AJC - Turning an 80% Nuke Into $3 Million on Robinhood Chain
AJC turned a roughly $25,000 position made after Ponds collapsed 80% in one day into an almost $3 million, mostly unrealized FOMO-account position. He bought near a $4 million valuation because he believed Robinhood Chain’s leading launchpad should eventually command nine figures. After holding through a run to 60 and a fall to 10, he now sells in roughly $1,000 increments while “watching the piggy bank grow.”
Robinhood’s distribution makes its chain a structural contender, even if the current frenzy marks a local peak. AJC compares the setup to Solana in Q4 2023 or baseline Q1 2024: an upstart ecosystem early in a longer expansion. Robinhood reportedly generated about $3 million of network revenue in one day, while its broader stated vision—putting stocks, collectibles, and other portfolio assets onchain—“has not happened yet.”
The discussion favors owning both Ponds and Pump rather than forcing a zero-sum ecosystem trade. AJC would choose Pump over SOL, while Thread Guy argued that Pump and Ponds can both thrive. Launchpads exhibit unusually clear crypto product-market fit because users keep generating millions in daily revenue even in a bear market. Thread Guy said a fivefold Pump recovery could raise the valuation ceiling for Ponds rather than kill it.
AJC used an extreme valuation comparison to support both launchpads. He cited Pump’s FDV-to-buyback multiple at roughly 10x–15%, compared with about 0.2x for Bags when he held it, and said the figure had since been in the 1x–2x range. He argued that both Pump and Ponds could remain attractive expressions of an onchain bull market.
The token-launch playbook may have reversed from “wait” to “day one or never.” Ponds’ community launched a token whose proceeds were directed 80% toward redemption, giving users confidence that fees would not simply accrue to operators. AJC’s conclusion: “I want to see a day-one token, and I want to see a token that benefits me,” because tokens remain unusually effective at aligning incentives and capturing attention.
Stock-paired meme coins could create a new trading primitive by linking cultural speculation directly to the asset it represents. In Thread Guy’s HIMS/BONER example, buying $100 of BONER routes value through tokenized HIMS shares into the liquidity pool. The attraction is “let’s connect meme coins to something that makes sense”; the danger is thin liquidity, market-hours-only redemption, and enormous weekend depegs.
Thread Guy remains bullish on Bitcoin but calls this his worst of three bear markets because its cause was unusually opaque. Holding around $60,000 despite heavy pressure suggested the worst might have passed, absent a macro collapse, which he declined to forecast because it is outside his expertise. His distilled view: crypto is now “looking for reasons to grow,” after exhausting many of its reasons to decline.
1. The $3 million trade began with an 80% collapse
AJC initially missed Robinhood Chain’s launch, assuming he had time, but Vlad’s engagement with Cash Cat convinced him the company treated the ecosystem as strategically important rather than experimental. When a competing launchpad closed, Ponds emerged with the strongest mindshare.
Ponds first ran to roughly $18 million, leaving AJC sidelined, before an 80% one-day collapse took it near a $4 million valuation. He believed the eventual category leader belonged in the nine figures, making roughly $25,000 of downside acceptable: “The opportunity is too good to miss.”
The path was brutal: Ponds rose to 60, fell to 10, and AJC sold none during that round trip. With the FOMO account now approaching $3 million, he is trimming about $1,000 whenever he opens the app—but readily admits he is not good at recognizing peaks.
2. Robinhood’s advantage is distribution, not merely another L2
Thread Guy’s framing was that “the first-mover advantage feels like a punishment” in crypto because later entrants inherit earlier failures. Robinhood arrived with a coherent plan, embraced memecoins, and promoted the ecosystem aggressively, avoiding the hesitant execution that undermined earlier corporate chains.
AJC found Robinhood’s embrace of onchain speculation surprising but logical: Dogecoin and Shiba had already demonstrated the disposition of its retail audience. Crypto users felt abandoned by incumbent exchanges and chains; America’s largest retail exchange for young people arrived “welcoming us with open arms.”
His stage comparison is Solana in Q4 2023 or baseline Q1 2024, not a completed cycle. Roughly $3 million of daily network revenue may signal a local peak after a violent run, but the broader vision discussed—putting stocks and collectibles onchain, with products such as lending and “weather trading” layered on top—has not happened yet.
The conditional call is explicit: if crypto enters a bull market over the next six to 12 months, AJC expects activity to concentrate on Robinhood Chain. Mainstream users already associate Robinhood with legitimacy, giving promoted onchain products a distribution advantage native crypto networks cannot easily reproduce.
3. Launchpad cash flow supports both Ponds and Pump
Thread Guy rejected a strictly PvP framing. Pump and Ponds compete for users and flow, but he noted that Pump and Virtuals both grew during Q4 2024; a Pump recovery to prior highs could lift the valuation ceiling for every launchpad. AJC agreed there was no need to force a pair trade.
If forced to choose between SOL and Pump, AJC would choose Pump. Launchpads are among crypto’s clearest product-market-fit businesses: even deep in a bear market, “these people show up every day to bet,” producing millions in revenue while ostensibly institutional projects struggle to match them.
The comparison began with a valuation discrepancy: AJC cited Pump’s FDV-to-buyback multiple at about 10x–15%, versus approximately 0.2x for Bags when he held it. He said the figure had since been in the 1x–2x range, yet a renewed onchain bull market could leave both Pump and Ponds attractive.
Ponds also changed the discussion of token timing. Its community—not the company—launched a platform token directing 80% of proceeds to redemption, assuring users that operators could not simply retain every fee. The emerging horseshoe rule was: “Either you launch the coin on the day of your product launch, or you never launch the coin at all.”
4. Stock-paired memes turn culture into underlying-asset demand
AJC’s thesis carries over from Zora: an AMM can bind the value of two assets. A viral Saratoga-water personality once produced a meme coin that fell to about $20 million while Saratoga stock rose roughly 100%, but the assets were economically disconnected; pairing the meme directly with the stock would join that attention and value.
Thread Guy’s HIMS/BONER example makes the mechanism concrete. Spend $100 of USDG on BONER and, as he explained it, the cash first acquires HIMS shares; those shares enter the HIMS-BONER liquidity pool, while the buyer receives the equivalent value in BONER. With no other trading, movement in HIMS changes the pool and therefore BONER’s implied value, though buying and selling can change the ratio.
Thread Guy cited roughly $40,000 of AMC liquidity and AMC trading around $400 onchain during a severe dislocation. Arbitrageurs can capture such premiums, but stock tokens can be created or redeemed only during market or possibly extended hours, leaving weekend discrepancies unresolved.
AJC imagined Robinhood offering an official APE/AMC pairing for a company with roughly a $2 billion market cap. He kept the caveats: he did not know the legal limits on direct corporate issuance, demand might remain crypto-native, and thin markets invite distortion. Thread Guy added that smaller companies might use these assets for community benefits, perks, or access, attracting buyers who would never otherwise own the stock.
5. Bitcoin is hunting for a reason to rise
Thread Guy remains “forever a supporter of Bitcoin.” Holding near $60,000 through intense selling pressure made him think the worst might have occurred; the exception would be a full macro collapse, which he explicitly declined to forecast because it is outside his expertise.
This was nevertheless the worst of his three bear markets. Previous failures had legible causes—Ponzi collapses and implosions—whereas the latest weakness remained hard to explain. “If you don’t know what caused the weakness, you don’t know when it will go away.”
His current read is bullish consolidation after strong upward momentum. He cannot identify the next catalyst, but believes the market’s reaction function has changed: “Cryptocurrency is now looking for reasons to grow. And eventually it will find reasons to grow.”
Full transcript
AJC, how are you doing, man? Welcome to the stream. What is happening?
Glad to be back. I remembered that the last time you were here, I said this might be good for my future earnings—a lagging indicator, since we usually agree on a lot of things.
It seems you were at Zora recently.
It happened twice. It was Zora, and that was also when the cards started falling.
Cards, yes. And then in December, I was talking about something like Messari’s thesis and some kind of jazz.
Yes, yes. It’s good to be back. It was a crazy time for cryptocurrency, so it’s always good to be present when there’s something to talk about.
I like how we broke it down into something good to talk about, and now this is something like no other. First of all, congratulations. Now you have a real solar run. We were just looking at your FOMO account. I think it’s worth almost $3 million, and almost everything is unrealized.
I realize that. I’m selling slowly, but I don’t like it. I’m not one to fill out a schedule completely, so almost every time I open my FOMO app, I just sell $1,000 worth of bonds or something.
I’ll tell you what: you’re a better person than me. I think you’re in the top 10 on the leaderboard right now. Could you tell me how your last month was? You’re smart, you understand money, and you’re a good trader, but you’re going through a generational run right now. Tell me about it.
It’s all thanks to Robinhood, thankfully. I won’t lie: I kind of missed the initial stage of Robinhood’s network development. This was because Misor [?] acquired Blockworks, so I just settled in. I didn’t really like trading, and I knew the Robinhood network would thrive, but I thought I had time—as if it wouldn’t go crazy.
Then Vlad went after Cash Cat, and things changed from there. Luckily, there was such an opportunity because Noosa just closed for some reason. They simply gave up on the golden goose. At that point, as I was watching, I thought to myself, “Okay, Robinhood is taking care of the Robinhood network. This is obviously something important to them.”
You could tell from Vlad’s tweets that this wasn’t a whim. I think a lot of people got excited because there have been a lot of network launches that just don’t work or don’t make sense, but this is Robinhood—a whole different beast.
I was looking at the launchpads and saw that Ponds had the most popularity outside of Noosa. Then I got completely sidelined. It went up to about $18 million or something, and then Brian changed his PFP to this meme coin. Complete capitulation for all memecoins. Pons fell as if I had traded him too. Pons fell 80% in 1 day.
I thought, “Okay, this is my chance.” I already think that the best launchpad in the Rama network costs somewhere in the 9-figure range. This is the leader now with $4 million. So I’m losing $25,000 on this? The opportunity is too good to miss.
There were a lot of ups and downs. For example, Pons rose to 60, then fell to 10, and I didn’t sell at all. During this time, there was endless PvP on the launchpad, but in the end, I won. I think part of it is because it had a token. We can look into this in more detail later.
There’s been some re-evaluation over the last 2 weeks, and I’ve just been watching the charts and how my thesis is developing. It was chaotic, but not too much. All the complicated part was already done. At the moment, I’m just watching the piggy bank grow, I guess.
Congratulations. I was going to talk about this earlier in the stream, but I forgot. I wrote in my Telegram earlier that, in many ways, the first-mover advantage feels like a punishment in cryptocurrency.
There’s an example with the NFT launcher. There’s an example from Vector. There are many examples where you act too early, and then someone comes after you who is more willing to take the risk because they know what went wrong.
Interestingly, when Robinhood launched, I was in the camp of, “Yeah, whatever.” It’s strange to think about. Robinhood’s approach, in my opinion, is very interesting.
Maybe other exchange networks would have taken a similar approach if they had launched later, but Robinhood came out with a whole plan. They really cared about the network within the network, got into memecoins, and moved aggressively every step of the way.
No mistakes, no triple shilling, no weird spin-off, no intro—none of those mistakes that happen with corporate movements onchain. It was just timed. It seems to have been timed. A soft shill on Cash Cat’s income statement, as if it was rigged from the start.
Did that surprise you?
Yes and no. I think Robinhood is such a huge company that, if they wanted their chain to be successful, they could make it successful. They have all the ingredients.
The way they relied on existing degeneracy in the chain was a bit strange at first, but I guess it makes sense. Think back to 2021, when Dogecoin and Shiba soared thanks to Robinhood. They have a user base that is very friendly toward that.
In that light, it makes sense that they took advantage of it, and I think maybe we should give them a little more credit. They realized the possibility. They realized that everyone onchain was being pushed aside by the existing offerings from exchanges and chains, or that we simply felt abandoned.
It was like nobody cared about us anymore. Then the largest retail exchange in America for young people came in, opened up, and welcomed us with open arms. It was kind of like a cool uncle.
I think it was a little strange that they went down this path, but I don’t think it’s strange at all that the Robinhood Chain is successful, if that makes sense.
That’s a good idea. How are you playing out your active portfolio positions right now, and what do you think about the evolution of Robinhood’s real takeoff over the last 2 weeks? At what stage of development are we currently?
It’s hard to say. I’m pretty good at telling when things are about to start, but once they start, I just hit the gas, and I usually end up trading back and forth.
That happens to me.
I’m not sure I’m the most qualified person, but you could definitely argue that it’s more like Solana in Q4 2023 or baseline Q1 2024, where the ecosystem is an upstart and it’s going to be a much longer growth story.
This is not a short-term growth phase. This is just the beginning. Obviously, I’m completely set on that point of view, so I hope that’s correct.
I find it hard to believe that the Robinhood Chain is a slim prospect if Robinhood is sincerely trying to get all of its stocks on the network and open up the world of DeFi to them.
Sorry. Sorry about that.
No, everything is fine.
I wanted to say “Bless you,” but I didn’t pre-sell.
I lost my train of thought, but if they’re really going to invest in blockchain, I saw Vlad on a podcast saying, “I’d like to do stocks, collectibles—pretty much anything that you can put in your portfolio, put it on the blockchain.”
That hasn’t happened yet. So if it hasn’t happened yet, I have a hard time believing that the Robinhood Chain has peaked.
It’s clear that the craze around memecoins and meme stocks has gone crazy. I think the Robinhood Chain had about $3 million in network revenue yesterday, which seems like it would blow every L2 out of the water.
It could definitely be reaching a local peak, but I think that if we get back into a bull market, cryptocurrency is no longer terrible, and the price action is not bad, the action will be on the Robinhood Chain.
This is simply too powerful a distribution regime. The average person, who is not very familiar with cryptocurrency, associates legitimacy with Robinhood. They will see promotions on the Robinhood network and feel comfortable using these products.
The products layered on top of it essentially allow for weather trading, lending, and launching meme stocks, as if people would be comfortable with that.
My position is that there might be a local peak because of how hard things have gone, but I don’t think it’s going to be a local peak after which people just go back to their old networks.
If you believe in a bull market over the next 6–12 months, you need to be in the Robinhood Chain. This is how you will be best positioned to benefit from this movement.
This is a completely unproductive sidebar, so I’ll just say it and move on. I’ve seen a mainnet like ETH make about $4,000 in all-time fees on a Robinhood-like L2. It’s such a disaster, but never mind.
You have a huge bag of stakes, and a couple of months ago I started getting really interested in onchain technologies again—namely, Pump. Ansem launches, Cash Cat launches, and two of them are participating in 9-figure exchanges.
My first thought was, “Oh my God, onchain is going to go crazy.” Pump’s revenue is disgusting. Solana is the obvious ecosystem here, but I don’t really like the SOL token, so I buy Bitcoin.
This plays into Bitcoin’s hands. The ecosystem starts going crazy, and cryptocurrency moves much faster than any market. Suddenly, 2 weeks later—or even 10 days later—it’s complete Robinhood dominance.
Even saying the word Solana live now feels taboo.
It’s crazy how fast this is happening. What do you think about Ponds versus Pump as a trade, and then the Solana ecosystem versus the Robinhood ecosystem as a trade?
I’d like to be long on both. I don’t think they—I mean, yes, they are. Are you long Pump? I am not. I’m not long Pump now. I’m spiritually long Pump. I want this to continue growing.
I definitely don’t hate Pump. But, yeah, if you want to think of it as a PvP market, Pons and Pump compete for the same set of users, the same streams, and so on. But I want to take a more optimistic view of abundance and believe that the Robinhood network will attract more users, which will have an impact on Solana and so on. I think they can both thrive for success.
Think, for example, about the fourth quarter of 2024, when Pump’s revenue was growing at a parabolic rate, but so was Virtuals. They were both fair. So I definitely don’t want to assume that these two PvP projects have to play against each other, or that you have to choose one over the other. I think a world where Pump grows 5x from now, going back to all-time highs or something, is very good for Pons, as it raises the ceiling for all launchpads.
I agree that I don’t have any SOL. If I had to choose between Pump and SOL, I would choose Pump. I think it’s more because launchpads are very interesting in the sense that they’re one of the clearest examples of product-market fit that cryptocurrency has.
You’ve mentioned this many times. They make millions of dollars in revenue per day in the depths of a bear market. If they’re able to do this, then they have a user base. You can call this user base what you want, but these people show up every day to bet on this shit.
I’m not one to hate, but cryptocurrency has swung so much toward the capital allocator—institutions, for example. What will institutions like? How do we serve them? I think launchpads are constantly undervalued because it’s not like institutions are going to care about this shit.
But look at Pump.fun’s revenue compared to all other institutional crypto projects. It seems to exceed all expectations. So, for me, this is a perfect pattern in a bear market. You have something that fits the product market, and you have something with ultra-low multiples because capital is pushed to the background.
Pump, I think, is still a great expression of that, but I think Ponds is also a great expression. Part of my bullish post for Ponds was this: just look at Pump.fun’s revenue, look at Ponds’ revenue, and look at the market cap and what they’re buying back. Do a multiple. For example, the Pump.fun FDV-to-buyback multiple was in the 10x to 15x range. When I held my position in Bags, it was about 0.2x. I think it’s been in the 1x to 2x range since then.
But if you’re strictly taking the view that on-chain is in a bull market, it’s a very easy argument to make that both Pump and Ponds are undervalued, and there’s no need to enter into a pairwise trade between them. If you’re going to do a pair trade, I say it’s a long position on both.
What do you think about Ponds’ revenue when you consider that the best coins on Robinhood simply aren’t Ponds coins?
I think that’s a problem in general. I’m like, what happens if a launchpad launches the coin? I don’t know if that’s true.
I think I’m coming to this horseshoe theory: either you launch the coin on the day of your product launch, or you never launch the coin at all. I think that’s why Ponds was successful.
People used to think, “Oh, you don’t want to launch a coin for your launchpad right away because that sets an implicit ceiling on the coin.” But I think people have realized that, because they’ve been hit over the head so many times with these horrible tokens that trick you, if they don’t immediately see that there’s consensus around a token, they know they’re not going to be attacked. They have no incentive to use your platform.
So I think that’s why Bags was extremely successful. Ponds weren’t even the ones who launched the token. The community launched it. They became CTOs and said, “Hey, this is our platform token. Eighty percent of the proceeds go to its redemption.” It’s like, “Hey, I’m comfortable using this platform now, knowing that they have a token they genuinely care about.” They’re not going to just take all the commissions into their own pockets.
I think this is a very interesting lesson because it’s a complete 180-degree turn from last year, when it felt like you didn’t want to launch a token to begin with.
Yeah. For me, it’s something like this: if you’re launching a new product, I want to see a day-one token, and I want to see a token that benefits me. Another good example of this is FWA. Obviously, it hasn’t been doing very well lately, but this coin is still—
I love it too. I’m fully positioned. I think this will be its day in the sun.
Another great example like this wouldn’t have traction if it weren’t for the token. I think we hate tokens so much that we forget why they’re good, and that they’re great at aligning incentives and capturing attention. Pond and FWA are two examples of this.
Ponds’ success seems to have improved a bit, so I think it’s going to be kind of a new rule: either you launch your token on day one, or you never launch your token at all.
Dude, I actually think this is one of the most important shifts that has ever happened in blockchain and cryptocurrency. We realized that we had reached a social consensus on what a good coin looks like, and that is: make money and redeem tokens, because coins are simply the best mechanism for attracting attention and capital.
This is the one thing cryptocurrency is incredibly good at—attracting attention and raising initial capital. The problem is always what the hell to do with it later. Nobody really seems to know, and then Hyperliquid comes along and says, “Oh, you know what? We have an idea of what we’ll do next. We’re just going to exchange this coin for the devil.”
Hyperliquid is a bit unique because they make an asymmetrically large amount of money, and they don’t need any of it for some reason. They’re already rich, and so on. There are no investors, and they don’t need any of this. So they’re in this kind of unique position to do this. Don’t expect every coin to be hype.
And then you get the hype, and then you start—I don’t know. It’s like you just keep going from coin to coin. Then you like maps. Then you like FWA. Then we get to the line itself.
It’s like, “Okay, all these coins that are making money have a provision for this. Some will be able to afford a higher redemption percentage than others, and some will make a lot more money than others.” But this signaling of consistency didn’t last long, and it led to as much steam, pain, and money being wasted on belief as on a founder who doesn’t believe. They sell on the backend, right? They sell over the counter. And that’s pretty cool.
And I think, as a continuation of some of the things onchain, you’re a good follower even before—I don’t know—3:00 a.m. publicly in about a month, because you’re always pretty up to date with a new, cool thing onchain.
You were really on social media. Me too. It didn’t go very well. You were in the trenches, I get it. It’s like you’re taking on confidentiality. I remember you talking a lot about Railgun, for example. You’re quite keen on the new game onchain.
I’ve said this before: the current game onchain is probably the most ambitious of all the previous ones. Cryptocurrency has been able to create something out of thin air for many years—for example, bringing value to the air. We’re making something like artificial intelligence coins. Then we do something like DeFi. It’s really cool, but it’s kind of exploitative, and we’re borrowing on garbage.
Now it’s like you’re getting the most valuable, most reliable, and safest assets in the world onchain. It’s like, “Okay, I have some faith in the ability of cryptocurrency to make something out of nothing here.”
I’m curious about stock memecoins. What stage are you at with your broader thesis? Why is this cool, how big can this become, and where is this going to go next? Are you some kind of giga-bullish on the coin-to-stock pairings in stock memecoins?
Yes. It’s funny that you mentioned Zora a few times, because my thesis regarding Zora actually overlaps with this. One of the reasons I was optimistic about Zora was that they understood the power of underlying AMM pools: you can combine the value of two assets together, essentially.
That’s what attracted me to Zora, and I thought it was super powerful. Remember the guy with the morning routine and the water from Saratoga? They want Ashwin Lal.
Yes, yes, yes—him.
For him, the meme coin crashed and hit about $20 million, but there was also Saratoga stock that went up about 100%. Those two assets had no correlation in value to each other.
So, for example, if you have these viral moments and now you could launch a meme coin around them that’s also related to stocks, those two assets are now directly linked to each other. They have a value connection. When you buy a meme coin, it’s directly linked to the stock price, and so on.
I’m very optimistic about this concept. Let’s connect meme coins to something that makes sense—something that’s actually a driver of value. It doesn’t seem to make sense if you’re launching an AI-related meme coin to pair it with something like ETH, right? ETH isn’t growing because artificial intelligence is going crazy.
Hmm, you'll want to pair it with Nvidia. I think Stocktwits also lets you pair it with pre-IPO stocks like Anthropic or OpenAI, etc. So I'm very optimistic from that perspective. It's as if we can finally more closely connect these cultural assets to the asset for which they are a proxy.
Either way, I don't know how high it will go. But I think this will be an extension of the norm of how we think these assets will trade. They no longer just pair with SOL or ETH. They pair with the asset that makes the most sense. I'm optimistic about this because look at how many people are trading SOL-based meme coins. Many.
Yes.
They should start trading this, and then maybe the ceilings will rise higher for them, because now, finally, the valuation will happen. If you want to look at Hims in the long term, you can buy BONER, and there's some leveling. For example, if Hims increases by 500%, BONER will increase by about the same amount. So, yes, I'm very optimistic about this concept. I don't know how much higher it will go. It's not something I'm strong at, nor are you.
Noted. I'm starting to find trends well, but you pointed that out, not me.
I didn't say that. I meant—mentioned that I'm pretty good at blockchain stuff. I'm good at the very early blockchain stuff, and, for example, identifying when a closing price change occurs, but I'm absolutely terrible at peak recognition, and there are almost always round trips. Maybe I'm not the right person to ask, but, yeah, I think the Robinhood Chain is definitely going to unlock this new game of meme coins, where we're going to tie these assets to what they're essentially proxies for, and that should theoretically raise the ceiling.
I want to get back to that Saratoga story in a second, because it was such a good thought. I haven't heard that before. I know we shouldn't talk about this out loud, but I think you might have a good answer for me. If not, then we can move on, but what actually happens when you make a purchase, like in a meme coin, with its shares? What is the mechanism? What is actually happening under the hood?
So Robinhood has official stock tokens, and to put them on the blockchain, it has to be something like a whitelisted market maker or something. I don't know everyone by heart. One of them that I know of is something like Rialto, which is something like a proprietary AMM on the Robinhood Chain. Basically, how it works is, if someone buys BONER—let's say you buy $100 of BONER—you're also indirectly buying $100 worth of Hims stock, right?
If you start with USDG and buy $100 of BONER, what actually happens is that $100 is exchanged for Hims shares. Those Hims shares are exchanged into the HIM Bonus Liquidity Pool, and then you get the equivalent of $100 in BONER coins.
Of course. So you sell Hims—
Buy BONER, but the money is first converted into Hims. They bring it to the blockchain, and then you—
You're not selling Hims, but not really, because you're actually bringing Hims in to buy BONER.
Of course. Think about it this way. I think you saw it with Cinema and AMC, where there's only about $40,000 of liquidity for AMC on the blockchain, and the price is massively de-pegging. So the incentive for a new offer on the blockchain is, in essence, just these arbitrage fluctuations. Obviously, you don't want it to de-peg crazily—de-pegging is 100%—but theoretically, that's how one of these meme coins would drive up the price. Let's say it's 0.5% above what it's trading at. Someone comes and captures the arbitrage opportunity.
And then, obviously, no one will buy.
Yes, and that's exactly right. How do you get the asset onto the chain? It's as if the minting of these coins is actually bringing supply to the chain. I think there was a 30% increase in RWA value on the Rubicon chain yesterday. So, yes, it definitely works.
The problem is that you can only exchange and redeem these stock tokens during market hours, maybe even during extended market hours. There is no swapping or redemption activity on weekends. You saw some of the meme coins burn up because they took off over the weekend, and then you had AMC on the chain trading at $400, although I don't even know what that is right now. That's a huge discrepancy, and they can't do anything until the market opens again.
So that's the only thing that's worrying. Just be careful if you buy any of these meme stocks that seem to be linked to something with terrible liquidity on the chain. Make sure the market is open, and make sure there is an active market maker who, like you, isn't just giving them free money.
Is there any reason why, let's say, Hims would halve by 50% over a 15-minute candle? Why would this cause BONER Coin to fall?
Because, essentially, the way it works in an AMM, the value of one asset—the so-called BONER—is directly related to the value of the pool. So if the value of the pool increases by 10%, assuming there are no purchases or sales, the corresponding value of the other asset also increases by 10%. That's because the way an AMM works is simple: X*Y equals Z, and it's not like the price and the dollar are correlated to each other.
Yes, obviously, the problem is that buying and selling change the ratio. So if it's already up 50%, but for some reason people panic about BONER Coin and sell it accordingly, it doesn't necessarily grow 50%. But if you just assume there are no purchases or sales, or that it hasn't even matched yet, it's as if, in a vacuum, it correlates one to another.
Of course.
Yes. Wow, this is fucking exciting.
Okay, so to your point about Saratoga, I was really obsessed with AMC—I don't know, 3 months ago, 4 months ago, whatever. AMC likes to do stupid things with its stock at any possible moment, so they did it in 2022 when they launched a second stock called APE, and they gave it out 1-for-1 to every AMC owner. From what I understand, it was basically just a fun way to dilute and raise cash for AMC stock without issuing more shares. It was a huge flop, and it went down to zero. They kind of laundered a couple hundred million dollars off of it, and then we just never talked about it again.
But what interests me so much is that if, sometime in 2026, I don't understand why they couldn't release something like APE/AMC on Robinhood. AMC's market cap is $2 billion, which isn't so crazy. I mean, AI coin is at million right now. Goat grew to 1.5 last time. Cerebra grew to a billion. AIX PT grew to a billion. If they wanted to put pressure on AMC stock buyers, this would probably be a better way to do it. Vlad is talking about APE/AMC. He's not talking about AMC in a vacuum.
Of course not.
Why does he care about AMC? There are many more stocks—hundreds of thousands—larger than AMC. He doesn't care about AMC in a vacuum. But APE/AMC on Robinhood Chain, which trades billions of dollars, I would imagine that is the story of a generation.
We were talking about Saratoga. I'm like, yes. I was just talking about this before you started. It seems, again, I think the word I would use is "ambitious" for your marginal buyer and marginal... As a KOL, it's something ambitious.
What do you mean? What do you mean by that?
As the North Star of the one who could sell this coin, the North Star of the one who could sell is its CEO. Again, as a market, the North Star of someone who could sell an AI coin on Solana, it's like some random ninth-in-line OpenAI developer that no one knows about or cares about. Do you understand what I mean?
Yes, yes.
Hmm, I don't know. So, for companies that directly issue meme coins, I don't know the legality of that. I think that meme coins under clearance are kind of legalized, but I don't know if that means anyone can just run them.
But, yeah, I think we'll get to a point where one of these smaller-cap companies will definitely adopt the meme coin. I think it will be a little different. Maybe it will be more in the form of community building, where maybe there are some benefits to the community from the meme coin. Maybe they'll get something like special merch drops or something—something like a return to the NFT style of 2021, something like community building. Maybe that's what it looks like.
But I think it's a powerful primitive. By then, I think you, like all the guys at WallStreetBets, will understand this and realize that it's a good way to hold a short position, which I don't approve of. I don't want you to be perceived as a securities manipulator or anything like that, but, like me, too, we've seen this before on the blockchain. I don't remember what stock it was, but it was kind of a super-small-cap stock, and they tokenized it, and it started skyrocketing like Rabbit Coin, hoping to take a short position because of the low interest in short selling. So, yes, there are a lot of secondary and tertiary effects from these meme coin pairs that I think could be crazy.
It hasn't yet been determined. Maybe there's no demand for it outside of crypto natives. Maybe people don't care about this meme coin now having better value associated with the proxy. Maybe all of this will go away. There is a risk involved with these things, but I think it's worth being optimistic about cryptocurrency and looking at the long term.
So I'm going to take the view that, yes, there will be some smaller companies that will see that this is a way—maybe, on an optimistic note, maybe you're attracting a new buyer base that would never have bought your stock in the first place. Maybe I don't care about AMC, but maybe their meme coin gives me perks for watching movies, etc., and that's how I got to this point. That's how I indirectly buy AMC now. So maybe some companies will be smart about this and realize that you can attract a new class of buyers who would never have bought your coin before, who would never have bought your stock.
This is an optimistic view, but it is too early to say how this will unfold. That’s how it literally took off for the first time last week. So who knows where it will go from here? But that’s what makes it so exciting and fun, and why it heralds a new kind of capital—as if you can dream up these sky-high scenarios.
We know what the value of a recent meme coin on Solana is, like Jimothy or something. You know what maximum it will reach. You don’t know how high the community’s leading meme coin will reach for one of America’s leading stocks. This is a new game, so new games are fun to play.
I think I’m starting to develop obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’m also getting spammed about this Gin Queen [?]. I think it just happened. People are like, “I don’t know.” I think it kind of stopped. It just stopped or something, and everyone’s so critical of the stocks.
I don’t really know what I’m trying to focus on. I do both.
I’ll tell you as soon as you finish.
I guess my last question for you—what do you think about the major cryptocurrencies, and what stage of the crypto cycle are we at? Bitcoin—where are we going next?
I am forever a supporter of Bitcoin. I will always be optimistic. It seems that the worst that could happen has already happened. We were at the $60,000 mark, Sailor was drilling cells, and seemingly couldn’t bring us down. So it’s hard to imagine what would bring us down, other than a complete macro collapse, which I have no idea about. This is not my area of expertise, so I’m not even going to explain it.
I would like to say that there is a bullish consolidation going on right now. We had such great momentum going up, but in my opinion, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency have just fallen a lot in the last year or so. I’ve seen some people say things like, “Oh, the bear market wasn’t so bad. The fall in the U.S. dollar wasn’t so bad.” But compared to the drop in the price of gold or against QQ, it’s terrible.
I think this is a bear market, as someone who has already had—I think this is my third bear market. I think this one was the worst. Last time, you could see very clearly, “Oh, we failed because all these Ponzi schemes failed and FX imploded.” It was as if you knew why we imploded, and as soon as we saw these catalysts.
But this time, it was much less clear. Why did we fall? It happened 10 10, but there was much more weakness. It’s still unclear what actually caused all this weakness, and that’s just what makes it scary: You don’t know. So if you don’t know what caused the weakness, you don’t know when it will go away.
Yes, 100% fair.
I just hold the view that cryptocurrency needs any reason to grow, simply because it’s been hit so hard. You saw what happened with Besson’s comments, or his plans to essentially buy up all the bonds and stuff.
I don’t know what the next bullish catalyst will be, but I think the signal for this upward momentum was that cryptocurrency is now looking for reasons to grow. Eventually, it will find reasons to grow. There are no more reasons to decline, but there are many reasons to grow. So that’s roughly my opinion.
I like it. Dude, congrats. Thread Guy, I really enjoy following everything you do, and I think you’re as on the pulse as anyone. Thank you again for stopping by.
Thanks, dude. I appreciate it. Good luck in everything.
Thanks, dude. Peace. What a fucking conversation.