Author: Mr. Z, 168X
Robinhood is turning stocks into composable assets: issuance rights, liquidity and routing rights are revalued at the same time. $AI and $PONS are just the first stage. The real big opportunity is in RWA DeFi
Wednesday, September 30, 2026 at 7:00 pm. The Crypto bull market has gained momentum again, and 168X has begun to return more attention to the chain. The first ecosystem we focus on this round is Robinhood Chain. Its mainnet has only been online for a few months, but it has rapidly grown from a simple "stock token" to Launchpad, currency-to-stock matching, LP, Treasury, Agent, Meme, DeFi and various new liquidity mechanisms.
In this issue, 168X invites independent on-chain researcher Alu (@alu1337). He started tracking the ecosystem from the first day Robinhood Chain was launched. He participated in DELTA, HOOKR, and PROLOGUE in the early days, and later planned STONK on Solana in advance. In this episode, we start with why Robinhood may hit the Top 3 mainstream public chains, and then dismantle the two completely different Launchpad models of LONG and PONS, and then talk in depth about $AI, $SHROOM, $OPEN, $BUN, $PAID (Solana Ecosystem), $UBIK, $HOOKR, $ZZZ, and the next stage of RWA+DeFi that may really open up the valuation space.
Alu’s judgment is that listing stocks on the chain is only the first step. The real big opportunity is to turn stocks into Crypto Native’s composable assets. Whoever controls issuance, liquidity, routing, and rules in the future will truly control the value of Robinhood Chain.
1. Why Robinhood is worth investing heavily in: It has 3 advantages that others cannot buy
2. The real innovation is not to put stocks on the chain: it is to make stocks the quotation leg of Crypto Native
3. LONG vs PONS: One internalizes value, the other outsources innovation to the ecosystem
4. Why $AI may be LONG’s real platform currency: the market has not fully priced it yet
5. PONS does not need to eat LONG: what it really wants to do is to "issue everything" at the toll station
6. $SHROOM: Early-stage Infra with cross-stock liquidity, it could be worth more than $100 million if it runs out
7. $HOOKR: Whoever controls Uniswap v4 Hook controls the issuance rules
8. $BUN / Mosh: Not a Meme, but a new issuance mechanism for Agentic Market Making
9. Why $PAID is only suitable for Event Trade: Creator Fee is sexy, but Attention is difficult to sustain.
10. $UBIK: Agent’s World Memory Layer, what I’m buying now is team and narrative
11. $OPEN vs $SHROOM: Do the same thing, but the real-name team determines the upper limit of valuation
12. $ZZZ, $AGI: The most noteworthy thing in this round is the second start-up of old Devs with new mechanisms.
13. STONK’s biggest lesson: After reading Thesis correctly, don’t sell Winner too early because of PVP path dependence.
14. Robinhood’s next big thing is not more Meme: Lending, Options, Collateral and RWA DeFi
15. How does Niu Chu screen projects: old Dev, real products, new mechanisms. When you see “Just for Fun”, you will immediately be alert.
1. Why Robinhood is worth investing heavily in: It has 3 advantages that others cannot buy
Mr. Z: First, please give a complete lecture on Robinhood Chain. It has only been a few months since the mainnet was launched, but you already feel that many core indicators have the opportunity to reach Top 3 in the future. What is your bullish logic?
Alu: I have been following Robinhood Chain since the first day it was launched. At the beginning, I didn’t actually assume that it would be successful. What I looked at was Bridge TVL, DeFi TVL, Stablecoin Market Cap, and developer migration speed. If these things do not grow, it is likely to become a ghost chain not long after it goes online, like many previous Layer 2s.
Alu: But by mid-September, I saw that several data had quickly entered the forefront of mainstream public chains. For a new chain that was born less than 3 months ago, this speed is exaggerated. If there is no obvious decline in the follow-up, I think it is not impossible for many indicators to hit the Top 3.
Mr. Z: But data speed is probably not just the most bullish reason for you?
Alu: Yes. What really makes me bullish is that Robinhood has 3 things at once that are hard for others to have together. The first is the compliance entrance plus retail distribution. It is a brokerage in itself, with its own App, Wallet and a huge user base. These users cannot be bought by ordinary Layer 2 money.
Alu: The second is RWA as the offer leg. There were people doing it before stocks were put on the chain, but using real-world assets directly as quoted assets and liquid assets in Crypto, I think it really started to take shape after Robinhood.
Alu: The third thing is that in a very short period of time, in addition to the traditional DeFi three-piece set, it has also developed a complete set of combinable gameplay methods such as Launchpad, currency-stock matching, Uniswap Hooks, Agent, and cross-stock LP. I have rarely seen a chain that has only been online for a few months grow so many original innovations so quickly.
2. The real innovation is not to put stocks on the chain: it is to make stocks the quotation leg of Crypto Native
Mr. Z: So many people still understand Robinhood as “stocks on the chain”, but what is really important is not the Tokenized Stock itself?
Alu: Yes. I think pure stock on-chain is actually not a particularly new thing. What’s really worth watching is that it begins to turn stocks from a “certificate” into an asset in Crypto that can participate in other gameplay.
Alu: For example, stocks can be paired with Meme, can be used as LPs, and can be used to route liquidity. Later, they can even continue to expand into lending, mortgages, options, and various DeFi products.
Alu: Many things are just beginning now. If officials really add dividend rights, voting rights and other rights to Tokenized Stock later, then you will need a complete set of DeFi Infrastructure to "use" these assets.
Alu: The real big opportunity for RWA is not to move a stock certificate to the chain, but to turn stocks into native assets on the chain that can be freely combined, like ETH and USDC.
3. LONG vs PONS: One internalizes value, the other outsources innovation to the ecosystem
Mr. Z: Now Robinhood’s two most important Launchpads should be LONG and PONS. You previously defined them as "internalization" and "externalization". Can you explain it in plain language?
Alu: I think LONG and PONS are not necessarily in direct competition. It does not mean that one will eat the other in the end. PONS is more like an issuance machine that wants to "issue everything", while LONG is more focused on RWA and stock liquidity.
Alu: I would define LONG as an internalized model. It splits the handling fees into its own pool and Treasury, controls its own inventory, LP, and treasury, and then continues to build various products around this set of balance sheets. For example, currency-stock matching, index products, leverage packaging, and LONG 500 are all in the same system.
Alu: The good thing is that the cost of copying is getting higher and higher. As TVL and liquidity become deeper and deeper, it will be difficult for others to copy something exactly like it from scratch. But the disadvantage is also obvious, that is, all innovations must be done by oneself.
Alu: PONS is the opposite. I call it an externalization model. It concentrates on issuance entrance, order flow, handling fees and repurchases, and leaves things like LP compound interest, Hook, AI market making, cross-stock liquidity, and Inference Capital Markets to external vertical teams.
Alu: LONG is to keep the value as much as possible in its own balance sheet, while PONS is to let the entire ecosystem help it innovate. One wins through integration, the other wins through division of labor.
4. Why $AI may be LONG’s real platform currency: the market has not fully priced it yet
Mr. Z: If you had to choose, you would actually prefer the LONG side, and you have a high opinion of $AI?
Alu: Yes. On the one hand, I think RWA is the main line in this round of main lines, and LONG has a clear advantage in this direction. On the other hand, looking purely at odds, I think $AI has better odds than $PONS.
Alu: LONG currently does not have a separate platform currency, but it is building deep liquidity around $AI, and hopes to slowly make $AI a liquidity hub for the entire Tokenized Stock. The ideal situation is that in the future, many stock transactions on Robinhood will be routed through the pool composed of $AI and stocks.
Mr. Z: Why is the market not fully Price In yet?
Alu: The simplest reason is that LONG has never explicitly said "$AI is our platform currency." So the market doesn't have a very clear pricing path.
Alu: PONS is very simple. It is called PONS itself. You can directly evaluate it based on Launchpad, handling fees, and buybacks. But $AI does not have this clear identity, and the market has no way to directly map the value of LONG to it.
Alu: I actually regard $AI as the de facto platform currency of LONG, but the market has not fully priced it in this way. This is where I feel the odds are still there.
5. PONS does not need to eat LONG: what it really wants to do is to "issue everything" at the toll station
Mr. Z: So what is the value of PONS? Why do you think it doesn’t need to compete with LONG to win or lose?
Alu: Because what PONS wants to do is to be the largest distribution entrance. You can think of it as a toll station. When projects are distributed from me, I collect handling fees, use part of them to repurchase PONS, and then grow other vertical services around my distribution layer.
Alu: For example, Hook design can be handed over to HOOKR, AI market making can be handed over to Mosh, cross-stock liquidity can be handed over to SHROOM, and Inference Capital Markets can be handed over to ORBIO. It doesn't require doing everything yourself.
Alu: A big advantage of this is that the valuation can be dismantled. Each vertical project can grow to $100 million or more on its own, but it will not dilute the story of PONS itself as issuance infrastructure, because these things are still issued from PONS at the bottom.
Alu: So I don’t think there is necessarily a winner between LONG and PONS. If PONS ends up becoming Robinhood's largest asset launch layer, it itself will only need to firmly control issuance rights and order flow.
6. $SHROOM: Early-stage Infra with cross-stock liquidity, it could be worth more than $100 million if it runs out
Mr. Z: Let’s talk about Ticker directly. $SHROOM is a cross-stock liquidity network, what do you think of it?
Alu: SHROOM’s positioning is relatively clear, which is to take advantage of misprices and fluctuations between different stock pairs and turn these things into returns that LPs can capture. I would still position it as a standalone Infra.
Alu: One of its current risks is that if a large amount of order flow is absorbed by the $AI of the LONG ecosystem in the future, SHROOM may be marginalized. But I think $AI is more like LONG’s internal routing, and SHROOM is more like a product that independently eats cross-stock structures in the PONS ecosystem. The two sides are not necessarily completely conflicting.
Alu: The current market value is about $15 million to $20 million, which you can understand as early Infra pricing. If it really becomes the Default Venue of multi-stock LPs in the future, I think more than $100 million is not too exaggerated.
Alu: The data that really need to be looked at are the number of cross-stock pools, depth of liquidity, the proportion of automatic reinvestment of fees to LP, and how much routing weight it can get in the end. Not just reading the story.
7. $HOOKR: Whoever controls Uniswap v4 Hook controls the issuance rules
Mr. Z: HOOKR is also a project you have been mentioning in the early days. Why do you think Uniswap v4 Hook is so important on Robinhood?
Alu: I think HOOKR is still an undervalued target. Uniswap v4 Hook can essentially be understood as a rules market.
Alu: For example, if a project is issued on PONS, it can choose different Hooks to determine anti-sniper, dynamic Fee, fee flow direction, and different liquidity rules. Whoever masters these rules will actually begin to affect the quality of project release.
Alu: Uniswap had a cooperative relationship with PONS before, and I had been thinking about how these two things would eventually be combined. I think a very natural direction is for the PONS issuance layer to directly integrate rule markets such as HOOKR in the future.
Alu: In the future, a project will not simply “issue a coin”, but will be able to choose the liquidity rules it wants when issuing it.
Alu: Launchpad decides who can issue coins, and Hook decides how the coins are traded. The latter may be far more important in the long term than everyone now understands.
8. $BUN / Mosh: Not a Meme, but a new issuance mechanism for Agentic Market Making
Mr. Z: I’ve also watched Mosh’s $BUN. It currently has a circulating market value of approximately US$20 million and FDV of more than US$90 million. What do you think?
Alu: I think the core is not whether it is a Meme, but that Mosh proposed a new distribution primitive.
Alu: Before it is released, it first crowdfunds a Bundle, then locks a large portion of the chips into a non-extractable Vault, and then uses Agent Swarm to use these chips for bilateral market making. At present, about 70% of the chips are locked in, so you can see that the FDV is very high, but the actual circulating part is actually not that big.
Alu: Why did this thing suddenly gain market attention? On the one hand, it is a new mechanism. On the other hand, some Web3 VCs have indeed begun to discuss and spread the concept of Agentic Market Making.
Alu: But I think it’s still far from enough to say that the mechanism has been successful. Its Agent Swarm market making algorithm is still relatively rudimentary. The most important thing later is to see whether market making can make money stably, and whether fees such as ALF (Agentic Liquid Fund) actually flow in and whether they are used to repurchase $BUN.
Alu: The market is now pricing the new issuance mechanism of "AI Agent market making", not a mature business model.
9. Why $PAID is only suitable for Event Trade: Creator Fee is sexy, but Attention is difficult to sustain.
Mr. Z: $PAID is also very hot these days. Creator Fees are paid directly to celebrities through X Money. What do you think of this scheme?
Alu: I am relatively clear. I would define PAID as an Event Trade, not a long-term holding project.
Alu: Its innovation is easy to understand, which is to convert the Creator Fee directly into real dollars through X Money and transfer it to the celebrity account. Compared with the past models similar to Bags, this path is smoother, so it is highly contagious.
Alu: But the biggest problem with it, and the biggest problem with this model all the time, is that you have to continue to rely on celebrity interaction and attention.
Alu: A celebrity with millions of fans may interact once because of the novelty, but you cannot expect him to continue to help you place orders and continue to participate in Build. And the Creator Fee may not be worth the long-term investment at all for really big celebrities.
Alu: You can trade when there is Attention, but once Attention leaves, it will be difficult for the fundamentals to catch the price. So I won't take it long term.
10. $UBIK: Agent’s World Memory Layer, what I’m buying now is team and narrative
Mr. Z: Another one you really like is UBIK, the so-called World Memory Layer of Agents. Why does this thing Make Sense?
Alu: Actually, you don’t need to think about Agent first. Think about it now that we use AI ourselves. When you use ChatGPT, Claude, and other models, your context, personal preferences, and historical Tool Calling are all scattered among different model manufacturers, and there is no permanent memory.
Alu: If there are a large number of Agents in the future, they will need an independent Memory Layer. What UBIK wants to do is to turn memory into an infrastructure that can be permanently saved and that different Agents can call and interact with each other.
Alu: I think Make Sense is in this direction, and the team is related to aixbt, which is why I am willing to give it more attention.
Alu: But now to be clear, it hasn't really delivered the product yet. Therefore, I think the current pricing of about US$20 million to US$25 million is more reasonable. In essence, we are still buying narrative and team.
Alu: If the product is really released later, we will have reason to give it a higher valuation if we look at the data, distribution and network effect.
11. $OPEN vs $SHROOM: Do the same thing, but the real-name team determines the upper limit of valuation
Mr. Z: Both OPEN and SHROOM seem to be doing Liquidity Layer. Why do you think OPEN’s upper limit may be lower?
Alu: The two things are indeed very similar, but the camps are different. OPEN is more LONG, SHROOM is more PONS. The core is the number, depth, and fees of the pool, as well as how to get more order flow.
Alu: OPEN has also recently made its own customized Hook, hoping to increase fee income. If the $AI or LONG ecology takes off, I think OPEN, an asset with a relatively low current valuation, will of course have the opportunity to be revalued.
Alu: But I still think that the upper limit of SHROOM is likely to be higher. One of the simple reasons is the team identity.
Alu: OPEN is an anonymous team, and SHROOM can see old developers who have done DeFi in the past. Crypto Of course, many anonymous teams can also be successful, but Devs with real names and successful projects have their own Reputation Cost.
Alu: In the early days of the bull market, I became more and more willing to pay a premium for "this person has really made something before." Because before the product is fully implemented, the team itself is one of the most important assets.
12. $ZZZ, $AGI: The most noteworthy thing in this round is the second start-up of old Devs with new mechanisms.
Mr. Z: You just talked about "Old Dev". Is this the same logic for companies like ZZZ and AGI?
Alu: Yes. A very important aspect of ZZZ is that GMX-related developers come out to do it. Their product path is not particularly clear yet. From my own understanding, it wants to be an AI Coordination Layer plus community gate control token on Robinhood.
Alu: You must first hold a Token to enter the community, and then hand over your ideas to the Agent, allowing the Agent to execute, collaborate, and deliver. It's still early days, and many things are even vague, but because of my developer background, I will continue to pay attention.
Alu: AGI is similar. The team that worked on Launchpad in the last round is now working on Clank. The most obvious runner currently is AGI. At present, the team has not 100% clearly acknowledged the entire long-term plan, but if it is later confirmed that it is the original team, and Clank will continue to build, I think there will be a chance.
Alu: This round I will pay special attention to one kind of project: Dev who has proven that it can build in the previous round will start a new business with new mechanisms in this round. It’s at least an extra layer of security than a completely anonymous project that only relies on memes.
13. STONK’s biggest lesson: After reading Thesis correctly, don’t sell Winner too early because of PVP path dependence.
Mr. Z: STONK should be regarded as a classic "look right but sell out" in your round. What’s the biggest lesson from this time?
Alu: I judged very early on that the stock matching narrative would not stop at Robinhood. Because many chains are doing on-chain stocks, but it is Robinhood that really brings the stock matching game to the forefront.
Alu: Now that this mechanism is established, I will naturally go to Solana and Base to find narrative migration, so I bought STONK early on.
Alu: But the problem is, I played a lot in Solana in the past, and there would be a very strong PVP path dependency. Many things in Solana are too fast-paced, so you will form a habit of taking profits as soon as you have good profits.
Alu: That's what happened to me this time. Thesis was right, and the position was early enough, but it didn't give Winner enough time.
Alu: One of the most common mistakes in the early stages of the bull market is to use the profit-taking logic of the bear market and PVP market to sell a Winner that is forming a long-term main line.
14. Robinhood’s next big thing is not more Meme: Lending, Options, Collateral and RWA DeFi
Mr. Z: If Robinhood really continues to grow in the next phase, what do you think you are most looking forward to? More crypto memes, or something else?
Alu: I think most runners now are still currency-stock matching, Launchpad, plus some early Infra, but if we really go back to RWA + DeFi, these things are not enough.
Alu: In the future, I will look forward to stock lending, mortgages, options, hedging, brokerage-related gameplay, and various products using Tokenized Stock as collateral.
Alu: Especially assuming that Robinhood really gradually grants real rights and interests such as dividend rights and voting rights to stocks on the chain, you will definitely need DeFi Infrastructure to combine them.
Alu: Now Uniswap is a DEX, Morpho is doing lending, and other mature DeFi can also be moved here. But what I look forward to more is Robinhood growing some new native DeFi projects on its own, rather than copying things on Ethereum forever.
Alu: The day when Robinhood truly becomes an “on-chain capital market” is not that stocks can be traded 24 hours a day, but that stocks can be borrowed, mortgaged, made into LPs, combined, and used to create new financial products.
15. How does Niu Chu screen projects: old Dev, real products, new mechanisms. When you see “Just for Fun”, you will immediately be alert.
Mr. Z: Finally, I will give you a more practical framework. There are so many projects on Robinhood now, what do you screen first?
Alu: First of all, I still want to emphasize that the tickers I talk about today are my personal opinions and are not investment advice. I hope that what everyone gets from it is how to look at projects.
Alu: At this stage, I would be more willing to start a second business project with a real-name developer. First, he has Reputation Cost; second, he has made products before and has experience in actually building a project; third, he is more likely to actually deliver things instead of just hyping them up.
Alu: In addition, everyone must identify the pipeline project. Now there are some obvious currency issuance factories on Robinhood, with the same logo style, the same website UI, and the same set of templates mass-produced. If you see something like this, be very careful.
Alu: Another thing I have reminded you before is that if a Founder or team member comes out and says: "We are posting a few Memes just for fun, Just for Fun." I will advise everyone to be more vigilant.
Because this sentence is often a disclaimer in advance. He has told you that there is no obligation on my part to deliver, no next stage, no Value Accrual, it is just a matter of playing along. You can treat it as pure speculation, but never come up with a long-term thesis for the project.
Alu: It’s not that you can’t buy Narrative this round, but you have to know what you are buying. Old Dev, real products, and new mechanisms can give time; water trays, anonymous copies, Just for Fun, don't invent the fundamentals for it yourself.
Mr. Z: At the end of this episode, Robinhood’s logic can actually be summarized very simply: Robinhood’s biggest Moat is compliance entrance, retail distribution and RWA; LONG and PONS represent two distribution routes, internalization and externalization respectively; projects such as $AI, $SHROOM, $HOOKR and $UBIK are competing for liquidity, rules, routing and Agent Infrastructure. The greater Alpha may not be in these Meme today, but in RWA DeFi that will grow after stocks truly become composable assets. The most important thing in the early days of the bull market is not to scan every new coin, but to find a few projects that can truly form a positive flywheel, and then give Winner enough time. Thanks Alu for coming to 168X for the first time today and completely dismantling the Robinhood ecosystem!