On July 23, someone broke into Vlad Tenev's X account and posted, as Robinhood's CEO, about a brand-new token called Vladhood. The post called it the "official mascot" of Robinhood Chain and promised it would soon land inside the brokerage's app.
The post didn't last long — Robinhood's team pulled it within half an hour — but it still racked up roughly 175,000 views before disappearing. That was enough. The token, minted just 46 minutes before the hack, spiked hard. Blockchain analysts estimate the attackers walked away with about 650 ETH, close to $1.3 million.
Robinhood confirmed the breach from its official account, saying it was working with X to restore access and that the fake post had been removed. Tenev got his account back shortly after. Robinhood Chain's own block explorer later flagged Vladhood as a likely scam.
The timing matters. Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum-based network the brokerage launched on July 1, has pulled in more than $700 million in assets in under a month, with cumulative DEX volume approaching $9 billion. Much of that trading is memecoins — people chasing the next token that might spike overnight.
Hijacking an executive's account to pump a fake coin is an old trick; scammers have run the same play on celebrities and politicians for years. What's new here is the setting: a major brokerage building a chain where memecoin speculation is already the main source of activity, which makes it a tempting target. Robinhood hasn't said whether affected traders will be compensated or whether it's changing how executive accounts get protected.
