Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s X account hacked in $10M memecoin scam

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev’s X account has been hacked to promote a fake company-linked memecoin that briefly reached a market capitalization of about $10 million.

Robinhood confirmed the breach through its official X account, telling users that Tenev’s profile had been compromised and that the company was working with X to restore access. The brokerage added that the unauthorized post had been removed.

Posted at about 17:24 UTC on July 23, the message introduced Vladhood under the ticker VLAD and described it as the “official Robinhood Chain mascot.” The hackers also claimed that Robinhood would list the token on its trading app.

Seeking to connect the token with Robinhood’s business plans, the deleted post claimed Vladhood would bring attention to Robinhood Chain during the third and fourth quarters. Neither Robinhood’s main X account nor the company’s crypto account published a matching announcement.

The post included a contract address beginning with 0x92d, directing Tenev’s followers to a token deployed only minutes earlier through a contract named PonsLaunchFactory. Robinhood Chain’s block explorer subsequently attached a “potential scam” warning to the asset after recording more than 1,800 transactions.

Vladhood surges before Robinhood confirms the hack

Trading activity accelerated soon after the contract appeared on Tenev’s profile, pushing Vladhood’s market capitalization to roughly $10 million at its peak. The token later fell below $5 million after Robinhood confirmed the breach and the promotional message disappeared.

Onchain data shows that wallets identified as insiders realized more than $1 million in profits during the rapid price increase. At press time, the wallet owners had not been identified, and there was no evidence linking them directly to the compromise of Tenev’s account.

Despite Robinhood’s warning, Vladhood continued trading after the post was deleted, showing how onchain tokens can remain available even when the social-media promotion behind them has been discredited. Robinhood had not announced any plan to list Vladhood or recognize it as the chain’s mascot at the time of reporting.

The episode follows a method that Binance co-founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao warned traders about in October 2025. With memecoin activity increasing at the time, Zhao wrote that hackers were targeting social-media profiles because such accounts often had weaker safeguards than crypto platforms.

“With the rise of meme coins, hackers are targeting social media accounts (as they usually have lower security measures) to post CAs [contract addresses].”

Zhao also cautioned users that official accounts did not endorse particular memecoins, urging traders to treat sudden contract-address posts with suspicion. His warning followed the compromise of BNB Chain’s X account, which attackers used to promote a fake BNB-themed token presented as part of an airdrop.

A similar scheme targeted Binance co-CEO Yi He in December 2025. Hackers seized an unused WeChat account connected to her old phone number and used it to promote MUBARA, also known as Mubarakah, shortly after she joined Richard Teng in Binance’s dual leadership structure.

Notably, posts from Yi He’s compromised profile encouraged contacts to buy the token, creating enough demand for a coordinated pump-and-dump. Zhao confirmed the breach and urged traders to ignore the messages, while reported onchain estimates placed the attackers’ profit at about $55,000.

Robinhood Chain keeps attracting speculative trading

Tenev’s account was compromised as Robinhood Chain recorded a sharp increase in activity following its July 1 mainnet launch. Built as an Ethereum layer-2 network using Arbitrum technology, the chain was introduced to support tokenized assets, decentralized finance and round-the-clock trading.

Memecoins, however, supplied much of its early decentralized exchange activity. Entropy Advisors estimated that Robinhood Chain had processed about $9 billion in cumulative DEX volume by July 23, with high-risk memecoin trading responsible for much of that amount.

CashCat became one of the network’s first major tokens, reaching a market capitalization of about $150 million during the chain’s opening weeks. Fortune reported that Robinhood Chain’s daily trading volume rose from slightly above $200,000 on July 1 to more than $500 million nine days later, driven largely by speculative tokens rather than real-world assets.

Although Robinhood designed the network around tokenized finance, Tenev previously acknowledged its early memecoin activity. Fortune quoted him as saying that while the company was building Robinhood Chain for real-world assets, the network also “works great for memes.”

Revenue has risen alongside the trading surge. DeFiLlama data showed that Robinhood Chain generated about $1.1 million in revenue over seven days and $2.11 million since launch, placing it among the highest-earning chains during the measured period.

DeFiLlama also recorded hundreds of millions of dollars in bridged value and substantial daily DEX volume on the network. Those figures explain why a false endorsement tied to Tenev and Robinhood Chain could attract traders within minutes, while Robinhood’s confirmation established that Vladhood had no authorized connection to the company.