GM, frens! ☕️

Time has a funny habit of changing the answer without changing the question. An idea that seemed ridiculous five years ago can look obvious today. A project that felt too early suddenly feels perfectly timed. Most things don't just need to be good, they also need the right moment.

Our space has always been a race against the clock in one way or another. Sometimes the hardest part isn't figuring out what will matter, but when it finally will 🤔 

Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

• 😸 How new serious chain launch instantly became a meme rush

• 🔥 Ambire adds Robinhood Chain

• 🎥 The Netflix director who bet the show budget on Dogecoin

• 🔎 AVAX treasury company warns it may not survive the year

Below is how $WALLET is trading right now.

Our Discord is open if you've got time for one more conversation 🤠 

How new serious chain launch instantly became a meme rush

Robinhood walked into crypto with a very Robinhood idea: bring stocks, bonds and RWA to crypto, make markets trade around the clock and turn its huge retail distribution into something bigger than a brokerage app.

Then the first thing people really chased was… a cat memecoin 🤦‍♂️ 

• Robinhood Chain went live at the start of July as an Ethereum L2 built on Arbitrum Orbit. It is EVM-compatible, settles back to Ethereum and uses ETH for gas.

• The official idea was Robinhood getting its own place for tokenized assets, 24/7 markets and the kind of products it has been talking about all year. Stock tokens, RWAs, app distribution, onchain trading, the whole serious finance package 👜 

And this makes sense. Robinhood has tens of millions of users, a known brand and an actual reason to care about bringing assets onchain.

But crypto has its own idea of appropriate usecases 👇️ 

The first breakout trade on Robinhood Chain became CASHCAT, a memecoin based on Robinhood’s old cat mascot from before the company became Robinhood. Robinhood did not create the token. CASHCAT’s own site basically calls itself a fan project built around the cat-with-cash idea. The listed utility is, very elegantly, “cat”… 🫥 

Our industry continues to overdeliver.

Still, the token took over the early chain story 📜 

Reports noted that Uniswap became the main trading hub on Robinhood Chain, with Uniswap V3 on Robinhood doing around $361.7 million in 24-hour volume and roughly 1.49 million transactions. That put it ahead of Uniswap V3 on Ethereum in that snapshot, which is not exactly nothing. The chain also got support from OpenSea and Pump.fun, while bridges like Relay and Across helped people move in 🪙 

So the chain had activity. Just not where you would expect it from.

• CASHCAT pushed above $150 million in market cap and it was roughly 25 times bigger than the next major Robinhood Chain meme contender.

• One early buyer spent $838 on 15.04 million CASHCAT tokens at the start, then sold most of them for about $917,600 while still holding another chunk worth around $133,700. Another wallet reportedly turned $85 into a position that had already realized about $687,000, with around $1.2 million still sitting on paper 🤯 

Those are the numbers that make degens click.

• The five most profitable wallets had banked close to $3.7 million between them, which means someone else was on the other side of the exit. CASHCAT had a market cap around $105 million against only about $6.6 million in liquidity, so the headline number looked much bigger than the amount the market could realistically absorb if holders rushed for the door 💵 

• The CEO Vlad Tenev had just recently told CNBC that memecoins were largely a dead end and that tokenized RWA were a more durable path for crypto. Some time later, after CASHCAT became the first thing people cared about on his chain, he even said that Robinhood was building the chain for RWAs, but it “works great for memes too” 🤷‍♂️ 

He might have changed his mind now but he is not wrong.

The degens still overwhelmingly think that memes are the easiest way to make a chain feel alive. Supporters often provide data that meme launches bring wallets, swaps, bridges, screenshots and drive hype faster than a tokenized stock product ever could. Makes sense, because nobody actually needs a 12-page explanation to understand a cat coin going up. A new chain needs usage, and speculative tokens deliver usage brutally fast 💰️ 

But it also keeps raising the same question crypto does not want to answer properly: is this it? Animal coins are still the main thing we are good at?

Robinhood Chain will probably become much bigger than CASHCAT. The company has distribution most chains would commit unspeakable sins to get. It already has a retail trading audience. It is pushing tokenized assets, yield products and onchain markets into something that could actually matter outside the crypto bubble 😼 

Still, the first real success came from the same old trick yet again: a good old memecoin play 🫠 

Ambire adds Robinhood Chain

And on that exact note, Ambire just added support for the chain to its extension, giving users another place to explore the new network directly from the wallet 👀 

That means full access to all of those hyped up memes / RWA / onchain stocks WITH Ambire’s proven set of tools - such as transaction batching, built in swaps, gasless transactions, actual phishing protection, transaction simulation and EIP-7702 support 🛠️ 

The important part is that using it stays optional.

To turn it on, users need to go into Networks, find Robinhood Chain and enable it themselves. That is not some grand philosophy, thankfully. It just means Ambire gives people access without pushing them into a chain they did not ask to use 🔒️ 

The Netflix director who bet the show budget on Dogecoin

Some production budgets vanish into reshoots, delays, legal fights and the usual Hollywood furnace where money goes to die.

This one apparently took a detour through luxury shopping, market bets and Dogecoin 🐶 

• Carl Rinsch, the director of 47 Ronin, has been sentenced to 30 months in prison after taking $11 million from Netflix that was meant to fund his sci-fi series White Horse. The money was supposed to help finish the show. Instead, prosecutors said he moved the funds into personal brokerage accounts, made risky trades, lost most of it, then threw what was left into Dogecoin 🐕️ 

Weirdly enough, it worked.

• Rinsch multiplied his $4 million Dogecoin bag into around $27 million during the bullrun of 2021. He even thanked a Kraken online chat representative afterward with the line “god bless crypto” 😲 

Unfortunately, then he started spending.

The guy apparently bought five Rolls-Royces, a Ferrari, luxury watches, designer clothes and millions of dollars in high end furniture, including mattresses and antiques. All while Netflix was expecting production money to go toward, you know, producing the show. Tiny misunderstanding. Happens all the time 🤫 

Netflix had invested in White Horse after six early episodes were made partly with Rinsch’s own money. The project itself had promise, at least enough for Netflix to back it. But by 2020, the company sent more funding to complete the series, and that is where everything fell apart. The money did not finish the show.

Rinsch later tried to sue Netflix for another $14 million, claiming it owed him under the contract. Netflix beat that claim in arbitration 🤕 

The court case ended with a lighter sentence than prosecutors wanted. They had asked for 60 months, arguing that Rinsch showed “disdain for the law” and damaged the careers of people attached to the production. The judge went with 30 months after hearing statements from people who knew him, including Keanu Reeves, who spoke about Rinsch’s mental health and character 😐️ 

Rinsch was also ordered to pay Netflix $11 million in restitution, attend a mental health program and avoid drugs. The judge reportedly joked that he would not recommend him keep investing in crypto because “it is a market for gambling” 🤪 

AVAX treasury company warns it may not survive the year

Avalanche Treasury Corp is not feeling that great 😷 

The company, described as the largest publicly traded Avalanche treasury firm, told regulators there is “substantial doubt” about its ability to keep operating as a going concern. In normal human language, that means the company is not sure it can survive the year 💸 

This is a sharp turn for something that was being sold as a big AVAX treasury play. Last October, the company was talking about a $1 billion pile of AVAX tokens. Today, its market cap is below $30 million 💀 

• The market reaction has been brutal. By June 10, the stock was already down 27% from the start of the month. On June 11, shares closed at $1.85 after trading above $10 earlier that month. More recently, the stock was sitting below $0.73 📉 

In total, the stock has lost about 93% in a month.

• The treasury math is not much better. The company paid roughly $265 million to acquire $AVAX, but by the end of March, those coins were worth about $123 million. That left the position more than half underwater before the public listing story even had much time to breathe 😵 

• AVAX itself has also been under pressure, down 47% year to date and almost two-thirds over the past 12 months.

• The company has also pledged around 7.8 million of its 13.8 million AVAX as collateral for a loan. So the treasury asset that was meant to be the company’s big long-term bet is also tied into financing risk.

That is the problem with the treasury company model when it spreads beyond the few names that actually have capital markets momentum behind them. It can sound simple: raise money, buy tokens, give public investors exposure and let the market price the story. But if the token falls and the stock loses support, the whole thing can turn into a feedback loop ♻️ 

Another example is AgriFORCE Growing Systems, a struggling agritech firm that rebranded into AVAX One last September. It announced a plan to raise roughly $550 million to buy more than $700 million worth of AVAX, with Anthony Scaramucci chairing its strategic advisory board. That company now has a market value near $43 million, down 68% this year and 93% over the past 12 months 🤦‍♂️ 

There can be a real case for public companies holding digital assets. Strategy proved (to some extent) that the market will reward the model under the right conditions. But every copycat does not become Strategy. Some become small listed companies carrying huge token exposure, with very little room for error.

Other worthy reads

“Data At The Edge” by Rebecca Kaden:

“The most profitable skill of the 21st century (not AI)” by Dan Koe:

MEMES

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better Web3 is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

Brought to you by Ambire: The Only Web3 Wallet That You’ll Need!