Robinhood Takes Control of Minting, Meme-Driven Trading: How Long Can Long's Bidirectional Flywheel Keep Turning?

Behind the bidirectional channel of speculation and investment, who is really taking the profits?

Written by: Prathik Desai

Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News

In the past year, the scale of tokenized stocks has grown fivefold, reaching approximately $3 billion. As more participants enter the market, this once-scarce product is no longer rare, and the divisible profits are becoming increasingly fragmented.

As a result, the profits from tokenized stocks no longer flow to those who put the most stocks on-chain; instead, they are captured by entities controlling different layers of the technology stack: when new tokenized stocks can be minted, on which network the stock tokens are traded, and through which application users make purchases.

On the Robinhood Chain, one company controls all three of these elements. Ironically, the fastest-growing source of demand for its tokenized stocks comes from meme coins. The issuance platform on Robinhood Chain, Long.xyz, allows each token to be traded directly with stock tokens. This mechanism transforms speculative gamblers into stock buyers and vice versa. This is expected to bring sustained buying pressure and more trading volume, with investors and speculators providing liquidity to each other.

In this article, I will explore whether this model can be sustained and who is capturing value within the entire technology stack.

How Meme Coins Sell Stocks and Stocks Sell Meme Coins

The vast majority of meme coins have a lifespan of less than a day. This is also why serious stock traders tend to avoid meme coins. Ordinary office workers and family-oriented investors prefer to invest their funds in retirement accounts and ETFs rather than tokens that can lose all value overnight.

Thus, Long has made a key design choice: every token launched on the issuance platform uses Robinhood stock tokens (e.g., NVDA, AAPL, MSFT, TSLA) as counterparties, rather than Ethereum or stablecoins.

This trading pair creates a bidirectional flow. When users buy meme coins tied to tokenized Nvidia stocks, the order first purchases Nvidia stock tokens—meme coins drive stock transactions. The reverse is also true: when users hold tokenized Nvidia stocks on-chain, they can directly exchange them for meme coins without liquidating their positions. Stocks also drive meme coin transactions, with stocks and community tokens being two sides of the same coin. Each stock supported by Long builds a channel for speculators and traditional investors to communicate.

The Long platform allows meme coins and Robinhood tokenized stocks (e.g., NVDA) to be traded directly, enabling speculators or investors to exchange tokenized Nvidia stocks for meme coin $AI, achieving a bidirectional swap between meme coins and tokenized stocks.

These trading channels are very active. As of September 8, Long processed over $1 billion in tokenized stock trading volume, accounting for about 15% of the total trading volume of all tokenized stocks on decentralized exchanges since the launch of Robinhood Chain. A week later, including leveraged products, the total trading volume exceeded $1.4 billion.

The average daily trading volume for a single asset on the Long platform is about $45,000, three times the average level of assets on the Robinhood Chain platform. As of September 10, seven of the top eight tokens by daily trading volume came from Long's issuance, including a meme coin tied to AMC and Artificial Inu ($AI) tied to Nvidia.

Long continues to iterate its products on this momentum.

On September 1, Long launched LongX, which packages a 3x long Nvidia position from the derivatives exchange Lighter into a token that can be traded like ordinary stocks. After its launch, LongX accounted for 16% of all open contracts for Nvidia on the Lighter platform.

On September 12, Long introduced Pre-IPO trading pairs for unlisted companies like OpenAI and Anthropic through Lighter's perpetual contracts.

Last week, Long launched LONG500, positioned as a S&P 500 index product in the tokenized stock space, covering over 70 stocks. Of the transaction fees generated from each new trading pool, 5% goes to the $AI community treasury, and another 5% is used to buy back and burn the corresponding meme coins for that trading pair.

Can Demand Be Sustained Long-Term?

The flow of buying on Long relies on the market having sufficient supply of stock tokens. The stocks that Long can pair are not scarce: Robinhood Chain has already launched over 190 stock token targets; for licensed companies, adding a new stock code is mostly just paperwork. What is truly scarce is the circulation of tokens corresponding to individual stocks.

Robinhood's stock tokens are debt certificates issued in Jersey, with each corresponding to real underlying stocks. Only the authorized entity BBVI has the right to mint and burn tokens, and minting and burning can only be executed between 2 AM CET on Monday and 2 AM CET on Saturday. Before minting tokens, real stocks must be purchased first, so there is almost no new token supply over the weekend.

The contradiction between speculative traders and traditional investors thus becomes apparent. Vaidik introduced a case in his article