$150 million Emotion-Driven Express Lane, AMC Squeeze a 5-Year Déjà Vu
At the close of the U.S. stock market on Thursday, AMC Entertainment was priced at $2.54. The largest movie theater chain in the U.S. has a market capitalization of $2.27 billion, with 893 million shares outstanding. On Thursday, there was no news regarding the company.
Half an hour after the market close, a new trading pair appeared on Robinhood's platform: AMC/MEME. The new coin is called "A Meme Coin," with the abbreviation conveniently being AMC:Meme.
Then things started to spiral out of control.
Within a 5-hour period, the MEME coin surged by thousands of times, starting with a market value of around $3 million, skyrocketing past $30 million, $50 million, and approaching $150 million; at the same time, AMC's own price saw movement, with after-hours trading briefly rising by over 14%, then extending to 18% to 20% in pre-market trading.
The surge led to AMC's CEO and Robinhood's co-founder engaging in a late-night public feud.
To understand what happened, we must first revisit the history between AMC and Robinhood.
Rescued and Betrayed by the Same Brokerage
In 2021, AMC and Robinhood were involved in a high-profile short squeeze.
On January 28 of that year, Robinhood restricted the buying of a group of surging stocks, allowing only selling. The list included GameStop and AMC, and retail investors using the app watched as prices plummeted, labeling the act as a betrayal. However, retail investors were reliant on Robinhood: it was the most convenient platform for retail investors at the time, and many of AMC's supporters placed their orders there. In June of that year, AMC's stock price was driven above $72, becoming one of the most talked-about stocks in the U.S. Adam Aron astutely embraced this enthusiasm: he provided free popcorn to shareholders registered in Investor Connect, engaged with retail investors on social media, orchestrated multiple rounds of stock issuance at peak levels, used retail investors' money to pay off debts and keep the company afloat, pulling the company back from the brink of bankruptcy.
At that time, Aron was one of the most beloved CEOs among retail investors.
Five years later, with the same company and the same CEO, the focus turned to a new business of the same brokerage: tokenized stocks on the blockchain. The name of AMC remained the same, as did Robinhood's, but what changed was the battleground of that short squeeze, shifting from New York's order books to a 24/7 blockchain pool. Once again, the market was ignited by the same formula validated in 2021: attention, leverage, and a short squeeze narrative.
Thousandfold in a Day
The Robinhood Chain is a layer 2 network launched in July 2026, featuring "Tokenized Stock" as its selling point: copying New York stocks onto the chain for 24-hour trading, allowing non-U.S. users to participate. The copied assets have their own rules, following the stock price, claiming to represent the underlying stock but without the voting rights or the ability to redeem the real stock in a New York brokerage account.
The meme coin game quickly evolved. Previously, creating a meme involved depositing ETH or USDT into a pool; now creators can deposit NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, or a stock of a movie theater chain called AMC into the pool. The front-end user experience is intentionally deceptive: while you appear to be spending stablecoins, in the background, two conversions have already taken place, first into stock tokens, then into meme tokens. Even the project's fees are settled in stock tokens.
As a result, the USD price of the meme coin is compressed into a single formula:
The number of meme coins exchanged for stock tokens multiplied by the USD price of the stock tokens.
Double down. Betting on the meme outperforming the individual stock, while staking your wealth on the stock's price movements. If the stock rises, the USD price of the meme is lifted; if the stock falls, even if the meme outperforms, the USD gains shrink. AMC happens to be the asset with its own narrative and memories: in 2021, it was shorted by hedge funds, saved by retail traders, and halted by Robinhood. Behind those five letters lies the emotions of a whole generation of retail traders.
This gameplay has been active on the Robinhood Chain for a month now.
For example, BONER, launched on August 20th, has trading pairs directly linked to the tokenized shadow of Hims & Hers. This company sells men's health products, and BONER's narrative is so explicit that it needs no translation: "hard currency," squeezing HIMS. It encountered a weekend: the New York Stock Exchange was closed, the issuer could hardly issue more tokens, the pool dried up its liquidity, the on-chain HIMS surged from $28.84 at Friday's close to $132.64, more than quadrupling in value; on Monday's open, the issuer minted 4,000 new tokens to restore the shadow price, but BONER continued to rise, driven by emotions.
Next was FATCOIN, paired with the tokenized stock of Eli Lilly (LLY), a weight-loss drug joke of "the more you trade, the fatter you get," surging 175x in ten hours.
While executives of other companies remained silent, the CEO of AMC couldn't stay idle.
CEO's Outburst Propels Market to New Heights
What prompted the CEO's outburst was the on-chain activity that reflected back on his own company's stock price, a pool that he had no control over, trading his company's name and price.
His initial statement was very strong: Robinhood claimed to cover tokenized stocks of over 190 companies, including AMC; this project has no relation to AMC, is unauthorized, and is not registered under U.S. securities laws. The language escalated to "shameful, absurd, disgusting, unforgivable," and he stated that the board would immediately hire external securities lawyers.
Tenev replied with a simple "What's it to me?" and the market instantly entered a new phase of growth.
Aron promptly fired back with a second shot: he stated that Robinhood is issuing "representative AMC stock" products through an overseas entity in Jersey, not bound by U.S. securities laws, causing "near-existential concerns" for the company; AMC spends millions annually on securities compliance, while Robinhood's "synthetic stock market" divorces trading from the company's financing and ownership, traditional shareholders have voting rights, while token holders have nothing. He demanded that Robinhood proactively halt AMC stock token trading, otherwise lawyers would take action to force a halt and submit inquiries to the SEC.
At this point, the issue had spread from the pool to Washington.
The argument itself became part of the market. With each round of verbal warfare, the discussion intensified; the more intense the discussion, the thicker the pool's buy orders became; the thicker the buy orders, the higher the meme rose, and the higher the meme rose, the more the CEO became uneasy. This is a closed loop, with attention itself as the fuel. What memes fear most is silence.
Still a Few Zeros Away from a Short Squeeze
Putting emotions aside, what truly matters is the scale.
The total supply of tokenized AMC is around 1.33 million. With 1.1 million tokens against 893 million shares outstanding, this is 0.15%. Approximately 746,000 tokens are locked in various pools, with the MEME/AMC main pool alone holding 557,000 tokens, close to half of the total supply; around 700,000 tokens are left in wallets and stablecoin pools for price discovery.
Data from the equity side is also in play: there are 42.4 million shares in short positions, accounting for 4.78% of the float; daily average trading volume is around 40.25 million shares, equivalent to about $1.0 to $1.2 billion.
With 0.15% of the float, buying it all up would merely be a fraction of the daily average trading volume of the underlying stock. To trigger a true short squeeze, a sufficiently large amount of equity buying is needed to squeeze those 42.4 million short shares. In 2021, AMC was able to rise to $72 because retail investors were buying actual New York Stock Exchange shares, measured in the billions. Today's on-chain pools are still several orders of magnitude away from that scale.
A $6 Calculation
Someone has already done the math for AMC.
The algorithm goes as follows: When the MEME market cap hits $150 million, one MEME is roughly $0.15; within the MEME/AMC main pool, it takes over 30 MEME to swap for 1 tokenized AMC. The implied tokenized AMC in the pool is valued around $6, while the common stock is currently at only $3. According to this calculation, AMC's stock price would need to double to match the frenzy on-chain.
However, the exchange rate is not fixed and is dynamically determined by the real-time buying and selling in the pool. The more people buy MEME, the fewer AMC tokens can be obtained. The tokenized quantity is also not fixed, as the issuer can mint more tokens at any time, as evidenced by the 4,000 new BONER coins on Monday.
But as one of the few innovative gameplay styles in the crypto world this year, we truly hope that the pricing power can be in our hands, using tokenization to price decades-old film industry assets and actually succeeding would be nothing short of incredible.
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