Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s X account was compromised Thursday and used to promote a fake meme coin that briefly reached a market capitalization near $10 million.
The deleted post presented Vladhood, trading under the ticker VLAD, as the “official Robinhood Chain mascot” and claimed the token would be listed in the Robinhood app. It included the contract address 0x92D176ccBeEffeCd8089e841D09ea17b6C22D969 and directed Tenev’s followers to buy the token on Robinhood Chain.
Robinhood confirmed the account compromise about 40 minutes after the promotion appeared. The company removed the post and worked with X to restore access, while confirming that VLAD had no connection to Robinhood or Tenev.
The fake announcement drew more than 175,000 views within 20 minutes. Tenev’s profile image was also replaced with a doctored picture showing him wearing a Robin Hood-style cap.
Token Launch Preceded Account Takeover
The VLAD contract was deployed through the Pons launchpad 46 minutes before the hacked post went live. Its launch metadata listed Tenev’s X profile as the project website, linking the token deployment directly to the planned social media promotion.
VLAD climbed toward a $10 million valuation before retracing as Robinhood’s warning circulated. Trading continued after the post was deleted, with the main Uniswap pool processing more than $24 million in volume across over 90,000 transactions. The token contract attracted more than 5,000 holders before Robinhood Chain’s Blockscout explorer marked it as a potential scam.
Bubblemaps traced roughly 70% of the supply to early wallets and estimated that addresses connected to the launch extracted about 690 ETH, worth roughly $1.3 million. Separate transaction tracking found that the creator also collected trading fees while the token’s liquidity remained available.
Meme Coin Trading Dominates Robinhood Chain
Robinhood launched its Ethereum Layer 2 on July 1 with tokenized stocks, real-world assets and onchain financial products at the center of its strategy. Meme coins quickly became the network’s main source of speculative activity.
Robinhood Chain processed about $825 million in daily decentralized exchange volume during its opening trading surge, led by CASHCAT, HOODIE and thousands of smaller tokens.
The uneven distribution of those gains was already visible before the VLAD promotion. Bubblemaps found that 63% of wallets trading the network’s 50 largest meme coins lost money, while a small group of early buyers captured most of the profits.
CASHCAT produced several seven-figure exits, including one wallet that turned a $3,000 position into $2.85 million. VLAD remained tradable after Robinhood removed the fraudulent promotion, with its main liquidity pool holding approximately $247,000 at the latest market check.
