# FOMO, Meme Stocks and Robinhood Chain | Andy8052 & Eric Conner *Author: David Hoffman* *Published: Sep 23, 2026* *Source: https://www.bankless.com/podcast/fomo-meme-stocks-and-robinhood-chain* --- David Hoffman: [0:00] Hey Bankless Nation, today on the show I talk to Eric Conner and Andy8052 about all the activity happening in and around meme coins and crypto. David Hoffman: [0:08] There's the paired tokenized stock meme coin activity happening on Robinhood Chain, there's conversations around FOMO and what their FOMO strategies are, and also just their do's and don'ts around meme coin trading. So, this is a meme coin episode, and it's not for everyone. I don't recommend meme coins, but nonetheless, I do partake in them, and I remain kind of curious about what the future might hold. Memecoins are a sector of crypto and that sector progresses and innovates like all the others. And I wanna make sure that I stay on top of that weird corner of the internet. So that's your disclaimer. If memecoins aren't for you, feel free to skip this episode. But if you wanna stay up to speed about what's happening or if you're just curious about what's going on in the trenches, feel free to tune in. So let's get into my conversation with Andy and Eric. Eric, Andy, welcome back. Hey, David. Eric Conner: [0:57] Good to be back for having me. David Hoffman: [0:58] Seems like another cycle is upon us. Andy, Eric, we all became friends during DeFi summer. And that was a while ago. I want to get you guys on the show just because I want to get grounded a little bit as we enter what seems to be like a little bit of froth in the market now. And if the cycle plays out as they normally do, it will only get frothier. And so now, I think is some of the time to get our bearings about what this all kind of looks like. A lot of this trading behavior, the FOMO meme coin behavior has been around for a while, but it's definitely picking up steam. So maybe I can kind of like start the conversation with this kind of just zooming out. David Hoffman: [1:38] Meme coins have been both incredibly durable and are individually incredibly not durable. Like most of them go to zero, but as a meta, we are still doing meme coins over and over and over again. Like we had the first meme coin bull market of 2024. And as an industry, that kind of did zero for adoption. And I would say like the industry took an L thanks to meme coins as like a brand identity for the industry. And then here we are again in the latter half of 2026 going on 2027 and FOMO and meme coins are kind of like once again the meta And I bring up the fact that we all kind of started in DeFi summer. And then after that was NFT mania. Previous cycles have all kind of looked different to each other. And now we're entering another cycle. And it's kind of the same meta of meme coins. Again, are we, the question I want to ask you guys is like, are we as an industry kind of just stuck in this meme coin meta? And that's kind of the way it is. David Hoffman: [2:45] Eric, you're the biggest veteran out of all of us. Maybe I'll throw that one to you. Eric Conner: [2:48] Yeah, I mean, I think so. It's ironic, of course, right? Robinhood finally starts tokenizing things like stocks. And the first thing people do with it is create meme stocks, right? It's just where I think finance in general is slowly going. And we're just on the frontier here. Yeah, I mean, I think it'll always be the meta. I think one thing we've seen in the past, the problem, like you brought up NFTs, DeFi Summer, what happens is someone creates a cool concept. Like I remember the first time I farmed during DeFi Summer was on Compound, right? It was just kind of a new concept. And then everyone takes that. And there's like this Cambrian explosion of either farming or NFTs or memes and the capital just starts to get spread thinner and thinner, right? So there are core winners that come out of these cycles. Like for example, CryptoPunks, you know, and the NFT craze. You know, there's obviously core DeFi protocols still around doing very well. Like Aave and Uniswap and others. You know, there's been big meme coin winners that have gone to billions of dollars and more. But I think that's always a good meta, but I think it's getting a little bit more refined. I think with apps like FOMO, for example, there's finally some like social accountability. There's tabs as like the most held. I think we're seeing consolidation in two. I think, yeah, there are like a lot of coins that you buy into at a small cap and they just go straight to zero. But a lot of like the most held coins over the last few months have actually done pretty well. Like AI, for example, just keeps cranking away every day. I think it's up to like a $350 million market cap. Eric Conner: [4:08] But I think like we're getting better social structure around this and just better apps for this to happen. I'm hoping like not everything just goes to zero. And I do think there's some interesting things happening around like meme stocks and things like that. So I think every cycle we go through, things get a little bit more refined, a little bit more mature. And I think we are seeing that with memes as well. Andy8052: [4:30] I would argue that every cycle memes have been like at least a bit of an undertone of what happens. Like, I don't think that 2024 was the first time that meme coins were really like Dogecoin was, you know, one of the larger onboarding things to crypto in general, like Shiba coin in 2021 went to like $40 billion. And so like... I think it's one of the few things that crypto is actually really good at. And I was actually, I was at the FOMO happy hour last night talking to someone about this. I think like crypto has proven, it's very good at speculation on both the like sophisticated end with leverage and these different things and the degenerate end with memes. And I think to a certain extent, those are kind of just like two different sectors that are just never going to go away because crypto is like by far the best way to do it and we just finally like memes have caught up to like leverage trading as far as like the level of sophistication and support to where they've like it feels like they're really coming on and it's this really big thing but it's been happening for forever it just like took a while to kind of David Hoffman: [5:40] Formalize i guess the question that i would like to have answered is like does the meme coin sector of the internet to grow up, get refined, get a little bit more polished? It's never going to enter suit territory. That would be just a complete oxymoron. But does it become more accessible in a positive sum way? Because meme coins have a very negative sum brand. It's like you would never, ever advise your non-crypto sibling, parent, uncle to get into meme coins. No one should ever do that. But is there a way for like meme coins? Are we going in a direction that just makes it a little bit more structurally sustainable, structurally sound rather than David Hoffman: [6:26] some of the PVP extraction that we've seen in cycles past? Eric Conner: [6:30] Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think we're seeing maturity on the financial side. I mean, Andy hinted at a little bit, but I mean, for example, you can go trade perps on AI. Like these meme coins are getting listed quickly on perp exchanges and that creates a more mature market. All of a sudden, people can short it if they want. They can use leverage. It just takes away some volatility and kind of evens the playing field. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I do think there's a lot around social accountability. I know I brought that up earlier, but one of the reasons I didn't really get into memes too much, I mean, recovering ETH Maxi, that's one reason. But the other is, there's cabals behind the scenes. You just know they're there, right? And if you buy a little late, you're probably going to get dumped on. And sure, I'm not naive. I know that's still happening, even with apps like FOMO. People can have sidewalls and things. But I do think it's adding a bit of social accountability to the meme layer. And that is important. Like, you know, if you go in there and you see some of the top holders average hold like a long time and they aren't just pumping dumpers, like you feel a little bit more comfortable. And before these apps existed, you just didn't know that. Like you could kind of go look at Wallets on Chain, but like normies aren't doing that. So I do think that'll help a lot with that. Andy8052: [7:40] Yeah, I always joke with meme coins that like if you don't have the insider information, someone else does. And you are like, you are very actively in like an information asymmetry trade. Andy8052: [7:51] Kind of all of the time with meme coins. I also think sort of an underrated aspect that hasn't really publicly become a thing yet, but I do think that AI actually can meaningfully help here as well. As far as just like getting, you know, there's really good meme coin traders who I'm friends with who already have their own tooling built themselves, but for analyzing like how many people who are all probably the same person own this token, what's the, how much is bundled how much is owned by some small group of people are those people selling whenever there's volume and As we see, like JEV was just announced kind of two days ago, and I'm really interested. I'm going to spend some time this weekend hacking with that on like analyzing. David Hoffman: [8:35] Talk about what that is. What's JEV? Andy8052: [8:37] Yeah, so JEV is, it's made by one of the former founders or like very early members of OpenAI. And it's a new model that is a bit unique comparatively to say, you know, ChatGPT or Claude, because it's not a natural language model. You can prompt it in natural language, but it does not respond in natural language. You kind of give it structured outputs that you want, and then it will give you its probabilistic answers. So it'll say like 95% yes, 5% no, things like that. And what that allows for is it is really, really fast and really cheap comparatively. And so I think that as these sorts of things come out and models get better and faster and cheaper, I think that you could probably using Jev make something where you paste a smart contract address in of a token and say, analyze this meme coin. Is it bundled? Has this been done before? Is it safe, relatively speaking? And get a really fast answer that is actionable in a way that currently there's not a lot of insight there. You have to really know what you're doing to analyze those types of things. David Hoffman: [9:42] Maybe just to kind of trace over what we've talked about so far, I kind of opened up this conversation with a little bit of frustration of those like, oh, meme coins again, like the crypto as an innovation layer, we're not only going so far. But what we've seen with FOMO, what Eric said with FOMO was like, actually, we're getting an illuminated social graph. And that is actually progress. If we're talking about like the tech tree of meme coins, FOMO truly unlocked something with like the social graph. And Andy, I think what you're pointing to is like there are even further steps down that meme coin tech tree that's not really on chain. It's not on Solana. It's not on Robinhood chain. It's not in the EDM, but it is in like the social and information layer. And using AI, we can round out some of the pokey edges of the meme coin sector of the internet to, I don't want to say make it more palatable to mainstream society, but just make it more accessible, less dangerous, less toxic, and potentially more positive sum for everyone involved. And that's going to be from the information and social layer. Eric Conner: [10:53] Yeah, I think with that AI tooling and what Andy was saying, that should help with quality. If everyone can build their own tooling very easy in AI and plug an address in quick and look for red flags. Previously, you had to rely on deck screener at the bottom right. It would have a couple flags. Now anybody, like the idea of guys summer with AI. So anybody can code this up. And in theory, hopefully that prevents over time people from hopping into scams and bundled tokens and cabal dumps and stuff like that. But, you know, that'll take time. But I'm sure people will package toying up like this online and, you know, offer it and stuff like that. Andy8052: [11:30] And at the same time, someone else will use the same AI tools to get better at bundling scams. And so it'll always be a game of cat and mouse with that stuff. For sure. That's just kind of the, like the realistic part of the meme coin industry in general. You can at least try to position yourself better. David Hoffman: [11:47] That is like, to me, the interesting thing about meme coins is that they, it is like Bitcoin on the farthest end of the spectrum is a shelling point of attention and it captures value and it like sucks everything in because it's Bitcoin. No, it is the meme. And then meme coins are on the other end. It's like, no, no, no, no. We like cycle through these things. And that's kind of the point. Like every once in a while we get a sticky one. But if meme coins, meme coins are like almost by design not durable because so many people want to like hop and move on their capital from the next to the next to the next meme coin. And that's kind of like a feature for some of these traders. That's where the fun comes from. That's where the entertainment comes from. And it's hard, it makes it hard to reason about because nothing is durable in this space. And so like making it like, like talking about it to anyone who's not in the meme coin, sector is always terrible because they like you're advocating that you like keep up with the meta and so it's just like a weird property of meme coins that you don't really find anywhere else is like the the lack of durability is kind of the point Andy8052: [12:52] Yeah it's very much an attention David Hoffman: [12:53] Economy let's talk about the stock paired meme coins because this is like the one bit of like innovation that we've seen out of the meme coin meta i don't know where this came from was this we've used ai twice on this episode one in the traditional sense meaning artificial intelligence and then David Hoffman: [13:09] Eric brought up AI, which is a meme coin, artificial inu. Was that ground zero for stock-paired meme coins, or what was ground zero for stock-paired meme coins? Andy8052: [13:18] I couldn't tell you what the first stock-paired meme coin was. There probably were some before AI, but AI was kind of the first one to... Hit some amount of, like, escape velocity, I would say. So I would, I think for, like, the sake of the conversation, it is ground zero. There's, like, Mars coin on Binance chain, which is paired with SpaceX. That was also very early. But yeah. David Hoffman: [13:40] So artificial Inu AI, it's fitting, like, the dog Shiba Inu meme coin form factor. So it's a homage to Shiba Inu. And then it's paired with NVIDIA. And right now it's, like, at a $350 million market cap. I'm using that as like a bellwether for the stock paired meme coin. So if that thing continues to go up, I'm like, okay, it remains safe to have exposure to the sector of stock paired meme coins. And if that goes down, I'm like, oh, maybe the cycle's up. So is that a fair thing? Would you guys agree with that like position of just like the AI meme coin, artificial Inu, is like a bellwether for this like whole meta that we're doing? Eric Conner: [14:18] Yeah, I think so. Everything kind of tracks it already, kind of like crypto general majors track Bitcoin. Like you see if AI is going up, some of the other larger stock coins go up and vice versa. And yeah, I think I would agree. AI is kind of the one that kicked it off. I mean, I would say in general, like [Wong.xyz](https://Wong.xyz), you know, they kind of were the ones that kind of, you know, their platform enabled this and the largest stock paired meme coins generally so far from there. It's not totally true. There's other ones that are, that have done well, of course, but they're kind of like the, They kind of started the whole thing, in my opinion. David Hoffman: [14:52] [Long.xyz](https://Long.xyz) is a meme coin launchpad that specializes in stock-paired meme coins? Eric Conner: [14:57] Yeah, you can pair with... They were kind of the first to do the pairing launchpad with stocks that really kind of blew up. There's a lot of others out there doing it, but I feel like they've done really good at controlling their brand. They invest a lot of time in helping push coins that have been on their platform. They created AI. I, they, you know, [long.xyz](https://long.xyz) just kind of has like the quality behind it right now. There's not a lot of just trash that's being launched there for whatever reason. Andy8052: [15:24] And something else on top of that, I think for the same reason is they've started to implement some infrastructure to limit what can be launched. So, you know, traditionally with a meme coin, someone puts out something and it's good. Five other groups of people will all come together and make some scam version of the same thing, try to get momentum to become the biggest one. And just like people call it like vamp, like vampire attack, a meme coin. Long, they actually... So any token that's launched, that ticker is locked then for 24 hours after that. So no one else can launch the same token for 24 hours. And now I believe they've also implemented stuff where like tokens that have been out for a while and have like AI, for example, or some of the other large coins. Like, I don't believe you can ever launch that ticker again. It's just like permanently locked now. And so I think that there are certain things like that that are actually quite valuable in the world of meme coins, where it's just like, I think one of the challenges, but also the fun parts is it's this every day there's 10,000 more coins and it could be anything. One of the challenges is you get diluted in just 10 different AI coins and they're all fighting for the same thing. Whereas if everyone kind of comes together and says, okay, we like the coins on long, we're going to buy those and support those. And then you literally can't launch another AI. That's actually a pretty unique setup for memes. David Hoffman: [16:42] Isn't that kind of the whole game of launch pads is correctly producing strong shelling points in your specific meme coins and like corralling the dispersion towards your coins. I feel like that is, that's how launch paths kind of compete, right? Eric Conner: [16:56] Yeah, for sure. They've done a good job at it. I mean, you can even like pair with AI, which has been, you know, a big thing for them. But yeah, I think. David Hoffman: [17:04] There's some coins worth a couple million dollars Andy8052: [17:06] In market cap. Eric Conner: [17:07] Yeah. Yeah, then you have NEST. Wow. Exactly. So then, yeah, whoever buys the coin pair with AI, AI goes up and then underneath that, you know, there's NVIDIA and all that. So it just kind of, everything plays together. But yeah, I mean, Eric Conner: [17:18] I think they've done a good job with the limiting of tickers and just a focus on quality. I mean, I have a theory that basically every major stock is going to have one winning meme stock and that community will kind of be the meme stock for that stock. And I have an even bigger part of that theory where I think eventually these companies will embrace these. These meme stocks were already kind of seeing it with Hems and Boner a bit, but with like the CEO following Boner and, you know, I've been on Hems House and the investor community seems very interested in it. But if you think about it, there's thousands of people holding these coins that are all pretty much interested in being just Long and the stock doing Long going up because if stock goes up, you know, that it's paired with the coin, the coin goes up too. So I think Bomb did a good job at like limiting the tickers and limiting just kind of one per, because I think that's what's going to happen in this meta to begin with. Andy8052: [18:08] Well, and I think kind of like taking it a step further and one of the things that has kind of really spurred on this like stock paired meme coin thing, because, you know, if you just like, if you sit down and just think for a second, you're like, it's no different than being paired against Ether, Bitcoin or Solana, really. Yeah. It's just a different underlying. David Hoffman: [18:25] The selling and buying behavior is exactly the same. Andy8052: [18:27] Yeah, just the underlying asset, maybe you're more bullish on it. And so like for those who are not familiar when you're trading coins that are on an AMM, if the underlying asset goes up, your coin automatically goes up because they're paired together. And so you don't want to be paired against something that you think is going to go down in price because that makes it harder for your coin to go up in price. But I think the other kind of thing here, like Eric has kind of touched on, is there's sort of this unknown of what it could be long term. And we're getting regulatory clarity on these things all the time and there's just like one of the memes that's paired with AI is called board sit and the meme is that they're going to accumulate enough NVIDIA in the liquidity pool ai token will get a board seat at nvidia which you know they need to get like some ridiculous David Hoffman: [19:19] Valuation is the hardest mode of all the assets to do that's the hardest one to Andy8052: [19:23] Do but like even could is that even possible who knows but it's this kind of new unknown thing that's fun and exciting of like what if what if this happens but then like we don't really know what's going to happen and that is able to get people much more interested than just like okay another coin paired with Solana. We know what this means. We know what kind of all of the rules of this. There's these unknown rules that no one knows and like how things could play out that gives people higher targets and more excitement and more belief that Andy8052: [19:56] this could be some new thing, which I think is one of the big factors here. Eric Conner: [19:59] Yeah. The funniest thing about that point is I think Robin Hood themselves doesn't even know sometimes how this is going to play out. Andy8052: [20:05] I don't think anyone knows. Eric Conner: [20:07] Yeah, exactly. We even see Vlad kind of tweeting about, wait, can we do in kind? Is it truly back to one-to-one? Like there's a lot of unknowns. Like one of the crazier things we see is like if one of these takes off and there's not a lot of shares minted on chain, all the shares get swallowed up by the pool and the price of the stock gets disconnected on chain versus off and then market makers have to step in. So yeah, it's a wild game. But yeah, I really don't. I mean, I have a theory where this is going, but there's so many unknowns when it comes to this right now. David Hoffman: [20:36] I had Johan from Robinhood on the show yesterday. I recorded him. I asked some of these questions, Eric. And so that episode will actually have already been out by the time this one comes out. And so if any listeners want to learn about LP pools and off-market trading price dislocations, I asked Johan about that. Perfect. So going back to the whole meme coin on the governance over public equities thing, like I'm of two minds about this. I wrote the HIMSS CEO an email to their, to their press and, and like also his email, just found his email. David Hoffman: [21:10] And like, this is what I do. I ask, this is how I find emails. So this is not anything like unique or specific, but just I wrote to me and I'll say, hey, come on Bankless. I want to get your take about like what's going on with your tokenized stock. I really made it more about the tokenized stock happening on Robinhood because that's like the bigger subject because this was happening at the same time the AMC CEO is blasting Vlad. And so I just wanted to get a public market CEO's opinion about like what it's like to have their stock tokenized on chain and what they think about that. Also, there was a line item that was like, oh yeah, and what do you think about like the meme coin. But I was doing a little bit of math of like, okay, is this even worth this man's time to come on this crypto podcast that he's probably never heard of before and like talk about his tokenized stock on Robinhood chain? And I went and I looked at how much of him's tokenized stock there was on Robinhood chain. And then I looked at the market cap of him's David Hoffman: [22:02] And those two numbers are wildly different. It's like $3.5 million of tokenized stock on a $6.5 billion company. And so I'm like, no way is this man ever replying to this email. Like, this is not worth his time. And of course, he did not respond. I was ghosted. There's nothing is happening on that front. Worth a shot. But like, it seems wishful thinking to think that these public market CEOs are ever going to care about these meme coin communities because not only is there only $3.5 million of tokenized HEM stock on Robinhood chain, the boner meme coin LP pool only has like half of that. And so it's even smaller. So that's on one side of the spectrum. On the other side of the spectrum, Andy talked about how like Shiba Inu or whatever meme coin went to $40 billion in 2021. And so like that's the high watermark. And I think that's what gets people's imagination going. But nonetheless, we are so far away from that like possible future. David Hoffman: [23:04] Eric, how do you think about this? Eric Conner: [23:05] Yeah, a couple of things. I think I'll start with for now, the impact might not be there as far as like a ton of shares tokenized on chain. Obviously, these are small like ratios of market cap versus the actual stock market cap. But I think what a CEO of a smaller company could realize is like the fandom that's being created and the marketing that's being created. So I had went on one of these like Kim's Investor podcast or whatever. And I haven't looked in a while, but I believe the video that he posted on Twitter got like 250,000 views. And like historically, his other videos got like 40 to 50,000. So, I mean, that's coming from the boner community in that case, right? And I'm sure if there was an NVIDIA investor call or something that AI was involved with. So I think in my X feed, I'm seeing a lot of like him stuff and things about their stock and charts. So I think they couldn't realize that all of a sudden you've gained 20,000 holders and these people are all of a sudden interested in your company. I don't think that they probably will care too much about the financial impact until one of these hits at least a couple billion, probably. Now, I will say, like, Boner, when it first started pumping, one of the days, it did 10% of the volume that the actual HEM stock did on the traditional stock exchange. So the volume can get up there. David Hoffman: [24:24] The volume of Boner, not the volume of the HEM stock, Eric Conner: [24:28] But the trading volume. The trading volume on Robinhood, yeah, was like 10%. So, like, you start to see, and I think, like, at one point, the market cap is like 1% or something like that as well. So all of a sudden, if one of these 20, 30X is over the next month or two, who knows, I'm not saying they're going to, but things could get interesting. I think this kind of goes to Andy's point earlier. We don't know what's going to happen. So take an example. What if one of these does flip the market cap of the actual stock? What breaks? What happens? Do we even have the stocks to put on chain? I don't know. Shit, this will get weird. Andy8052: [25:03] Yeah, I think that's like a big part of it is there's just so much unknown that you can't price. And so it's just this like total mystery box of outcomes, which is typically in the history of like bull markets of kind of anything. That's like kind of what you need is this like unknown thing that you can't price because you don't know what it is totally yet. For people to get really excited about. And it kind of feels like that's what we've found here, even if it's just a meme coin. David Hoffman: [25:36] I will say if you wanted to like paint a pretty strong picture, before I say this, I'll say that Eric is very, very exposed to Boner. I'm also exposed to Boner. I don't think Andy has. I don't have any right now. Okay. David Hoffman: [25:51] Yeah. So if you wanted to construct like the perfect structural market structure setup, You would pick a equity that has a decent but not large market cap in the single digit billions, perhaps, that also had a very large outstanding short supply on his float, which HIMSS also has. And so HIMSS is a $6.5 billion market cap and 30% of the float is shorted. I don't know why it's shorted so well, but like maybe because people think like margins are going to compress. And so it's like we are GME adjacent from 2021. Now we're in 2026. And so like that, I think it's like that structural setup of just like, oh, if this meme coin does things that have happened in the past to other meme coins, like it's 30 Xs. And then the virality takes over, the short squeeze can like, the tail can wag the dog into the short squeeze on the public market. And I think that's like your structural setup that produces the most imagination, I think, in the meme coin people. Eric Conner: [26:55] Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, I think each meme stock community is going to go about it differently. I think like some are going to go community focused and some are going to go, hey, there's a lot of short flow and this company has a low market cap. Can we run it up and see what gets weird? I mean, I think AMC's market cap is only like two and a half billion dollars or something like that. And there was one of the meme stocks for AMC ran up to like, I think 50 or 60 million or something like that. I mean, if all of a sudden that. Andy8052: [27:21] Runs to a billion. It hit like 125 million. Eric Conner: [27:22] Yeah, you're right. It did. Yeah, that crazy night. So, I mean, you're talking about all of a sudden things, I mean, if it runs to a billion, it's half of the market cap of AMC. Like what starts happening, right? And yeah, I mean, you're talking, memes have run to, you know, 20, 30, 40 billion. Eric Conner: [27:36] Then it's going to start having an impact at that point. Andy8052: [27:38] Yeah, and then I think the other kind of weird thing that could happen is we're starting to see some significantly smaller publicly traded companies go on-chain as well. I don't own any of this, but there was one called Vita that... Like the I think it was Vita or something like that where like they're literally trying they were trying to flip the market cap of the stock and like the CEO was like in he was like this is sick let's let's try and like it's like the coin was named like Vita CTO which stands for community takeover and the joke was like we're taking over Vita by just like we're gonna flip the stock and just take over the company and I think like that's probably for one of these you know I think the Odds are they will at some point be a $30 million publicly traded company that ends up on chain that is flipped by a meme coin. I think that's kind of an inevitability. And it's just a matter of like, which one is it? And what happens when that happens? Eric Conner: [28:36] Yeah, it'd be interesting in that case, will they say like, let's try to just tokenize all our stock on chain, you know, like slowly just try to become the first fully token. Now, it's impossible to do like 100%, of course, but someone could just say, hey, let's try to just be the first fully Robinhood stock. You know. Andy8052: [28:53] And I think the cool thing with that is you end up actually getting, you know, a lot of liquidity for your tokenized stocks through this. Like, AI especially has like, let me pull up the exact numbers right now because I have it in front of me. But it has... $14 million of liquidity on-chain, which is a lot for a meme coin. It's especially a lot. David Hoffman: [29:15] For these days, yeah. Andy8052: [29:16] But for a company's tokenized stock to bootstrap liquidity, there's almost no better way to bootstrap initial on-chain liquidity than meme coins. Because otherwise, you need some sort of retail flow to bid the stock on-chain. And the best way to do that is with meme coins. And so you end up with this really beneficial for you long term. If you think that having good liquidity on your stock on chain matters, then you probably want some meme coins that are launching against it to drive volume so that market makers come and LPs come to make money on that volume. David Hoffman: [29:52] Yeah, it's a really good point. So if a stock meme coin gets launched and that LP pool grows and we have the meme coins on one side and the stock on the other and both go up, the meme coin goes up in market value and all of a sudden there's more LP, the LP pool is larger. You can bootstrap liquidity without ever touching USDC or any other like kind of denominated asset. Like that liquidity works for like dollar buyers. Andy8052: [30:18] So what's happening there is, so in the case of, let's say, AI and NVIDIA, because it's the largest, at least when it first started, if you wanted to buy AI, let's say odds are you probably had either Ethereum or USDG, which is the stablecoin on Robinhood chain. So let's say for the sake of argument, you have Ethereum on Robinhood chain. You have to first, through Uniswap, buy NVIDIA tokenized stock, and then buy from that, sell the tokenized stock to buy AI. And so what that's doing, it's not, it's encouraging people to provide liquidity for the Ethereum-NVIDIA pair, because any volume driving through AI has to be driven, again, early on, now there's way more liquidity pools and stuff, has to be driven through the Ethereum-NVIDIA pair. And so if you're LPing there, you're just going to like make a ton of money. David Hoffman: [31:12] And that You're selling the bridge. It incentivizes LPs. Andy8052: [31:16] And so then you can just provide liquidity for Ethereum and NVIDIA, have no risk to AI at all. And you're just making money from retail buying through FOMO or PumpFun app or all these different things because you're eating all the fees on Uniswap. David Hoffman: [31:29] That's wild. Yeah, sick. That's wild. Yeah. This is kind of like reminding me of like every, not every, but many of the good innovations that came out of crypto started with meme coins bootstrapping something. And like why do we want like tokenized stocks on Robinhood chain or like anywhere that you can't do already in your normal brokerage, your normal Charles Schwab or interactive brokers or whatever. It's like, well, because of this, like you can do weird shenanigans like this that actually do create like positive market structure in the traditional asset in like the good normal ways. But just like it's the tale of meme coins that wagged the dog and you can't do that anywhere else. Andy8052: [32:14] Yeah, and so like now Robinhood tokenized stocks on the weekends are extremely liquid and that is only because of meme coins. Like obviously over time, I'm sure they would have spent money and resources paying to get liquidity on these things and now they don't have to because meme coins did it for them. David Hoffman: [32:30] That's wild. That's wild. Andy8052: [32:33] And so that's where I think there's benefits that are much larger than like a traditional pair on PumpFun or something. But now at PumpFun, every major launchpad has integrated this too. David Hoffman: [32:44] It's like the structural stuff like this that actually makes me like somewhat David Hoffman: [32:46] optimistic about this meta. I want to go into, I want to ask some FOMO questions, just like strategy for using FOMO because I've been using FOMO more and more and more like most people who are in the trenches in this industry. And so I'll just kind of like run through some of these things. How do you find coins? Because like the whole idea of FOMO is that you can see what your friends are buying. So that's my dominant like coin discovery channel is like I see a notification popping up that Eric is buying this one cat coin. I see a notification that Andy's buying this one thing. I open it up. In that moment, I decide whether I like it or not. And that's kind of it. So like is your coin discovery dominantly inside of FOMO or if it's not dominantly inside of FOMO, what is your coin discovery process? Andy, I'll start with you. Andy8052: [33:34] Yeah, I would say for me, it's a bit different. I definitely use FOMO a lot, primarily as like just general social graph tracking, seeing what people are buying and selling. David Hoffman: [33:45] For the information side? Andy8052: [33:47] Yeah, I am just in like a lot of DGEN chats of traders. And yeah, Telegram chats and have like some bot tooling and stuff for new launches and things like that. So a lot of my information comes from Telegram chats primarily, but that's not what the average person's lived experience is going to be. But I do think it is valuable to have some friends in a chat if you're trying to trade this stuff in any bit seriously and just even to bounce ideas off of or have someone say, hey, I found this. I think it's cool. I can give you a little bit more signal than what you see on FOMO. But there are certainly times where I'll see someone buy something on FOMO and I'll be like, oh, that's cool. I'll buy it. David Hoffman: [34:29] Okay. So like using FOMO exclusively is probably not positive EV who need more signal than just FOMO. Andy8052: [34:37] I think it depends how you trade as well. If you're, you know, I like to sling around in the mud. I like to roll around in the mud, so to speak. I like to buy coins that are super low market cap, very high risk. Most likely I'm going to lose all my money. But when I hit it well, you hit it very well. I don't think that trading those types of coins on FOMO and expecting to like win is like the best thing because you have not only information asymmetry, but also timing asymmetry. Like if you see some guy with a bunch of followers buy this $100,000 market cap coin, you're probably late at that point. Whereas if you're using it to discover and trade things that are somewhat established in the five, 10, $20 million meme coin range, which for most people, if you're trying to trade meme coins, that's what you should be doing. It's what I should be doing, but I enjoy what I do. Then I think it's a totally different ballgame because it's not this rush to buy, I have to get it right now. If you buy it, if you don't, it'll probably go back down a bit and you can buy it later. And so I think that for that sort of trading, using exclusively FOMO for discoverability is like totally fine. And just like figuring out what are people buying, what's interesting, what has a lot of volume of people buying it, where there's a lot of new people buying and holding. I think FOMO is really, really good for that kind of stuff. David Hoffman: [35:54] Eric, what's your point discovery process look like? Eric Conner: [35:59] I wish I was. Yeah, my strategy has actually changed. I was a little late on the meme and FOMO game in general. My strategy has changed since I joined. When I joined, I was mostly trying to catch big runners, kind of like what Andy's talking about a little bit. I would go on the graduated tab, which is a dangerous place to be. Eric Conner: [36:18] And throw some money at something I thought. I'm setting up some bot tooling slowly, But generally, my play is just click it, paste the address in Twitter, see what people are saying quickly about it, run a couple safety checks on it, see what the holders are, and just throw a little money at it. But I feel like now with the capital being spread out so much, I've changed a lot in the last couple of weeks to making larger conviction plays and higher cap coins. So I think like 90% of my capital probably over the last few weeks has gone into coins that are already over even like $10 million market caps. I kicked myself a little bit. I saw AI at I think a $25 million cap. I'm like, ah, it's too big already. And here we are at $350 today. I finally dipped a bullet and bought around $150 or something. But I think, especially with FOMO, it's like the most held tab now. People are probably default going to that when they join the app, mostly. And they kind of see those most held coins. And I think it's just easier to get larger plays, of course, on higher cap coins. I'll still take some punts here and there. But at this point, I'm just looking for like, new narratives, because the narratives are so recycled, right? The new thing is some devs have come back from the dead from the past cycles and launched mysterious coins that people don't know what's happening. We saw a couple runners in the last week for that. Eric Conner: [37:37] But yeah, I'm trying not to spread my capital too thin because a lot of stuff, 98% of the stuff seems to be bleeding out over the first couple of days. It's hard to catch one that kind of sticks. But I do agree. I think with AI being so easy as an artificial intelligence like Claude and. Eric Conner: [37:55] Not the token, I do think it's smart for everybody to just put in a prompt that says, hey, quickly set me up a meme dashboard just to plug in an address and create some flags for me and track certain movements on chain or certain traders. Because like Andy said, if you're buying, if you get that FOMO alert and it's someone with a large following, you're too late. I mean, like on mine, the copy traders on my FOMO now, I buy something that's absolutely insane. Like hundreds of people buy after me, just bots, which is actually pretty annoying. Andy8052: [38:25] And they sell like 10 minutes later. Eric Conner: [38:26] Yeah, it's really annoying because the chart's all messed up, then it's stuff, it's ridiculous. But yeah, so I mean, that's kind of, I really don't, I'm actually, people think I'm in like a ton of cabal chats. I'm in like one meme point trading chat. Andy8052: [38:40] It's just like friends. It's a very casual chat. Yeah, exactly. Eric Conner: [38:44] Like I'm really not grinding too hard on that side of things. You know, I think usually what my strategy is, like take a risk and actually put some size in. Eric Conner: [38:52] And then if things take off, you know, you do pretty well with it. David Hoffman: [38:55] But you guys have talked about just getting bot alerts. What flags are you looking for? Like what are you trying to be alerted about? Say you like see a coin. What are the top three bits of information that you want first and foremost? Andy8052: [39:07] It's a good question. I think like either like some semblance of originality or like something that is unique about this. If it's been done a ton of times, it's like hard to get excited about it. Even if it's like, oh, this one's better because of some random reason, you know, so-and-so has launched it or whatever. Normally that doesn't really move the needle for me. And then I would say, like, making sure that the holder distribution is at least okay. Like, now with tooling, it's relatively easy to figure out if you look like, you know, does someone own 85% of this coin? And like, that just never works out. It's never a good strategy. David Hoffman: [39:52] A shallow Gini coefficient is what you're looking for. Yeah, okay. Good spread. Andy8052: [39:57] I would say those are really like, yeah, those are really the big things I would say. And then like, I like to buy things where I can at least realistically give myself a world where this goes like 100x from where it is currently. That's kind of how I try to think about this stuff is it's like, sure, I could buy this coin, maybe it'll go up 5x because so and so tweets about it or whatever, like dumb thing people are hoping for. But like the risk reward of that is not that good versus like for example right now i'll say and again not financial advice you probably shouldn't buy this coin there's a coin that is called elon coin that sends him the fees through x money which is a new oh funny x x finance like x has on your like financial services stuff someone built on top of pump fund to automatically convert it and send it to someone's x money account And to me, that coin is like, likely it's worth nothing. And it goes to zero and he never talks about it. But there is some small range of outcomes where Elon tweets, someone sent me $500,000 on X money. Isn't that sick? And this coin goes up 500X in one day. David Hoffman: [41:03] Because it was the coin. Andy8052: [41:04] I want to own some of that because there's a chance. And so it's like, I prefer coins that have, what, you know, that this is an extreme example, but I can tell myself the story that it's going to go up a lot. And then it feels like the risk reward is better versus like, oh, this is the 17th dog coin about NVIDIA. Maybe this one could be good. Eric Conner: [41:25] Yeah, it all comes down to that attention economy, right? I definitely agree with that. And I actually think that's why that people aren't even really talking about this yet, but meme stocks in general, you have the potential of, so people are only thinking about the stock, the company coming to the meme. I think it could go the other way around, meaning people in the investor community for these stocks to become interested in the meme. And there's a lot of people and a lot of liquidity and a lot of money in stock trading, right? And if all of a sudden they start to like the meme and kind of see behind it, they might start buying, right? Like it's hard for crypto to tap outside liquidity and outside buyers. And previously with meme coins, it was like crypto only. But now with these meme stocks, you could see traditional stock traders saying, oh, this one, this is kind of a cool concept. I've never done meme coins before. I'm going to buy it because it supports the stock I like. So I think we could see that happen. But going back to the question on the bot, yeah, and Andy mentioned bundles. I think people need to be careful with that. So you might see like a coin launch and the top holder only has like 1%. But what happened on launch is like they sent out 1%. It's like 50 different people, right? So in theory, 50% of the supply is controlled by one entity. Maybe they're all bunnies or whatever. But yeah, so I think looking for that. --- *This article is brought to you by [NEAR](https://www.bankless.com/sponsor/near-1785257427?ref=podcast/fomo-meme-stocks-and-robinhood-chain)*