'CASHCAT' trader turns $800 into over $1 million on Robinhood's brand new blockchain

Major financial exchange Robinhood launched its own blockchain on July 1 to move stocks and bonds onchain. But the first breakout hit is a cat-themed token that's generated a fortune for early, lucky punters.

$CASHCAT, a memecoin named after the mascot Robinhood used before it was Robinhood, has surged several hundred percent on Robinhood Chain in the past two days, the Arbitrum-based network the brokerage switched on at a London keynote billed "Robinhood Presents: The World Is Flat."

One early buyer spent $838 on 15.04 million tokens roughly three weeks ago and has since sold about 13.5 million of them for around $917,600, according to onchain data, with the remainder worth roughly $133,700 as of Asian afternoon hours Thursday. That is a return of about 1,250 times the original stake.

It is not alone. A second wallet turned $85 into 17.4 million tokens in one buy and has realized about $687,700 while sitting on roughly $1.2 million more on paper.

The five most profitable wallets have banked close to $3.7 million between them, DEXScreener data shows. Every dollar of it came from someone on the other side of roughly 12,300 sell orders.

The whole thing stands on shaky ground, however. $CASHCAT carries a market value of about $105 million against roughly $6.6 million of liquidity in its Uniswap pool, meaning it may not absorb even a fraction of the holders trying to leave at once.

The token is down about 12% over 24 hours and roughly a quarter off the intraday peak near $145 million it touched on Wednesday, and sell volume has edged past buy volume, $29.1 million against $28.9 million, across more than 30,000 transactions from about 6,800 traders.

Robinhood did not create the token. $CASHCAT's own website describes it as "fan fiction with a ticker," a project built by outsiders around the cat-with-cash logo the company used in its earliest days before rebranding. The utility, the site says, "is cat."

Interestingly, on July 2, the day after the chain went live, Robinhood's chief executive Vlad Tenev told CNBC that memecoins were largely a dead end, as 'assets without utility do not serve a lasting purpose,' and that tokenized real-world assets were the durable direction for crypto.

However, days later on July 7, as $CASHCAT climbed, he posted on X that while the company is building its chain to be the best for real-world assets, "it works great for memes too." He also followed the token's account.