Robinhood early investors urge management not to repeat the brand crisis of the GME era.

Written by: Jon Ma, Co-founder of Artemis

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

Robinhood Chain has made an impressive start on the path to inclusive finance：

• Daily active addresses exceed 300,000;
• Daily trading volume on the decentralized exchange (DEX) exceeds $1 billion, ranking second among public chains;
• Circulating supply of stablecoins is approximately $300 million;
• Annual on-chain transaction fee revenue exceeds $40 million;
• Projects like Morpho, Ethena, Uniswap and others have driven the total value locked (TVL) on the chain to exceed $300 million.

Related data dashboard: https://www.artemis.ai/jon/dashboard/334077439341928255

I participated in Robinhood's pre-listing financing through @whalerock as early as 2019, and followed up with reporting on Coinbase's IPO roadshow in 2020. My initial intention was to guide people to invest in quality assets with long-term value in the cryptocurrency market and stock market, rather than speculating on meme coins.

Last week, I opened the Robinhood wallet and was deeply shocked and disappointed: the available trading assets on the platform have almost become solely various meme coins. I made a small purchase of CASCHAT, and within just three days, my wallet received a large number of random, worthless token airdrops, including one token named "Pointless Coin."

Undeniably, Robinhood's current spot DEX trading volume ranks third across the network.

However, the vast majority of the trading volume comes from various meme coins — animal-themed meme coins, meme coins related to Vlad (Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood) and Robinhood, and a plethora of generic meme tokens. Hereby I earnestly request Robinhood: do not turn this public chain into a meme coin dedicated chain.

Coinbase's Base chain has developed earlier and is larger in scale, and Robinhood's crypto business has a lot of experience worth learning from.

Brian Armstrong (Co-founder and CEO of Coinbase) has repeatedly emphasized in public replies the importance of guiding users to focus on applications with real value and sustainable development:

Source: https://x.com/brian_armstrong/status/2076506839953629445?s=20

I understand the platform's difficulty in resisting the temptation of meme coins: these types of coins are a shortcut to acquire early users, attract market makers, and boost liquidity and trading volume. Many believe "they come for the meme, but stay for the real applications." Just like Aerodrome on the Base chain, which occupies the vast majority of trading volume and has built a sustainable business model.

However, meme coins will lead to significant losses for many users and destroy industry trust. Looking at the numerous meme coins launched on the Base chain at the beginning of 2024 serves as a cautionary tale: this year, prices plummeted another 90%, with the maximum decline from peak reaching 99%.

Meme coins lack long-term viability, harming the interests of ordinary investors, and will make retail investors increasingly alienated from blockchain. Furthermore, if Robinhood Chain continues to be saturated with meme coins, it will deepen Wall Street's and various hedge funds' preconceived notions: Robinhood is merely a speculative trading software that gained popularity relying on the GME (GameStop stock symbol, a famous meme stock) and meme stock craze in 2021.

Source: https://x.com/vladtenev/status/2074695821896065360?s=20

Wall Street itself finds it difficult to view Robinhood objectively. Do not repeat the mistakes of 2021 that damaged brand reputation.

On the contrary, the Robinhood wallet and ecosystem should direct liquidity and resources towards Arcus (originally built by the dYdX team, an established leader in perpetual contract DEX) and the tokenized stock sector. I am very optimistic about Arcus's vision: allowing anyone in the world to trade spot tokenized stocks.

Such stocks have only emerged in the past decade.

Please let Robinhood Chain truly focus on the real asset tokenization (RWA) sector, broaden the boundaries of financial services, and enable more investors to trade stocks and shares of companies about to go public.

Robinhood faces the biggest bearish risk: the domestic market in the U.S. is nearing saturation. Currently, the platform has 27 million funded accounts, and institutions predict that by the 2028 fiscal year, the account base can only grow to 31 to 32 million, with very limited room for growth.

Yet I remain bullish on Robinhood's core logic: relying on Robinhood Chain to reach over 100 million new overseas investors. Users can participate in RWA, prediction markets, stablecoins, public companies, and Pre-IPO asset investments via the public chain, while continually supplying upper-level traffic to public chain Apps.

Tokenized stocks that allow for round-the-clock trading have real market demand. Referencing the trade.xyz platform, users primarily trade assets corresponding to entities like SKHY, which boasts annual real revenue of up to $68 billion.

Let's run some calculations: relying on Robinhood Chain, if the company achieves 100 million monthly active users by 2030. Currently, the platform's ARPU (average revenue per user) is about $171; overseas users pay more chain fees rather than trading through the App with a higher commission ratio, and we conservatively assume an overseas user ARPU of $100. Just from C-end business, 2030 revenue could reach $10 billion, surpassing Wall Street's forecast of $8.78 billion in revenue for the 2029 fiscal year.

Vlad Tenev (Co-founder and CEO of Robinhood), Johann Kerbrat (Senior Vice President at Robinhood, General Manager of Crypto Business and International Business), you have a great opportunity: to realize the original vision of the crypto industry through asset tokenization — to enable equal access to financial services for everyone around the world.

Do not willingly throw away this opportunity and allow the Robinhood public chain to degenerate into a meme coin chain. If you choose the right direction, Wall Street, millions of users, and even the entire world will recognize you for it.