Memecoins Are Stress-Testing The Future Of Tokenized Stocks | Weekly Roundup
Summary
Jason Yanowitz compares the current market to the disbelief that followed a prior cycle’s 10% candle, while Santiago Roel Santos calls it the beginning of a bull market. Yanowitz recalls an ETF-related Cointelegraph intern post after which Bitcoin’s 10% move seemed impossible and memecoins began running while investors explained why the move could not last. Santos says his earlier “$65,000 generational bottom” call now looks increasingly credible, while acknowledging he gets few such calls right.
Santos sees memecoin–stock-token pools as the forcing function that could accelerate tokenized equities and 24/7 markets. Memecoins have “stressed the infrastructure more than any other piece of technology in crypto”; pairing their demand with scarce stock tokens forces liquidity providers, authorized participants, market makers, and market infrastructure to solve real problems. “The sheer volume is like opening a massive fire hose to sort this thing out.”
The Boner/HIMS pool demonstrated how a tiny, temporarily fixed on-chain float can detach sharply from the underlying stock. With roughly 60,000 HIMS tokens outstanding and more than half locked in the meme pool, weekend BONER demand pushed tokenized HIMS to an implied three-to-four-times Friday’s closing price, reportedly around $132. This was not a short squeeze in HIMS itself but a squeeze in the small authorized-participant wrapper pool while new tokens could not be minted.
Buying a memecoin paired with a stock token does not give the buyer a claim on the corresponding shares. Yanowitz described Robinhood’s tokenized HIMS as a Jersey debt security, theoretically backed one-for-one by shares at a custodian but carrying no votes or ordinary shareholder rights. Matt Levine’s warning, relayed on the show, is that users may not care about the wrapper when things are going well, but custody, redemption, backing, and rights will matter when something breaks.
On-chain equities have become the leading institutional and regulatory question around crypto. Yanowitz says New York institutions and Washington contacts independently called them “the single most important thing we’re trying to figure out,” while one fund discovered Hyperliquid through its pre-IPO markets. The opportunity therefore comes with an urgent need for transparency across custody, backing, legal claims, and token-holder rights.
Yanowitz’s preferred cycle expression is Robinhood, potentially supplemented by the L2 infrastructure beneath it, rather than ETH itself. He recommends Robinhood and L2 exposure, owns both, and says ETH’s roughly $300 billion valuation does not fit its current fees. Santos says he is also very long Robinhood and Coinbase, and calls Solana “literally years ahead” of most chains under sustained load. Yanowitz disclosed BTC, SOL, HYPE, ZEC, and MORPHO holdings.
Stablecoin distribution is becoming both a competitive moat and a market-cycle signal. Yanowitz argues USDC is the only asset that materially moves the needle for several new DeFi builders, interpreting Stripe’s single Open Issuance standard after acquiring Bridge as evidence that “the many stablecoin view has failed.” Santos agrees issuance may proliferate without meaningful volume fragmentation and reads BNB Chain’s approach toward overtaking Tron in stablecoin holders as evidence of growing retail participation.
Deep dive
1. The market feels alive because disbelief has returned
Yanowitz’s cycle comparison begins with a Cointelegraph intern’s ETF-related post from the prior cycle: a 10% candle felt impossible after such a long bear market, and the timeline immediately generated reasons it could not be a bull market. Memecoins then moved, first through names such as PEPE and later Fartcoin. Santos’s read today is stronger: “This is what the very beginning of a bull market feels like.”
Santos had publicly called $65,000 a “generational bottom” and now thinks the call may have landed, although he readily concedes, “I don’t get many of these calls right.” Blockworks analysts are again making serious money in memes, but LPs have not yet started urging the company to launch a fund—Santos’s recurring marker for genuine late-cycle behavior.
Yanowitz’s sentiment gauge is behavioral: “You want to be buying when you want to puke, and you want to sell when you start taking screenshots of your portfolio.” He sees neither extreme yet, despite the proliferation of FOMO screenshots. His renewed engagement matters because Santos says Yanowitz had not been excited about crypto for roughly two years.
Yanowitz praises the combination of FOMO’s social features, Robinhood Chain, Crossmint, and rapid Apple Pay onboarding, while stressing that participation is also a way to understand the mechanism rather than proof of easy profits. The reported distribution remains brutal—roughly 90% of people may not make money, comparable to a brokerage disclosure Yanowitz recalls stating that 82% of users lose.
2. Memecoins are turning tokenized stocks into infrastructure tests
Santos’s central thesis is that tokenized stocks advanced slowly because they lacked a forcing function. Memecoins supply it: intense demand collides with stock tokens, liquidity pools, constrained inventories, and market hours, compelling authorized participants and market makers to build machinery that can eventually support “24/7/365” equities.
The pairings are deliberately legible jokes: BONER with HIMS, an unnamed memecoin tied to AMC, Artificial with Nvidia, and Memory Moo with Micron. Santos also highlights ZAI, a privacy-cat memecoin whose holders receive Zcash airdrops—a dividend-like variation that became especially popular as Zcash rallied. He calls the broader design space the most interesting new primitive he has seen “since DeFi summer.”
His historical analogy is Solana: memecoins stressed the infrastructure more than any other piece of crypto technology and exposed congestion and fee problems that quieter applications might not have revealed. Whether people love or hate them, Santos calls memes crypto’s first proven product-market fit; joining them to equities may pull future market infrastructure forward faster than orderly experimentation would.
3. BONER squeezed a tiny HIMS wrapper, not the public stock
BONER launched on August 20 beside a tokenized version of HIMS on Robinhood Chain. One HIMS token was intended to track one listed share, but Yanowitz emphasizes that it was not the share itself: as he understood it, it was a Jersey debt security theoretically backed one-for-one by shares at a custodian, without votes or normal shareholder rights.
In the BONER/HIMS automated market maker, buying BONER deposits HIMS into the pool and removes BONER, making BONER more expensive in HIMS terms. Crucially, those HIMS tokens cease sitting in the separate HIMS–stablecoin pool where price discovery occurs. Demand therefore locks up the scarce wrapper even though it does not directly change the underlying company’s total share supply.
Yanowitz estimates only about 60,000 tokenized HIMS existed, with more than half eventually sitting inside the BONER pool. The speakers said authorized participants could create new wrappers only during a set window: they were unsure whether it ran Monday–Saturday or Monday–Friday, but weekend minting was unavailable. Tokenized HIMS consequently reached an implied three-to-four-times Friday’s close, around $132, before inventory could be replenished.
Yanowitz initially called the event essentially a squeeze, then corrected himself that it was not a conventional short squeeze. Santos sharpened the distinction: it was a squeeze on the authorized participant’s small pool, only a fraction of HIMS’s total public float. Santos’s unresolved question is what happens if meme demand becomes 100 times larger, especially against a small-cap stock where replenishment purchases might actually move the underlying.
4. The wrapper determines what token holders truly own
Drawing on Matt Levine’s taxonomy, Santos lays out four possible structures: issuer-native tokenized stock; an SPV holding exactly one share per token; a swap obligating the issuer to deliver the share’s economic return; or a token that merely references the stock while owing its holder nothing. The first is “the dream” but largely does not exist today; current products occupy the messier middle.
Levine’s warning, read by Santos, is temporal: “Users do not care in the slightest when things are going well.” In 24 months, when the usual crypto failure arrives, custody location, redemption rights, dividends, governing law, and whether shares ever existed will matter. Santos frames the practical question as whether users trust Robinhood and its redemption mechanism.
Yanowitz recalls similar friction around pre-IPO products tied to Anthropic, Stripe, and OpenAI: founders publicly denied approving transfers and said they might not honor the underlying arrangements. AMC CEO Adam Aron went further, calling Robinhood-linked AMC tokens “contemptable, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable, and vile.” Robinhood’s chief legal officer, Dan Gallagher, responded to a regulator with an equally categorical “We will not desist.”
5. Wall Street’s attention is creating the investable layer
Yanowitz says recent New York and Washington conversations produced the same message: institutions and regulators view on-chain equities as “the single most important thing we’re trying to figure out.” Blockworks is sprinting to release data comparable to its token-transparency framework, because products with different custodians, backing arrangements, and legal rights cannot be responsibly grouped together.
One fund told Yanowitz that Hyperliquid entered its radar through pre-IPO markets such as Cerebras and SpaceX. The investors initially thought Hyperliquid was a data website; only later did they realize it was a trading venue. The anecdote shows pre-IPO exposure bringing crypto infrastructure to investors who were otherwise outside the trenches.
Yanowitz’s preferred expression is Robinhood: “Any day I’m not selling is a day I’m buying,” because he continually rebuilds the portfolio from scratch. He sees Robinhood as a clean way to own tokenization and stablecoin growth, with Arbitrum as the infrastructure complement earning fees from Robinhood Chain activity. He still rejects ETH’s valuation-to-fee proposition and mentions a possible EIP-1559 discussion to restore balance.
Yanowitz’s token portfolio is BTC, SOL, HYPE, Zcash, and Morpho, with Bitcoin largest and Morpho smallest. He recommends Robinhood and L2 exposure and says he owns both, including early Arbitrum exposure. Santos separately says he is very long Robinhood and Coinbase. Santos’s strongest chain call is Solana, which he says is “literally years ahead” of most rivals after preparing for sustained demand. Robinhood Chain handled some initial volume, but its fees “got out of control,” whereas Solana has already spent years engineering for that moment.
6. Stablecoin concentration is becoming a bull-market signal
Yanowitz is emphatic about USDC’s network effects: friends building DeFi protocols tell him alternative stablecoins are effectively worthless to them because only USDC integrations move the needle. After Stripe bought Bridge, Stripe launched the single Open Issuance standard rather than an ecosystem of equally important coins—his evidence that “the many stablecoin view has failed.”
Santos expects many stablecoins to launch without winning meaningful volume. His base case is an oligopoly: Tether’s and USDC’s market shares have not shifted much, while distribution is the cleanest indicator of potential displacement. The question is not how many issuers exist but where users already hold liquidity and where applications integrate it.
Blockworks data showed BNB Chain nearing the point of overtaking Tron for the world’s largest number of stablecoin holders. Santos reads the shift as a bullish retail signal, separately arguing that more retail accounts on Binance and more stablecoins being held typically indicate that users are preparing to come on-chain and bid assets.
Santos says exchange tokens have historically been among crypto’s best-performing tokens. Yanowitz’s BNB logic is volume-first: he does not need to predict the direction of travel, only that there is more travel and more volume. He sees Robinhood as an analogous equity expression.