Want to Buy a Dog? Buy Nvidia First: Is Meme Coin Stock the Engine of the Bull Market?

It's very lively, but there are few real people.

Written by: Clow

To buy a Dogecoin, you first need to buy Nvidia stock.

This is not a joke; it's the most popular play on the Robinhood blockchain right now. The dog is called Artificial Inu, and across the pool is the tokenized NVDA. On August 1, it had a market cap of $1.5 million; by August 30, it soared to $135 million, and at the beginning of September, it briefly exceeded $320 million.

The blockchain is going crazy too. In about two months, the DeFi Total Value Locked (TVL) surged from nearly zero to $700-800 million; according to DefiLlama, on September 3, the daily DEX trading volume reached $1.686 billion.

In two months, three records, and a new term: Meme Coin Stock.

So some people started shouting: the engine of this bull market has been found. The last round was ETFs bringing Wall Street money into the crypto space; this time, it’s turning Wall Street stocks directly into on-chain chips.

Others say this is just Pump.fun with a new skin, only this time the skin is printed with Nvidia.

An engine needs two things: a continuous supply of fuel and a non-stop RPM. Whether this machine has it, we need to take it apart to see.

01 Want to Buy a Dog? Buy Nvidia First

The story starts with a cat.

The Robinhood chain launched its mainnet on July 1, built on the Arbitrum Orbit architecture, using ETH to pay for gas, with a block time of about 100 milliseconds. The official vision is to create a 24/7 road for tokenized stocks and Real World Assets (RWA).

The first thing to bring retail investors in wasn’t stocks, but CASHCAT. It borrowed the name of Robinhood’s two founders' original company from 2010 and has no official connection, with a market cap that once surged past $300 million. Robinhood’s CEO didn’t mind, posting that this chain "is also great for Meme."

It proved one thing: as long as the story is rich enough, retail investors are willing to cross chains, willing to set up new wallets, and willing to provide liquidity in a strange contract.

Next came Pons, a token issuance assembly line. Issuing, pricing, and building pools became a standard process, and once the shares on the curve were sold out, it automatically locked the raised funds and reserved tokens into Uniswap V4.

As of August 31, Pons had issued about 389,000 tokens, collecting $46.27 million in fees, of which $10.23 million went to the protocol, and about $3.61 million was used to buy back and burn PONS. On August 30 alone, PONS had a trading volume of $67.38 million, with a market cap soaring to $233 million.

Money shifted from betting on individual Memes to betting on the casino itself.

Then came the third step: Meme Coin Stock.

The meaning is straightforward: a Meme coin, not paired with ETH, not paired with stablecoins, directly paired with a tokenized US stock.

Artificial Inu came about this way. To buy it, you first need to buy the NVDA token and throw it into the pool; every buy order creates demand for Nvidia’s token.

SPACEHOOD pairs with SPCX, riding on Musk’s coattails. MOO pairs with Micron’s MU, leveraging the homophony and the "memory supercycle." The dollar prices of these coins have two variables: community enthusiasm for dogs and the ups and downs of the underlying stock itself. Buying it means betting on two fronts simultaneously.

The Index is more direct, charging 3% on both buy and sell sides, using the fees to buy a basket of stock tokens to distribute to token holders, with cumulative fees exceeding $1.7 million.

The problem with traditional RWA is that once bought, they are not traded, and stock tokens are like locked in a safe. Meme Coin Stock drags them out, forcing them to act as chips. Every time a Dogecoin changes hands, it creates trading volume for the underlying stock.

02 The Opening Bell is the Final Market Maker

Recently, everyone has seen enough of the excitement around HIMS; here, we only mention the broken bone it exposed.

According to The Defiant, there are only 58,700 HIMS tokens on-chain, corresponding to a real circulating supply of 233 million shares, which is 0.025%. A Meme called BONER locked 31,200 of them in its pool, accounting for 53%.

On Sunday night, HIMS was bought on-chain for $132.64, while the NYSE closing price on Friday was $28.84.

A 4.6x premium, why didn’t anyone come to arbitrage?

Because no one could. According to Robinhood’s design, only the uniquely authorized participant BBVI can mint new tokens; this role in the prospectus is Robinhood’s own Bitstamp. The prerequisite for minting is to first buy stocks in the real market for hedging. With the NYSE closed over the weekend, no one was willing to conjure a new HIMS out of thin air.

On Monday, after noon Eastern time, BBVI minted about 4,000 tokens within an hour to replenish, collapsing the premium and bringing the price back to around $29.

On-chain finance has been blowing for ten years 24/7, yet the pricing power still belongs to the sound of the opening bell in New York. Those 4,000 tokens were the true market-making instructions, and the person issuing this instruction had to wait for Wall Street to start work.

This time it was an upward squeeze, a superficial prosperity. Conversely, if a panic sell-off had occurred over the weekend, it wouldn’t just be the Meme that would be crushed; the half circulating stock tokens in the pool would be drained together. And the replenishing person would have to wait until Monday.

An asset with limited supply elasticity, which also has to stop for two days a week, is being used to price something with infinite volatility. This is not an accident; it’s by design.

Once the opening bell rings, the weekend on-chain is over.

03 The Numbers are Big, But Where are the People?

Looking at all 63.5 million transactions from July 16 to 28, what I see is a treadmill.

Out of 823,700 wallets, 61% appeared only for one day. Daily new tokens issued ranged from 10,000 to 26,000, with 84% not trading after the first day. The median transaction amount was $48.42.

Trading bots only account for 1.7% of wallet numbers but contribute 51.3% of trading volume. The 9,003 wallets that were active for all 13 days accounted for 1.1% of the total and consumed 37.3% of the trading volume.

However, the same data also shows another side: the number of holders of tokenized stocks increased by 155% in 30 days, with cumulative DEX trading volume exceeding $3 billion. Next to the casino, the number of legitimate customers at the counter is also increasing.

The distribution of money is similarly fragmented. As of August 31, there were about $775 million in stablecoins on-chain, with Paxos’ USDG accounting for 57.6% and Ethena’s USDe accounting for 42%. Of the more than $700 million in TVL, $480 million is lying in Morpho, earning about 7% annualized as advertised by Robinhood Earn, mainly from the USDG treasury managed by Steakhouse.

The capital actually changing hands in the casino is much smaller than the $1.5 billion daily trading volume suggests. The same money is turning many circles in a day.

On the other hand, Robinhood’s tokenized stocks are completely blocked for residents of the US, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, and the UAE.

Wall Street stocks cannot be bought by Wall Street people. Half of the on-chain transactions are generated by scripts.

Returning to the question: will Meme Coin Stock become the engine of the bull market?

Those who are bullish have their reasons. RWA has been discussed for three years; tokenized stocks have always been things locked in safes after purchase; Meme is the first to give them real trading depth.

The last round of Solana’s market was also ignited by Meme first, with legitimate applications following later. Nvidia, Musk, Apple—these symbols are universally understood and can pull people who have never touched the chain before; this is something ZK and re-staking cannot achieve.

Those who are bearish focus on two things.

One is fuel: the prerequisite for a bull market is a continuous net inflow of new money from outside; the last round of Bitcoin spot ETFs did just that. However, Meme Coin Stock blocks the most purchasing power from North American retail investors, relying instead on retail investors from Europe and Asia-Pacific, along with the existing funds on Ethereum flipping hands.

Some have calculated that, taking The Index as an example, with a 3% fee on both buy and sell sides, entering and exiting would cost 5.9%, not counting slippage. Without new money coming in, this negative-sum game burns its own fuel.

The second is RPM: 61% of wallets only come for one day, half of the trading volume is generated by bots, and every weekend it has to stop and wait for the NYSE to open.

Regulation is the same sword hanging over both sides. The SEC’s three divisions previously issued a joint statement that tokenization does not change the substance of securities. The NVDA that retail investors buy on-chain is legally a debt instrument issued by Robinhood’s special purpose entity in Jersey, with no voting rights and no direct claim to dividends.

For something like The Index, which takes a cut to buy stocks and then distributes them to token holders, how to classify it is still unclear.

Both sides have their arguments; the difference lies in how to define the engine: is it the match that ignites it or the fuel that keeps it burning?

Meme has changed skins many times: animals, celebrities, and this time it’s stock codes. Each time it can ignite a fire; whether this fire can burn outside the chain depends on the next few months—whether money comes in from outside the chain or just circulates within.

The fire has already been lit. Where the oil comes from, no one has answered yet.