Author: Mr. Z (@168MrZ)
Amber Group advisor Haotian (@tmel0211) said Robinhood’s first wave pulled in attention through meme tokens and launchpads, but the next stage will have to come from Hooks, agent trading and tokenized stock DeFi if the chain wants to become more than a short-lived hot spot. Speaking in a conversation with 168X on Oct. 14, 2026, he described the current market as an early bull phase with liquidity only tentatively returning, narratives still unsettled and PvP trading pressure remaining heavy.
Over the past month, Robinhood moved quickly from the first wealth-effect phase built around PONS, meme tokens and launchpads into a cooling period. At the same time, the market has started debating a potential nine-digit ecosystem grant, along with Hooks, AI agents, tokenized stocks and the question of what takes over in the next phase.
An early bull market, but still non-consensus and highly PvP-driven
Haotian said the market looks like a typical early bull stage, except it is still very much a non-consensus one. Many trends are still being tested. The market has not settled on clear answers to how meme assets pair with stocks, how AI agents fit in, or which narrative can genuinely carry the next leg.
He said liquidity is returning, but only tentatively and nowhere near a full comeback. ETFs have seen net inflows, but those flows can flip back to net outflows during sharp drops. In his view, the issue is not that there is no money in the market. It is that traders still do not know whether that money is durable.
After a year-long slump, he said, much of the capital still active in the market is speculative by nature. That helps explain why many Robinhood projects from the first phase turned into pure PvP trades. These assets are driven by short-term capital and short-term attention, making it hard to approach them with a holder mindset.
His conclusion was blunt: a bull market starting does not make making money easy. In his words, bull markets are usually born in doubt, hesitation and low positioning. By the time everyone agrees that the bull market is here, the easiest first stretch is often already gone.
Do not price in a rumored nine-digit Robinhood grant too early
The Robinhood ecosystem grant has been one of the community’s most discussed topics, with speculation at one point reaching a nine-digit, $100 million scale. Haotian said it is too early to focus on the headline number. Vlad’s AMA and other public comments may have created expectations, but at the time of the conversation, the plan had not been formally finalized, and market rumors should not be treated as established fact.
Even if Robinhood does end up committing $100 million, he said the number itself is not the key question. What matters is how the money is spent and how the accompanying resources are allocated. A grant tied to listings on the main platform, meme support, infrastructure, or long-term builders would each lead to very different outcomes.
If the market fully prices in a nine-digit grant before Robinhood delivers one, he warned, disappointment could create negative sentiment. He said the better approach is to wait until the program is actually launched, then judge how the capital works together with Robinhood’s own distribution, listing support and developer support. Cash is only a number; resource allocation is what determines whether it becomes alpha.
Robinhood’s first 100-day data set needs more than a TVL reading
Mr. Z noted that Robinhood Chain’s first 100-day numbers looked strong on the surface: more than 190 stock tokens, 200,000 holders, coverage across more than 120 countries and regions, roughly $15 billion in stock-token DEX volume, and $1 billion in TVL.
Haotian said those snapshots alone are not enough. A chain can post impressive DEX volume in its first 100 days, yet 80% of that activity may have been concentrated in the hottest 15 days and then faded from there. He said cumulative figures need to be read together with the actual curve over time.
At minimum, he said, the numbers show Robinhood is paying serious attention to the chain and is actively signaling confidence to the market. But the metric he wants most is much more specific: the actual amount of tokenized stock assets staying on Robinhood and how fast that base is growing, especially relative to competitors such as xStocks and Ondo.
For him, tokenized equities are Robinhood’s defining narrative in this cycle. If the core stock assets fail to settle on-chain in a meaningful way, then even large meme volume and strong-looking DEX volume may turn out to be little more than a short-term FOMO event. The more telling measure is not how much traders speculated on the chain, but how much real stock exposure chooses to remain there over time.
Phase one brought traffic; phase two needs infrastructure
Haotian said Robinhood’s first 100 days can be summarized fairly simply. Emotion and wealth effects came first. Meme coins moved first, then launchpads and PONS-like models took off because these were the easiest structures for the market to understand after a bear market: volume, fees, buybacks and token issuance.
That model’s biggest value was in bringing attention and capital into the ecosystem early. But it has a built-in weakness. It relies heavily on ecosystem momentum. Once new money slows and the quality of launches deteriorates, launchpad revenue and token buybacks tend to weaken as well.
That is why he said he does not want phase two to be a repeat of the same PONS, meme and launchpad formula. If the second wave still depends on endless token issuance, transaction taxes and buybacks, that would suggest the chain’s basic DNA has not changed. In that case, the move may be fast on the way up and just as fast on the way down.
In his view, a healthier bull market cannot be sustained by PvP traders alone. Builders, developers and long-term capital also need something they are willing to participate in. That is why he wants infrastructure to take over in the second phase.
Why HOOKR is now drawing attention
Haotian said his interest in Hooks predates Robinhood. He had been following the narrative since Uniswap v4, but the broader market was still in a bear phase then, with limited liquidity and little appetite for infrastructure-heavy ideas.
When the first Robinhood wave started, he said, part of the ETH he initially bridged in went into HOOKR. At that point he had not fully finished researching the project itself, but he was convinced the Hooks narrative would eventually return to the market’s field of view.
In the first phase, Hooks were not the main attraction because traders preferred the easiest-to-understand trades in launchpads and meme coins. That has started to change. After the earlier batch of mainstream Robinhood tokens pulled back, HOOKR rebounded from roughly the $5 million range to above $20 million and began pushing toward previous highs, while other Hooks-related projects also started to appear.
He said that does not necessarily confirm HOOKR as the next leading token. It does, however, show that existing capital is actively hunting for the next growth point after phase one, and Hooks are now part of that search.
Hooks are not just about anti-sniping
Haotian argued that Hooks should not be understood as a single feature such as anti-sniping or changing transaction taxes. He compared them to previous technical narratives he followed in Layer2, where ideas such as modularity and chain abstraction became complete narratives because they kept generating new protocols and new applications.
Hooks, in his view, have a similar path. Launchpads solved the question of how to issue a token. Hooks move the conversation a step further by asking whether trading rules, fees, liquidity, buybacks, anti-MEV protections, permissions and later behavior can all be programmed once an asset is issued.
That shifts the frame from issuing a token to designing a financial rule set. For builders, it creates room to build products around those primitives rather than staying inside pure meme speculation.
He said meme coins can carry attention in the first stage of a bull cycle, but they rarely carry the full cycle. By the middle stage, the market needs a theme that can simultaneously hold speculative capital, developers and longer-duration capital. Whether Hooks can fill that role is only beginning to be tested now.
AI agents may be the biggest narrative, and one of the easiest places to lose money
Haotian also singled out AI agents as a major theme, while warning that it is one of the easiest narratives to lose money on. The reason, he said, is simple: AI x crypto is extremely compelling. It is hard to falsify, and at first glance almost everyone finds the story persuasive.
He said AI is moving away from a race centered on compute and large models toward the rollout of agent applications. Once agents start handling trading, payments, asset management and other tasks, it feels natural to ask how identities are verified, actions are recorded, permissions are restricted and assets are managed. Crypto appears relevant at nearly every point in that stack.
That very smooth logic is why so many AI agent projects have appeared over the past two years. Yet many of them remain experimental or lack real products altogether. A narrative that everyone agrees sounds reasonable is not automatically ready to justify aggressive valuations.
He used himself as an example, saying he has been loudly bullish on AI and has also taken sizable losses on some related tokens. Looking back, he said, the problem may not have been the direction. It may have been that the market was paying in advance for a milestone that remains far away.
Even so, he still sees AI x crypto as a long-term major theme. The difference is timing. A large end state should not obscure how far away that end state still is today.
Venice: solve a real need first, talk about autonomous agents later
Mr. Z pointed to Venice as a more interesting model because it does not start by selling a story about full AI autonomy or digital immortality. Instead, it begins with needs that even Web2 AI users can understand, such as privacy, inference and API credits, then uses crypto to handle identity, payments or token incentives.
Haotian said that balance matters. In his view, it gives both crypto-native users and AI users a reason to engage. AI users do not feel that crypto is being forced into the product, while crypto users can identify where tokens or on-chain payments are actually doing useful work.
Mr. Z added a second layer for investors: where value accrues. A project generating revenue does not mean the revenue necessarily accrues to the token. Venice is one example where the token, API credits and company equity are different things. A strong product does not automatically mean the token captures all of the upside.
Haotian said that as AI x crypto matures, the market is likely to spend less time buying the words “AI + token” on their own and more time asking who the real users are, what problem crypto is solving, where cash flow sits, and where value finally lands.
For agent-driven token launches, human-in-the-loop may be the better model
Turning back to Robinhood-based ideas such as agentic launchpads and AI-managed treasury systems, Haotian said he has been thinking harder about the topic after taking a large loss on a token tied to a similar concept.
He originally found the idea highly appealing: an agent managing funds on its own, automatically carrying out buybacks, burns and airdrops, all with rules that are fully transparent. But once that kind of system is put into practice, a more basic issue emerges. The “justice” of machine rules does not always line up with what human markets actually need.
An AI can buy a small amount of tokens mechanically according to preset parameters, and the process may be fully transparent. That does not mean the buyback has any effect on price. Human markets still depend on judgment, pacing and dynamic adjustment. Pure AI rules can be too rigid.
That is why he now prefers a human-in-the-loop setup. The base rules can be executed automatically by an agent, while a person adjusts some parameters or inputs new instructions in an open, transparent and traceable framework. In his view, the next generation of agent launchpads may not be about AI replacing humans. It may be about humans making judgments, AI executing transparently, and every human intervention remaining verifiable.
Secondary-market selection has narrowed to three filters
Moving from Robinhood back to the broader secondary market, Haotian said the lesson from the last cycle is now clear. Projects with heavy VC control, high FDV, large token unlock overhang and no PMF carried substantial risk. Last cycle, the market was willing to grant those projects long-dated valuations. This cycle, it is much less willing to do so.
His framework is now simpler. First, there must be a product and real PMF. Second, the asset has to sit inside a new trend. Third, it has to be building new market attention and new consensus.
That is why some older projects from the previous cycle may survive but still fail to matter this time, while some assets with proven products can return as strong candidates if they also tap into a fresh narrative. In this cycle, he said, the market is not seeing all altcoins rise together. As low-quality supply keeps growing, capital is more likely to concentrate in the assets viewed as real winners.
Four themes for the months ahead: privacy, PerpDEX, AI and post-quantum cryptography
Asked which themes he would rank highest in the coming months, Haotian said the broad list is already fairly clear. First is privacy, with assets such as ZEC being re-evaluated by the market. Second is PerpDEX, including directions such as Hyperliquid and Lighter that have genuine product innovation. Third remains AI; whether the project is new or an older chain such as NEAR trying to regain attention, AI can serve as a meaningful re-entry point.
The fourth theme is cryptography and post-quantum security, which has started drawing attention more recently. Haotian said that as AI’s mathematical ability improves, the market naturally starts rethinking the security of existing cryptography. When he saw those discussions, his own first reaction was to look for cryptography-related assets, including trades in directions such as STRK.
He added that narratives like this are often not something a research report written a year ahead can fully predict. A single technical event can ignite them quickly. That makes long-term thesis work important, but it also makes rapid re-underwriting just as necessary.
Why HYPE and LIT could still see re-rating
Haotian said PerpDEX ranks so highly for him because it differs from many narratives in one important way: it is solving a real problem, and people are using it. Products such as Hyperliquid and Lighter are not relying on white-paper storytelling. They have real volume, real users and real structural innovation.
He also said PerpDEX is beginning to bring in assets beyond crypto, including stocks and pre-IPO pricing. That means its total addressable market is not limited to taking crypto perpetual volume away from Binance. The larger question is whether the 24/7 on-chain derivatives market can keep expanding.
Another feature of this cycle, he said, is that very few projects survived the last cycle and also emerged as core assets for the new one. The more low-quality projects there are, the easier it becomes for capital to focus on a small group of winners. For that reason, he said investors cannot keep using the previous cycle’s habit of assigning a fixed market-cap ceiling to leading names. If the supply of quality assets shrinks, valuation ceilings for the winners with real PMF may open up again.
“Crypto VC as we knew it is gone”
On venture capital, Haotian said the traditional form of crypto VC has effectively disappeared. He was careful to add that the capital itself is not going away. It is more likely to reappear in another form.
In the last cycle, the standard VC model was to invest early, get tokens at a very low cost basis, wait for TGE and exit against a high FDV. The market has largely turned against that setup, he said. In the next cycle, VCs may move directly on-chain, participate in incubation, or wait until a project is already at a $20 million or $30 million market cap before entering through OTC deals or direct token purchases.
Viewed that way, they start to look less like traditional venture capital firms and more like very large players operating inside the same arena as on-chain and secondary-market participants. They may not need to disclose who they are, and they do not necessarily have to carry the burden of four-year unlocks.
He added that part of the VC market will still back early projects with real technical barriers, such as new PerpDEX, AI and cryptography ventures. But in either form, simply having money and primary-market access is no longer enough. VC still has to prove why it deserves alpha.
Robinhood versus Solana: asset innovation against capital efficiency
Asked how Robinhood, Solana, Base and BSC might compete for tokenized stock activity and on-chain trading, Haotian said each chain has to be judged by its own core strengths.
For Robinhood, the advantage is clear: tokenized stocks plus distribution. In his view, the chain’s real task is to develop rights, liquidity and DeFi composability around tokenized equities, then let on-chain products grow around those assets.
Solana, by contrast, wins on capital efficiency. Capital can move from centralized exchanges on-chain quickly, and stablecoin depth is strong enough that once a narrative catches FOMO, market cap can expand very quickly.
That helps explain why some narratives may not begin on Solana but still end up producing their biggest wealth effect there. Solana may not always be the first innovator, but it can be the most effective amplifier. Haotian said tokenized stocks could follow a similar pattern this cycle: Robinhood competing on innovation and asset entry, Solana competing on liquidity and speculative upside. As for Base and BSC, he said he would not yet place them at the same priority level, at least not with the current clarity of advantages seen in Robinhood and Solana.
What to watch over the next three to six months
For the next three months to half a year, Haotian said tokenized stocks remain the first thing to watch on Robinhood. But he cautioned against taking every self-described stock DeFi project at face value. The real question is whether actual stock assets are settling on-chain. If tokenized equities eventually move closer to traditional stocks in areas such as dividends and voting rights, and if on-chain liquidity becomes deep enough, then lending, collateral, yield and liquidity protocols built around them begin to matter in a much more concrete way.
The second theme is Hooks. If Robinhood wants phase two to avoid repeating the meme and launchpad cycle, it needs projects with stronger technical grounding and better durability. Hooks are the line he most wants to see validated.
The third is agent trading. He said Robinhood itself has invested heavily in automated agent trading, which makes it a likely direction for official ecosystem support in the next phase.
He also offered a warning on social trading apps such as FOMO. They have brought in new money, fresh traffic and new trading behavior, but they can also sharply amplify emotional trading. A call from a top KOL can send a token up 30% almost instantly, or much more in extreme cases. Traders who rush in only after seeing the signal can easily lose 10% on the first trade alone.
For that reason, he said social trading is better used to observe signals than as a blind copy-trading tool. In his words, just because the platform is called FOMO does not mean traders should actually FOMO.
At the end of the conversation, Mr. Z condensed Haotian’s framework into four judgments. First, the market is still in a high-PvP early bull phase with only tentative liquidity returning, so a bull market does not mean all altcoins rise together. Second, Robinhood used meme tokens and launchpads to bring in traffic during phase one, but phase two will be judged by Hooks, agent trading and DeFi that can retain real tokenized stock assets. Third, the secondary market has shifted from valuing VC backing and high FDV to valuing PMF, new trends and fresh consensus, with privacy, PerpDEX, AI and post-quantum themes worth continued monitoring. Fourth, one of the easiest ways to lose money this cycle may not be picking the wrong direction, but FOMOing too early in the right one. The sequence, he said, is to find the trend, confirm product and value accrual, and only then decide when to place the bet.
