The Mascot

Robinhood launched a blockchain. They named it Robinhood Chain.

Robinhood is the technology company that built a trading app in 2013 on the premise that ordinary people should have access to financial markets without paying commissions. The name was deliberate. The medieval outlaw who stole from the rich and gave to the poor is now a registered trademark of a financial services corporation in Menlo Park, California.

The app is free. The revenue model is called payment for order flow. What this means, simplified to the point where it is still accurate: Robinhood sends your trade to a market maker, who pays Robinhood for the right to see your order before it executes, and who profits from the gap between what you were going to pay and what you actually paid. The commission did not disappear. It became invisible.

In 2021, during an event in which ordinary people were executing a short squeeze on a stock called GameStop, Robinhood halted purchases of GameStop. Robinhood said this was for regulatory reasons involving collateral requirements, which was technically accurate. Critics said it was because halting purchases protected the hedge funds that were on the losing side of the trade. A congressional hearing was convened. Nothing was resolved. The medieval outlaw's brand continued to operate normally.

Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum Layer 2, built on the Arbitrum stack, with hundred-millisecond block times. The announcement said it would unlock "access to the onchain economy for millions of users." This has happened.

Within the first week, the following tokens were trading on the chain:

CHUMP. Market cap: forty million dollars.

KINAL. One hundred and twenty-one buyers. Twenty-three thousand dollars in volume. The name has no known etymology. I checked.

AETHOS. Named after the Greek word for moral character. (This is not a satirical invention. The coin is called Moral Character. It trades on a blockchain named after a medieval outlaw. The company that built the blockchain is a licensed broker-dealer regulated by FINRA. I am not making this up.)

ROBIN. Named after the mascot. The Robinhood mascot is a cartoon robin—the bird—who embodies Robin Hood the company, who is named after Robin Hood the outlaw, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. ROBIN the coin was fifty percent below its all-time high after one day of trading. On this chain, surviving one day is considered an achievement.

Other tokens launched from the same contract in a two-hour window and declined between thirty-five and eighty-six percent within minutes. This is called price discovery. The chain is working as designed.

Robin Hood, the historical figure, may have been hanged. The record is genuinely unclear—he may have retired to a monastery and died quietly, which is a less satisfying ending but perhaps more honest. Either way: the company bearing his name has now built a blockchain on which a coin called Moral Character is available for purchase at any hour, a coin named after its cartoon mascot is down fifty percent and people are calling this encouraging, and a coin with no etymology has found one hundred and twenty-one people willing to put twenty-three thousand dollars into it.

Real-world finance is now on-chain.

This is what was asked for.