AMC CEO Blasts Robinhood Stock Tokens as AMC Shares Rally

Last night we got the first taste of mainstream attention to Robinhood tokenized equities (TEQs), with AMC’s CEO, Adam Aron, blasting them as “contemptible, outrageous… and vile.”

They aren’t registered under U.S. securities laws, he says (as does Robinhood…), they give no actual ownership or voting rights (which Robinhood already makes clear), and they’re issued by an offshore entity in Jersey (the island, not the state) which, once again, isn’t some hidden detail: these tokens aren’t offered to U.S. persons. Again, qualities that Robinhood makes explicitly clear from the start.

Still, Aron calls for a “CEASE and DECIST” — (fits of rage are the leading cause of typos) — of these “quasi-fake market(s),” or else legal action may be leveled against Robinhood. Robinhood’s Chief Legal Officer seemed unperturbed, replying the below:

Just yesterday, I wrote about how cornering the onchain supply of these tokenized stocks holds essentially zero direct bearing over the offchain float, being as they are tokenized debt securities backed by underlying shares rather than actual shares themselves.

I drew this in the context of the short-squeeze thesis circulating around Twitter, where people believed cornering onchain supply of a TEQ could squeeze the stock offchain. That’s not possible. If you want the mechanics, here’s the full article from yesterday.

The Stock-Paired Memecoin Squeeze Is a Lie on Bankless

Why cornering a tokenized stock’s supply doesn’t corner the real stock.

And, in a way, Aron is making the same point I was. These aren’t AMC shares. They don’t give you AMC voting rights or direct ownership. They give you economic exposure through a debt security. So, no, squeezing them does not squeeze AMC.

Going beyond that, though, I dove into what the actual relationship between tokenized equities and the equities themselves could be.

The leading theory, put forth by Eric Conner, is effectively the memecoin acting as guerrilla marketing for the actual equity. In the positive version, the company aligns itself with the memecoin and the community forming around it, expanding its reach and pulling more attention toward the stock.

We already got a taste of this when Conner went on Hims House, a HIMS investor community, to discuss BONER, the memecoin paired with tokenized HIMS.

What’s going on with AMC is exactly that, but in reverse.

Instead of the CEO aligning himself with the memecoin, he’s in direct opposition to it. Yet the end result looks remarkably similar: CINEMA, one of the memecoins paired with tokenized AMC, surged more than 10x in 15 minutes, while AMC itself jumped as much as roughly 17% in the wake of the exchange (though it sold off from those highs today).

You obviously can’t say Aron’s posts caused the move in AMC. But the attention loop is hard to ignore. An already memetic piece of equity now has its CEO standing up against what he sees as this corrupt, “quasi-fake” practice. That gives people a cause to rally around.

It’s negative guerrilla marketing.

And while this isn’t exactly the version I had in mind yesterday, it probably strengthens the overall thesis.

Aron is 71, so he’s not exactly the internet-native CEO I’m imagining here. You can easily see a more tech-savvy company looking at this and leaning the opposite direction: instead of fighting the onchain community around its equity, work with it.

Robinhood’s current Stock Token structure may make that difficult, since the company itself has no role in issuing the token. But we’ve already seen Galaxy work with Superstate to bring its actual equity onchain with shareholder rights attached. There are clearly other designs here.

Which gets to the more interesting question: if an adversarial interaction between a company and its onchain counterpart can generate this much attention, what happens when that interaction is aligned?

Hopefully, soon, we’ll find out.