperliquid where people are trading primarily equities like SK Hynix which does $68B of actual revenue and is a real business that people want access to.
If through Robinhood Chain, Robinhood grows to say 100M MAUs in 2030 and ARPU is currently ~$171 and say international users have lower ARPU because they’re paying Chain Fees instead of trading through Robinhood App which has higher take rates, and ARPU is $100. That’s $10B of revenue on just consumer revenue alone in 2030 and beats the streets estimate of $8.78B by FY29.
Vlad and Johann, you have the opportunity to fulfill crypto’s promise of enabling anyone to access finance through tokenizing assets.
Please don’t f*ck it up by making Robinhood a memecoin chain.
Wall Street, your customers and the world will thank you for it.
Sincerely,
Jon Ma
Robinhood User since 2017.