Robinhood CEO’s Twitter Account Hacked to Promote Memecoin

A hacker compromised Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s X account and used it to promote a memecoin named after him.

A now-deleted post claimed Robinhood had launched a token called VLAD. It described the token as the official mascot of the recently launched Robinhood Chain.

The post also included a contract address and claimed Robinhood would list VLAD on its trading platform.

Robinhood’s communications team later confirmed that the post was fraudulent. The company said Tenev’s account had been compromised and that it was working to recover access.

Robinhood Chain’s block explorer also tagged the VLAD contract address as a scam, warning users against interacting with it.

Hacker Withdraws 650 ETH From VLAD Memecoin

While the post has now been deleted, the fake promotion has achieved the attacker’s goal. It generated interest from several users, who likely bought the token.

Robinhood block explorer shows that there have been over 10,000 transactions on the token contract. However, the contract address shows a balance of $0.

According to data from onchain sleuth MLM, the hacker was able to withdraw around 650 ETH, worth $1.2 million, from the token. The funds have been split between six different addresses.

The incident highlights how hackers continue to use incentive ways to steal from crypto users. Although the practice of hacking social media accounts to promote fake tokens is not new, the hacker took advantage of the increased interest in Robinhood crypto ventures.

Memecoin Trading Dominates Activity on Robinhood Chain

The brokerage platform launched an Ethereum L2 network, Robinhood Chain, on July 1, joining Coinbase and Kraken, which have also deployed Ethereum L2 networks.

Since launching, the Robinhood Chain has seen a surge in activity with daily transaction volume crossing 10 million on several days. Most of this volume comes from memecoin trading on the network.

Even Tenev acknowledged this, noting that the network works well for memecoins even though it is actually built for real-world assets (RWA).

According to Defillama, the network now has a total value locked (TVL) of $308 million with bridged TVL near $1 billion. Average daily decentralized exchange volume has also been over $500 million over the past two weeks.

Despite the memecoin activity, Chain continues to highlight  RWA as its core focus. It recently integrated the decentralized perps exchange Lighter, allowing users to use their stock tokens as collateral on the Perps DEX on the network.