PANews summarized the Sept. 3 episode of The Chopping Block, where Unchained founder Laura Shin, Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi, Dragonfly general partner Tom Schmidt and Robot Ventures managing partner Tarun Chitra discussed Robinhood Chain’s latest breakout, the speculative mix of tokenized U.S. stocks and meme coins, Solana’s competitive position, and reports that Hyperliquid may be exploring a compliant route into the U.S. market.
Robinhood Chain posts a second wave of growth
Haseeb Qureshi said Robinhood Chain has become one of the hottest narratives of the week. He noted that when the chain first launched, trading activity spiked and then cooled, leaving many people wondering whether the move would fade quickly. The chain has now seen a second burst of activity, with more than 125,000 active wallets, 5.7 million daily transactions, more than $1.2 billion in daily DEX volume and $2 million in daily fee revenue.
According to Haseeb, that growth has been driven largely by tokenized stocks onchain and meme-coin trading. Because Robinhood Chain is built on the Arbitrum Stack, he said the move has also fed into gains for Arbitrum. He added that a meaningful share of the fees generated by Robinhood Chain flows back to Arbitrum and Robinhood, while Ethereum only captures a very small amount of data availability revenue. That dynamic, he said, has sparked a broader debate over whether an L1 can capture value from prosperous L2 activity built on top of it.
Tom Schmidt said he was surprised that a “corporate chain” could produce this level of onchain activity. What stood out even more to him was that roughly half of the volume came from tokenized equities rather than meme coins alone. He said Robinhood may have originally imagined a 24/7 stock market and a global, permissionless financial system when it designed the chain, yet much of the attention has instead gone to users trading crude meme tokens.
Old Olympus-style mechanics reappear in a meme-coin wrapper
Tarun Chitra said some of the activity on Robinhood Chain reminded him of the old “Ohm forks.” He explained that Ohm, or OlympusDAO, was a well-known stablecoin experiment on Ethereum in 2022, one that carried what he described as ponzi-like characteristics. It also gave rise to the “(3,3)” meme before collapsing in 2022, even though the original protocol survived in diminished form.
What is happening now, he said, is that builders on Robinhood Chain have taken the logic of an Ohm fork and repurposed it for meme coins. These contracts are not simple copies. In his description, they have been modified enough to function more like meme-coin launchpads, where a token has to be paired with an underlying tokenized stock.
Tarun gave a simple example. If a user brings in $100 worth of stock to mint a meme coin, that user might receive $10 worth of the meme coin, with that amount locked in an LP, while the remaining $90 is returned. The locked $10 is used to provide liquidity, which he compared to a classic bonding-curve-style setup.
In his telling, the stock pairing effectively turns the meme coin into a token incentive around a specific equity. He compared it to the old Ohm structure, where Ohm, locked Ohm and ETH played different roles. In that framework, ETH functioned like the stock around which everything revolved, locked Ohm helped support liquidity, and Ohm itself acted as the incentive layer.
BONER and HIMS became the clearest example in the discussion
Tarun said the best-known case was BONER, a meme token paired with tokenized HIMS shares. The show described HIMS as an online men’s health drug retailer heavily advertised across New York City. In that setup, BONER became, in effect, the liquidity incentive for minting the tokenized HIMS stock.
Haseeb then walked through the weekend trading behavior around that structure. He said traders piled into BONER while U.S. equities were closed. As the meme token rallied, the paired HIMS token on DEXs moved to a large premium and traded far above Friday’s closing price in the stock market. Retail traders, driven by FOMO, chased those moves on Robinhood Chain or through the fomo aggregator, expecting the meme token to keep rising.
Once the U.S. stock market reopened on Monday morning, he said, the arbitrage channel came back. Anyone could mint fresh HIMS stock tokens and bring them onchain. That meant retail traders who bought BONER and overpriced HIMS late Sunday could be run over by hedge funds and arbitrage desks as soon as the market opened.
Haseeb’s criticism was blunt. He argued that retail traders celebrating these weekend surges were, in practice, handing money to Wall Street hedge funds through the very depegs they were cheering.
Tarun described the whole setup as a collision of DeFi Summer, GameStop-style retail fervor, 4chan culture and tokenized stocks, calling it “investing by idiots” in one formulation. Tom said there was a strange generational and entertainment element in it, almost a “look how much money we can lose” attitude.
Haseeb rejected the comparison with GameStop as a valid thesis. GameStop, he said, at least came with the theory that a coordinated squeeze could hurt Wall Street and support the company. Here, he argued, the math simply does not work because the capital in these onchain tokenized stocks is tiny relative to the underlying U.S. equities. In his view, this is just another meme-coin game wearing an RWA shell.
Laura Shin says the structure is bad for retail
Laura Shin agreed with Haseeb’s bottom line. She said that if she had to make a value judgment, she would side with him and call the situation bad. After the bear market, she said, retail participants have already been battered by collapses and by what she described as exploitative meme-coin ecosystems. Many ordinary users have simply left crypto.
She said that in a recent conversation with Jeff Dorman, she made the point that by objective measures such as stablecoin adoption, regulatory progress and ETF developments, the industry’s underlying infrastructure may be stronger than ever. Yet sentiment remains deeply weak because the previous meme-coin wave hurt retail traders so badly. Those who lost everything in the trenches, she said, do not care that stablecoins are seeing mainstream use or that ETFs have been approved. They only remember getting wiped out.
For that reason, Laura argued that the industry should not endorse or polish up a structure that, in her words, seems designed to make retail lose money to hedge funds.
Tarun answered from a different angle. He said he understood the moral criticism, but from an anthropological perspective he found the mechanism fascinating. RWA has long been treated as one of the dullest corners of crypto, difficult to distribute and lacking token incentives. This design, he said, managed to inject token incentives into RWA and lifted Robinhood Chain’s RWA issuance by 50% in one week, taking it to between $70 million and $80 million.
That suggested to him that strong enough demand can force new issuance into existence. Retail traders may arrive for BONER, he said, but the tokenized HIMS stock remains onchain afterward.
Haseeb pushed back again, arguing that a casino is different because people pulling slot machines know they are paying for entertainment and know the odds are against them. Retail traders chasing meme coins, by contrast, are often influenced by KOLs and promotional narratives on social media and believe they are on a path to real profit or financial freedom. In his view, that illusion is the cruelest part.
Is Robinhood Chain stealing Solana’s momentum?
The panel then shifted to whether Robinhood Chain is taking share of mind and activity away from Solana. Haseeb cited a post on X from trader Flood that said, “Solana is in the most dangerous position since inception.” The argument behind that view, he said, is that Solana was an early mover in tokenized stocks and had previously dominated meme-coin activity, yet this latest RWA-plus-meme cycle is unfolding on Robinhood Chain instead.
He added that Solana currently does not have a perpetuals venue with meaningful market share, has little share in RWA, and is seeing many major pairs move toward stablecoin quotes such as USDC rather than SOL-linked pairs. For some market participants, that raises the question of whether Robinhood is now taking over the narrative advantage that Solana once had.
Laura said the debate reminded her of an industry rumor that Robinhood Chain had at one point come close to choosing Solana before switching to Arbitrum at the last moment. She recalled seeing public back-and-forth on Twitter between the Arbitrum Foundation and the Solana Foundation, with media reports later touching on those rumors. She also referenced an interview with AJ in which he did not directly confirm how close Robinhood came to Solana, but did say that once a company has its own dedicated L2, the economics change completely because it is no longer just paying the base chain and can actually share in fees.
Tarun argued that crypto often rewards the later entrant that executes better rather than the first team to identify an idea. He cited DEXs and prediction markets as examples where the earliest project did not become the largest. In his view, Solana made a major strategic mistake in tokenized equities.
He said Solana mishandled its relationship with XStocks. The Solana Foundation heavily incentivized liquidity for XStocks on Solana and then allowed Kraken to acquire XStocks. Tarun’s point was that ecosystems either need direct investment and deep alignment or they need incentive structures with far tighter alignment. Simply spending money on a partner does not create loyalty to the chain.
Solana still leads comfortably in the numbers
Even so, Haseeb said it is too early to write Solana’s obituary. Looking at trading data, he said, Solana remains the clear leader in 30-day DEX volume. Over the past 30 days, Solana posted $62 billion in DEX volume. Ethereum came in at $33 billion, while Robinhood Chain stood at $17 billion, with BSC and Base also ahead in the ranking sequence he described.
Tom added that even when looking only at fomo-related volume, Solana and Robinhood Chain were still roughly neck and neck a week earlier. Haseeb then pointed to 24-hour data, saying Solana remained first at $2.5 billion, Robinhood Chain had climbed to second at $1.5 billion, and Ethereum ranked third at $1.3 billion. So Robinhood Chain had clearly surged into second place on the day, but had not displaced Solana overall.
Laura said her focus on fomo reflected a broader shift. At the wallet and application layer, users are becoming less locked into any single blockchain ecosystem. People are increasingly comfortable with cross-chain bridges running in the background, especially for small trades. She also said that while Robinhood has a large traditional retail distribution channel, most of the activity on Robinhood Chain does not actually appear to come from Robinhood’s own app. It is coming from third-party aggregation apps.
That is why she thinks traffic aggregators such as fomo and gmgn could become some of the more important winners over time, making it hard to call the final winner now.
Haseeb agreed and said about half of the volume appears to come from fomo and the other half from gmgn. By user count, most users are on fomo. That suggests gmgn is used more heavily by professional traders or bots with much larger order sizes, the “sharks” in the pond, as he put it, while fomo hosts more of the “small fish” destined to lose money.
He also said Robinhood Chain’s TVL remains very small despite the jump in daily activity. The chain’s TVL is currently $730 million, which places it 11th among public chains in the figures cited on the show. By comparison, Solana is at $5.7 billion, Base at $5.4 billion and Ethereum at $48 billion. His conclusion was that it is still too early to make a final call and that he has not yet seen a large influx of truly new retail users from outside crypto. In his view, this remains a crypto-native frenzy rather than a broad new consumer wave.
Hyperliquid’s reported U.S. path through Kraken’s corporate network
The final section of the show focused on Hyperliquid and its possible route into the U.S. market. Haseeb said there had been reports that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, is looking to bring Hyperliquid within an American regulatory framework. He then cited a recent Bloomberg report saying Hyperliquid Labs is in deep talks with Payword, Kraken’s parent company.
According to the discussion, the two sides could form a joint venture that would allow Hyperliquid to use Bitnomial’s license and clearing infrastructure under Kraken’s umbrella to launch in the U.S. on a compliant basis. Haseeb added that this domestic U.S. version would require KYC and would be linked in some form to Hyperliquid’s offshore liquidity pools, although the exact mechanics remain unclear.
He also noted the market reaction discussed on the show: CME shares fell in U.S. stock trading after the news, while Hyperliquid’s token HYPE rose sharply.
Panelists expect a very different product under U.S. rules
Tarun said the result would probably look more like a “U.S. Polymarket” or a simplified Robinhood-style product than a truly unified venue sharing global liquidity. American compliance rules around custody, risk limits, automatic deleveraging and liquidation do not line up neatly with the architecture used in offshore DeFi-style derivatives trading, he argued.
That may still be good for Hyperliquid as a brand, he said, but it would not be the same product that users know offshore. He added that this may be enough, citing the U.S. version of Polymarket as an example of a product criticized inside crypto but still able to grow on the back of major events such as the World Cup and the U.S. election.
Laura said the part she wants to understand is whether a compliant version could still be a pure DeFi exchange, something akin to the HIP-3 architecture, or whether it would become something else entirely.
Tarun answered that the biggest barrier is the U.S. requirement for centralized clearing. Under that framework, a venue must have a central clearinghouse, and the instant ADL or algorithmic liquidation mechanisms that exist in DeFi are generally not accepted in the same form. Even if the technology could be adapted, he said, it would still have to cross a major legal and technical divide. So while the product might nominally run onchain as a HIP-3 instance, professional traders would still need prime brokerage, market surveillance and anti-manipulation systems associated with CeFi. The user experience would feel very different from the offshore version.
Tom agreed. The key issue, he said, is whether the U.S.-compliant version and the offshore version can produce a real “1+1 > 2” effect together. He compared it loosely to Binance.US, asking whether a highly successful U.S. arm would necessarily feed value back into BNB. That was never clear, and strong offshore brands often struggle when they enter the U.S. market.
Tarun pointed to earlier attempts by international exchanges to enter the U.S., naming FTX.US, Binance.US and OKX’s U.S. entity. In his view, they largely failed because U.S. regulation strips too much out of the product experience. Firms effectively need to rebuild compliance and technical systems from scratch, and Kraken’s license alone would not make the process easy.
Debate over a U.S. walled garden versus global crypto liquidity
Laura said she understands the logic behind U.S. regulation, but worries that if crypto becomes more mainstream, the U.S. could end up isolating itself from the rest of the world’s crypto markets behind a very high compliance wall. She framed the concern as a future split between an American walled garden and the global internet of capital, and questioned whether cutting itself off from the most dynamic pools of global liquidity would truly benefit the U.S. over the long run.
Tarun said it is hard to imagine a seamless connection between the two systems at the level of margin and collateral because the underlying legal systems are different. In the U.S. financial system, if a clearing intermediary fails, users can sue. In a fully onchain system, if an ADL event is triggered by a smart contract, there is no equivalent path. He added that securities exchanges in places such as Europe, Japan and the U.S. already operate under sharply different legal regimes, which makes it hard for a single internet-style standard to survive when it collides with sovereign capital controls and anti-money-laundering requirements.
Tom said the U.S. still has the longest regulatory reach and the largest single consumer and financial market, which is why global crypto firms remain willing to go through so much pain to gain compliant access there.
Laura closed that part of the conversation by saying many countries historically had both formal and informal markets. The U.S. was unusual over the past 50 years because it largely eliminated informal stock trading and pushed activity into highly regulated venues. Crypto, she argued, is effectively bringing that gray or informal market structure back to every corner of the world, including the U.S. The internet did this for content; crypto is trying to do it for assets.
Her example was simple: highly regulated institutions may be confined to a U.S.-compliant version of Hyperliquid, but ordinary retail users who want the global venue will keep looking for ways to connect to Hyperliquid Global. If one route is blocked, another will appear. That, she said, is part of crypto’s borderless and permissionless nature.
She suggested that every country may eventually build a wall similar to the U.S., while offshore decentralized global protocols continue to grow in gray zones, much like Napster once did.
Haseeb said he largely shares that view. Unless one day the world’s biggest companies decide to go public directly onchain and bypass traditional stock exchanges, he does not see the existing geopolitical walls disappearing. Crypto may be borderless at the code layer, he said, but capital controls and efforts to prevent capital flight still shape liquidity in very real ways.