AMC CEO Blasts Robinhood Stock Tokens as AMC Stock Rallies

Last night, we got our first glimpse of mainstream attention on tokenized Robinhood (TEQ) stocks, with AMC CEO Adam Aron calling them “despicable, scandalous… and vile.»

They are not registered under U.S. securities laws, he says (just like Robinhood…), they do not confer any real ownership or voting rights (what Robinhood already specifies), and they are issued by an offshore entity in Jersey (the island, not the state), which, again, is not a hidden detail: these tokens are not offered to American people. Again, qualities that Robinhood explicitly lays out from the start.

Yet Aron calls for a “STOP and DECIDE” – (outbursts of rage are the main cause of typos) – of these “quasi-fake markets”, otherwise legal action could be taken against Robinhood. Robinhood’s legal director seemed unfazed, responding to the following:

Just yesterday I wrote about how hogging the on-chain supply of these tokenized stocks has virtually no direct bearing on the off-chain float, given that these are tokenized debt securities backed by underlying stocks rather than actual stocks themselves.

I drew this in the context of the short-term thesis circulating on Twitter, where people believed that hogging the on-chain supply of a TEQ could drive the stock off-chain. This is not possible. If you want mechanics, here is the full article from yesterday.

The Squeeze of Memecoins Coupled with Stocks Is a Lie About Banklessness

Why monopolizing the supply of a symbolic stock does not monopolize the real stock.

And, in a way, Aron is making the same point I am making. These are not AMC shares. They do not give you voting rights or direct ownership in AMC. They provide you with economic exposure through a debt security. So no, squeezing them doesn’t tighten AMC.

Beyond that, however, I explored what the actual relationship might be between symbolic actions and the actions themselves.

The dominant theory, put forward by Eric Conneris actually the memecoin acting as guerrilla marketing for real equity. In the positive version, the company aligns itself with memecoin and the community that forms around it, expanding its reach and drawing more attention to the stock.

We already had a taste of it when Conner went to Hims Housea community of HIMS investors, to discuss BONER, the memecoin associated with tokenized HIMS.

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

Instead of the CEO aligning with memecoin, he directly opposes it. Yet the end result seems remarkably similar: CINEMA, one of the memecoins associated with tokenized AMC, surged by more than 10x in 15 minuteswhile AMC itself jumped about 17% following the trade (although it was sold off from those highs today).

You obviously can’t say that Aron’s posts caused AMC’s move. But the attention loop is hard to ignore. An already memetic action now sees its CEO opposing what he considers to be this corrupt and “quasi-false” practice. It gives people a cause to rally around.

It is negative guerrilla marketing.

And while it’s not exactly the version I had in mind yesterday, it probably reinforces the overall thesis.

Aron is 71 years old, 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 in the opposite direction: instead of fighting the onchain community over their equity, work with them.

Robinhood’s current stock token structure may make this difficult, as the company itself has no role in issuing the token. But we’ve already seen Galaxy work with Superstate to bring its equity in line with shareholder rights. There are clearly other models here.

Which brings us to the more interesting question: If an adversarial interaction between a company and its on-chain counterpart can generate so much attention, what happens when that interaction is aligned?

Hopefully we’ll find out soon.