At the close of U.S. stock trading on Thursday, AMC Entertainment closed at $2.54. The country’s largest movie theater chain had a market cap of $2.27 billion and 893 million shares outstanding. There was no news at all that day.
Half an hour after the close, a new trading pair appeared on Robinhood’s blockchain: AMC/MEME. The new coin’s full name is "A Meme Coin," and its abbreviation happens to be AMC: MEME.
Then things started to spiral out of control.
Over the course of five hours, the MEME coin surged more than a thousandfold, with its market cap starting at about $3 million and climbing past $30 million and $50 million, approaching $150 million. At the same time, AMC’s own quote moved too, rising more than 14% in after-hours trading at one point, then widening to 18% to 20% in premarket trading.
AMC’s CEO and Robinhood’s founder stayed up late at night trading insults on X.
To understand what happened, we have to go back and look at the old history between AMC and Robinhood.
Saved by the same broker that later blocked it
In 2021, AMC and Robinhood went through a short squeeze dramatic enough to be written into a textbook.
On January 28 that year, Robinhood restricted buying in a batch of soaring stocks and allowed only selling. GameStop was on the list, and so was AMC. Retail traders watched prices plunge in the app and called it a betrayal. But they couldn’t do without it: Robinhood was then the easiest entry point for retail traders, and most AMC bulls placed their orders there. In June that year, AMC’s stock price was pushed above $72, making it one of the most talked-about stocks in the U.S. Aron smartly rode that wave: he gave free popcorn to shareholders who had signed up for Investor Connect, befriended the bulls on social media, and issued new shares in rounds at high prices to use retail money to pay down debt and keep the company alive, pulling it back from the brink of bankruptcy.
At the time, Aron was one of the most beloved CEOs on the retail side.
Five years later, the same company and the same CEO were pointing the finger at the broker’s new business: on-chain tokenized stocks. AMC’s name hadn’t changed, Robinhood’s name hadn’t changed; what changed was the battlefield of the squeeze, from New York order books to a 24/7 on-chain pool. And this time, the spark was still the same formula proven in 2021: attention, leverage, squeeze narratives.
A thousandfold in one day
Robinhood Chain is a layer-2 network launched only in July 2026, marketed with "tokenized U.S. stocks": it copies New York stocks onto the chain for 24-hour trading, and even non-U.S. users can access them. The copied asset follows its own rules: it tracks the stock price and claims to correspond to the custodied underlying shares, but you can’t exchange it back for voting rights or for the real stock in a New York account.
The meme-coin playbook then changed shape. In the past, when creating a meme, the pool would hold ETH or USDT; now creators can put NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, or a movie stock called AMC into the pool. The front end is hidden very well: it looks like you’re paying with stablecoins, but behind the scenes your money has already been passed through two middlemen—first into stock tokens, then into the pool to swap for meme. Even the project’s fee cut is settled in stock tokens.
So the dollar price of meme was compressed into one formula:
1 meme can be exchanged for how many stock tokens, multiplied by the stock token’s dollar price.
A double bet. Bet on the meme beating the stock, while also staking your fortune on the stock’s rise and fall. If the stock goes up, the meme’s dollar price gets lifted; if the stock falls, even if the meme outperforms, the dollar return still shrinks. AMC happens to be the perfect symbol, one that comes with its own narrative and memory: in 2021 it was shorted by bears, saved by retail, and gated off by Robinhood. Those five letters stand for an entire generation of retail sentiment.
Robinhood Chain has been running this kind of play for a month already.
Take BONER, for example: it launched on August 20, with a trading pair directly tied to the tokenized shadow of Hims & Hers. The company sells men’s health products, and BONER’s narrative is blunt enough to need no translation: "hard currency," a squeeze on HIMS. It hit a weekend: New York was closed, the issuer could hardly mint more, the pool drained away free float, and on-chain HIMS surged from Friday’s close of $28.84 to $132.64—more than fourfold. When Monday opened, the issuer minted 4,000 new tokens and knocked the shadow back to its original shape, but BONER itself kept rising; what drove it was sentiment.
Then came FATCOIN, which paired with Eli Lilly’s tokenized stock (LLY), joked about weight-loss drugs with the line "the fatter it pumps, the fatter you get," and rose 175-fold in ten hours.
Executives at other companies didn’t say much, but AMC’s CEO couldn’t stay quiet.
After the CEO’s rant, the price moved even faster
What set the CEO off was that the activity on-chain had made its way into the quote for his own stock—an pool he couldn’t control was trading using his company’s name and price.
His first statement was very sharp: Robinhood claimed to offer tokenized stocks from more than 190 companies, including AMC; the project had nothing to do with AMC, was unauthorized, and was not registered under U.S. securities law. The language escalated all the way to "shameful, ridiculous, disgusting, unforgivable," and he said the board would immediately hire outside securities lawyers.
Tenev replied, "What’s it to me?" and the market instantly kicked into a second leg up.
Aron then fired a second shot: he said Robinhood was issuing a product from an offshore Jersey entity that "represents AMC stock" while not being subject to U.S. securities law, which posed an "existential" concern for the company; AMC spends millions each year on securities compliance, while Robinhood’s "synthetic stock market" separates trading from the financing and ownership of the listed company—traditional shareholders have voting rights, while token holders have none. He demanded that Robinhood voluntarily stop AMC stock-token trading, or else lawyers would take action to force a halt and submit inquiries to the SEC.
By this point, the matter had spread from the pool all the way to Washington.
The argument itself became part of the trade. Each new round of insults raised the discussion one notch; the more people talked, the thicker the buy wall in the pool; the thicker the buy wall, the higher meme rose; and the higher meme rose, the less the CEO could sit still. It was a closed loop, and the fuel was attention itself. Meme’s biggest fear is silence.
Still several zeros away from a squeeze
Set the emotions aside, and what really matters is the scale.
The total supply of tokenized AMC is about 1.33 million. 1.1 million tokens against 893 million shares outstanding is 0.15%. About 746,000 of those tokens are locked in various pools; the MEME/AMC main pool alone locks 557,000, nearly half of the total supply. Another roughly 700,000 tokens remain in wallets and stablecoin pools for price discovery.
The data on the stock side was there too: short interest stood at 42.4 million shares, or 4.78% of the float; average daily volume was about 40.25 million shares, equal to roughly $100 million to $120 million.
0.15% of the float, even if fully bought up, would still be just a tiny fraction of the stock’s average daily trading volume. To trigger a real short squeeze, you’d need enough buying in the actual stock to move the 42.4 million shorted shares. AMC’s run to $72 in 2021 happened because retail was buying real New York-listed shares, in the hundreds of millions. Today’s on-chain pool is still several zeros away from that scale.
A bill that pencils out to $6
Someone had already started doing the math for AMC.
The math works like this: when MEME’s market cap reaches $150 million, one MEME is worth about $0.15; in the MEME/AMC main pool, more than 30 MEME are needed to get 1 tokenized AMC. That implies the tokenized AMC in the pool is worth about $6, while the real stock is only at $3. By that accounting, AMC’s actual share price would have to double just to match the on-chain frenzy.
But the problem is that the price ratio isn’t fixed; it’s determined in real time by buying and selling in the pool. The more people buy MEME, the fewer AMC tokens they can get. The amount of tokens isn’t fixed either—the issuer can mint more at any time, as shown when BONER added 4,000 new coins on Monday.
But as probably the year’s almost only real innovation in crypto, we very much hoped pricing power could be in our hands, and that using a tokenized method to price a decades-old film company could succeed—how incredible that would be.