Why would anyone want to trade a healthcare stock for a memecoin like BONER? Why wouldn’t they, ask the degens on Robinhood Chain who are building a strange new corner of DeFi.
The HIMS token is designed to track shares of the teleheath company Hims & Hers, which trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). On Robinhood Chain, traders can buy and sell the tokenized stock alongside other crypto assets like memecoins.
The deliberately ridiculous memecoin was paired with HIMS in a liquidity pool, where traders could swap between the two tokens.
At one point, the pool contained 31,198 HIMS tokens, which is more than half of the 58,714 tokenized HIMS shares that were in circulation. That imbalance briefly sent the HIMS token on Robinhood to $132.64, more than four times the $28.84 closing price of the real HIMS shares on the NYSE.
It is a bizarre glimpse of what can happen when real-world assets are put onchain and made usable in crypto markets. As Thomas Probst, a research analyst at Kaiko, tells Magazine:
But why would anyone want to trade a memecoin against a tokenized healthcare stock in the first place? And what happens when onchain markets make even more bizarre pairings possible?
Cast your mind back to summer 2020, when DeFi pioneers were busy farming for yield, deconstructing legacy finance and trying not to get rugged in the process. As Mike Dudas, co-founder of 6th Man Ventures, puts it:
Robinhood Chain seems to be the next iteration of this phenomenon, finding new uses for tokenized stocks no one had even considered until now. In less than three months after it launched, traders on Robinhood have created some wild crypto-native pairings like BONER/HIMS, AI/NVIDIA and SPACEHOOD/SPCX.
Stock tokens where they are the quote asset. Source: DeFi Prime
The basic idea is simple: instead of buying and holding a tokenized stock on its own, users can put it into a decentralized liquidity pool alongside pretty much any other token, and traders can swap between the two, creating a market around the pair.
Related: Robinhood Chain nears $1B TVL as Uniswap drives liquidity: Standard Chartered
One of the launchpads behind the trend, LONG, says its stock-paired markets generated more than $425 million in trading volume over a 24-hour period on Sept. 2, with almost $12 million locked in stock-token liquidity.
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