When U.S. stocks closed on Thursday, AMC Entertainment finished at $2.54. The nation's largest movie theater chain has a market cap of $2.27 billion, with 893 million shares outstanding. On this Thursday, there was no news at all.
Half an hour after the close, a new trading pair appeared on the Robinhood chain: AMC/MEME. The full name of the new token is "A Meme Coin," and its abbreviation happens to be AMC:MEME.
Then things spiraled out of control.
Over the next 5 hours, the MEME token surged thousands of percent. Its market cap started at roughly $3 million, broke through $30 million, $50 million, and approached $150 million. At the same time, AMC's own quote also moved, with overnight trading up over 14% at one point, expanding to 18%-20% in pre-market trading.
It rose so much that AMC's CEO and Robinhood's founder were up late on X, hurling insults at each other.
To understand what happened, we need to revisit the old grievances between AMC and Robinhood.
Saved by the Same Broker, Also Shut Down by the Same Broker
In 2021, a textbook-worthy short squeeze unfolded between AMC and Robinhood.
On January 28 of that year, Robinhood restricted buying on a group of skyrocketing stocks, allowing only sells. The list included GameStop and AMC. Retail investors watched the prices plunge in the app, calling the move a betrayal. But they couldn't leave it: Robinhood was the most convenient gateway for retail to enter the market at the time, and most of AMC's retail army placed orders from there. In June that year, AMC's stock price was pushed above $72, becoming one of the most discussed stocks in the U.S. Aron was savvy enough to embrace the enthusiasm: he sent free popcorn to shareholders registered with Investor Connect, addressed retail investors as comrades-in-arms on social media, and had the company conduct multiple rounds of share offerings at high prices. He used the retail investors' money to pay down debt and stay afloat, pulling the company back from the brink of bankruptcy.
Back then, Aron was one of the most beloved CEOs in the retail camp.
Five years later, the same company, the same CEO, turned his spear towards the same brokerage's new business: on-chain tokenized stocks. The name AMC hasn't changed, Robinhood's name hasn't changed. What changed was the battlefield of that short squeeze, moving from New York's order books to a 24/7 on-chain pool. And what ignited the market this time was still the same recipe validated back in 2021: attention, leverage, and the short squeeze narrative.
A Thousand Times in a Day
The Robinhood chain is a Layer 2 network that launched only in July 2026. Its selling point is "tokenized U.S. stocks": copying stocks from New York onto the chain for 24-hour trading, accessible even to non-U.S. users. This copied version has its own rules. It tracks the stock price and claims to correspond to custodial real shares, but you can't exchange it for voting rights or the actual shares in a New York account.
The playbook for meme coins immediately took a new shape. In the past, creating a meme involved putting ETH or USDT in a liquidity pool. Now, creators can put NVDA, TSLA, AAPL, or a movie stock called AMC into the pool. The front-end path is cleverly hidden: you see yourself spending stablecoins, but the backend has swapped for you twice—first into stock tokens, then into the pool to get the meme. Even the project team's commission is settled in stock tokens.
Thus, the dollar price of a meme is compressed into a formula:
How many stock tokens one meme can be exchanged for, multiplied by the dollar price of the stock token.
A double bet. Betting the meme outperforms that stock, while also staking your fortune on the rise or fall of that stock itself. If the stock rises, the meme's dollar price gets lifted; if the stock falls, even if the meme outperforms, its dollar gains shrink. AMC happened to be the target with built-in narrative and memory: in 2021, it was shorted, saved by retail investors, and had its buy button disabled by Robinhood. Behind those five letters stands the sentiment of an entire generation of retail investors.
This kind of gameplay has been running on the Robinhood chain for a month.
Take BONER, launched on August 20th, with its trading pair directly linked to the tokenized shadow of Hims & Hers. This company sells men's health products, and BONER's narrative is so straightforward it needs no translation: "hard currency," a short squeeze on HIMS. It hit a weekend: New York markets closed, the issuer could hardly mint new tokens, the pool dried up the free float. The on-chain HIMS shadow surged from Friday's close of $28.84 to $132.64, over fourfold. When Monday opened, the issuer minted 4,000 new tokens, slamming the shadow back to its original form, but BONER itself continued to rise, driven by sentiment.
Then came FATCOIN, linked to Eli Lilly's tokenized stock (LLY), telling the "the more you trade, the fatter you get" weight-loss drug joke, surging 175 times in ten hours.
Executives from other companies didn't say much, but AMC's CEO couldn't sit still.
After the CEO's Outburst, the Rally Went Faster
What made the CEO lash out was the on-chain movement affecting the quote of his own stock—a pool he doesn't control is trading using his company's name and price.
His first statement was firm: Robinhood claims coverage of tokenized stocks for over 190 companies, including AMC; this project has no relationship with AMC, is unauthorized, and not registered under U.S. securities laws. The wording escalated to "shameful, absurd, disgusting, unforgivable," and stated the board would immediately hire external securities counsel.
Tenev replied with something like "What's it to me?" and the rally instantly entered a second phase.
Aron fired back with a second salvo: He claimed Robinhood uses an offshore entity in Jersey to issue products "representing AMC stock" but not subject to U.S. securities laws, posing an "almost existential" concern for the company; AMC spends millions annually on securities compliance, while Robinhood's "synthetic stock market" decouples trading from the listed company's financing and ownership—traditional shareholders have voting rights, token holders have nothing. He demanded Robinhood voluntarily halt AMC stock token trading, or lawyers would take action to force a halt and submit inquiries to the SEC.
By this point, the issue had spread from the pool to Washington.
The quarrel itself became part of the rally. Each round of verbal sparring raised the discussion level higher; the higher the discussion, the thicker the buy-side in the pool; the thicker the buy-side, the higher the meme rose, and the higher the meme rose, the more restless the CEO became. It's a closed loop, fueled by attention itself. What a meme fears most is no one talking about it.
How Many Zeros Away from a Short Squeeze
Putting emotions aside, what's truly worth calculating is scale.
The total supply of tokenized AMC is approximately 1.33 million tokens. 1.1 million tokens against 893 million shares outstanding is 0.15%. About 746,000 of those are locked in various liquidity pools, with the MEME/AMC main pool alone locking 557,000 tokens—nearly half the total supply. Around 700,000 tokens remain in wallets and stablecoin pools for price discovery.
Data from the real stock side is also in play: short interest is 42.4 million shares, accounting for 4.78% of the float; average daily volume is about 40.25 million shares, roughly $1.0 to $1.2 billion.
0.15% of shares outstanding, buying it all would be just a fraction of the daily volume of the real stock. To trigger a real short squeeze, substantial buying pressure on the real stock is needed to move that 42.4 million share short position. In 2021, AMC could rise to $72 because retail investors were buying the real New York-listed shares, measured in hundreds of millions of shares. Today's on-chain pool is still several zeros away from that scale.
An Account Calculated to $6
Some have already started doing the math for AMC.
The algorithm goes like this: When MEME's market cap touched $150 million, one MEME was worth about $0.15; in the MEME/AMC main pool, it took over 30 MEME to exchange for 1 tokenized AMC. The pool implied a tokenized AMC price around $6, while the real stock was only at $3. According to this calculation, AMC's real stock price would need to double to match the on-chain frenzy.
But the problem is, the exchange 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 for it. The tokenized supply isn't fixed either; the issuer can mint more at any time, as seen with BONER's 4,000 new tokens on Monday.
But as this year's almost sole innovative play in the crypto space, we dearly hope that pricing power can be in our hands. How incredible it would be to price a decades-old movie theater business using tokenization methods and succeed.
