Robinhood lists another memecoin as worries mount about ‘dark side of crypto’

As a listed company, Robinhood is a tightly regulated online brokerage that often draws scrutiny from lawmakers and consumer finance advocates.

That isn’t deterring the Silicon Valley-based company from deepening its exposure to memecoins just as the segment is exploding with controversy.

On Monday, Robinhood offered up a new one to its 24 million customers — dogwifhat.

Up 60%

Inspired by a meme of a Shiba Inu dog named Archi sporting a pink knitted beanie, dogwifhat has soared in value in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory at the polls on November 5.

The coin is up almost 60% in the last two weeks or so, and has multiplied in value 20 times this year.

Even though memecoins have virtually no utility beyond rampant speculation, mainstream platforms such as Robinhood appear to be quite keen on offering up even more to retail investors.

Robinhood will undoubtedly be joined by other investment players keen on exploiting the lax regulatory climate to come as Trump and his fellow Republicans take control of Washington in January.

“We expect this move by Robinhood to be just the beginning of a series of corporate moves to take advantage of the growing interest in crypto assets,” Ed Hindi, chief investment officer at Swiss-based crypto hedge fund Tyr Capital, told DL News.

But controversy comes with the territory.

Animal cruelty

This week, critics lambasted memecoins as irresponsible assets that are monetising extreme and criminal online content.

Solana memecoin generator Pump.fun, for instance, enables users to create tokens easily without requiring any coding knowledge or upfront capital.

To make their tokens go viral, some memecoin creators performed shocking stunts on Pump.fun livestream, including child abuse, animal cruelty, and pornography.

‘Let’s build real applications using blockchain.’

—  Changpeng Zhao

Taking a dim view of the trend, Changpeng Zhao, the co-founder and former CEO of Binance, said memecoins had become “weird.”

“Let’s build real applications using blockchain,” Zhao pleaded on X.

Pump.fun has deactivated its live-streaming feature in the wake of the backlash.

“To ensure the absolute safety of our users, we will be pausing the live streaming functionality on the site for an indefinite time period until the moderation infrastructure is ready to deal with the heightened levels of activity,” Pump.fun said in a statement on Monday.

Memecoins, of course, have long been used to promote jokes that have gone viral, and are rapidly becoming a staple of pop culture. Yet in this latest bull cycle they are increasingly being used to platform offensive content.

This year, meme tokens promoting several forms of bigotry proliferated on Solana.

At the time, trading platforms responded by overhauling their content moderation policies to block such tokens. But several of those offensive memecoins still exist today.

I don’t think memecoins are dead, but they are certainly undergoing an existential crisis.’

—  Alice Shikova, SPACE ID

Alice Shikova, marketing lead at digital identity platform SPACE ID, said the Pump.fun scandal showcased the “dark side of crypto.”

" I don’t think memecoins are dead, but they are certainly undergoing an existential crisis,” Shikova told DL News.

“It’s our job as a crypto community to help this sector return to its harmless fun roots, where investors can bet on memes of cats and dogs rather than watching disturbing videos or putting their own safety on the line,” Shikova said.

Canine mascot

In any event, dogwifhat has been at the heart of the meme token frenzy this year, especially on Solana.

Launched last November, dogwifhat is the fifth most-valuable memecoin with a market value of $3 billion, according to CoinGecko.

Dogecoin is the most valuable, ahead of Shiba Inu, Pepe, and Bonk.

Pepe is the only one among the lot that isn’t a so-called dog coin ― a meme token with a canine mascot.

Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. To share tips or information about stories, please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.