'Outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable' AMC CEO attacks Robinhood after its tokenized stock traded 35x above stock

AMC Entertainment, the movie theater chain whose shares became a meme-stock favorite, saw CEO Adam Aron blast Robinhood's tokenized version of the company as "vile" days after its on-chain price reportedly traded 35x above the real stock.

• Aron unleashed an unusually hostile attack on Robinhood over its AMC Stock Token, calling the product in a Friday post on X post "contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable, vile" and saying the theater chain had asked outside securities lawyers to examine whether it could stop the product.

• The criticism itself quickly drew attention, but it came just days after the AMC token demonstrated one of the potential problems created when tokenized stocks continue trading on-chain while the shares they track don't.
• In an Aug. 31 post on X, PAIR, a third-party token launchpad built on Robinhood Chain, said the on-chain price of AMC's Stock Token ran as much as 35 times above the real stock price while U.S. equity markets were closed and market makers were absent.

• AMC shares had closed the previous trading session, Aug. 28, at $2.59.

A memecoin helped knock AMC off course

The distortion emerged after PAIR added AMC as its first penny-stock pairing and someone launched ABSOLUTE CINEMA, or CINEMA, a new token paired directly against Robinhood's AMC token.

• PAIR allows anyone to create a fixed-supply token and pair it against Robinhood Stock Tokens through Uniswap liquidity pools. Its own data lists ABSOLUTE CINEMA as paired 100% against AMC.

As traders piled into CINEMA over the weekend, the thin AMC side of the pool was pushed dramatically away from the price of AMC shares, according to data from PAIR.

The protocol later said market makers began minting additional AMC tokens around 5 a.m. ET and the price re-pegged before temporarily diverging again.

PAIR said it was responding by adding a "peg guard" that would stop new launches when a stock token strays too far from its last closing price, as well as risk labels for traders. It also said it had contacted on-chain market makers about weekend coverage and that Robinhood Crypto was adding liquidity, although Robinhood doesn't appear to have independently confirmed that statement.

• Robinhood describes the tokens as standard ERC-20 assets that can be transferred and plugged into third-party applications, including trading and lending protocols.
• It also advertises them as self-custodied and accessible around the clock.

Aron calls it a 'quasi-fake market'

Robinhood Stock Tokens aren't actual shares in the companies whose prices they track. Instead, they're tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited, a Jersey-incorporated Robinhood entity.

Robinhood says the instruments provide economic exposure to underlying stocks and ETFs but give holders no legal or beneficial ownership rights in those securities. They aren't registered under U.S. securities laws and cannot be offered to U.S. persons.

And those disclosures apparently became the focus of Aron's attack.

After Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev replied to his original post by asking, "What's the concern?", Aron doubled down, accusing Robinhood in another X post of creating a "fictitious synthetic equity market" that could decouple token trading from companies' own capital-raising efforts and complained that token holders don't receive shareholder rights such as voting.

The AMC CEO called on Robinhood to voluntarily "CEASE AND DECIST" trading AMC Stock Tokens and said AMC's securities counsel would examine whether the company could force Robinhood to stop if it refused.

Aron also said AMC intends to raise the matter with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.