Robinhood's Vlad.fun slams the brakes on its own memecoin casino 🛑

Vlad.fun, a memecoin launchpad operating on Robinhood Chain, suspended its platform Wednesday after uncovering what it called a "serious internal integrity issue" involving members of its own team. The project said it took the service offline while it investigates the incident and consults legal counsel on potential action against those responsible, without disclosing the nature of the alleged misconduct.

Hours before announcing the shutdown, Vlad.fun warned users that a token bearing the platform's name, which had appeared on its leaderboard, was not an official release. The project reiterated that anyone can create tokens on the permissionless launchpad, and it did not indicate whether the unauthorized token was linked to the integrity probe.

Robinhood launched Robinhood Chain on July 1 as an Arbitrum-based Ethereum layer 2 built around tokenized stocks, real-world assets and onchain financial services. Within days of launch, memecoins became the network's dominant use case, according to Galaxy Digital, making platforms like Vlad.fun central to early activity on the network. No timeline has been provided for the platform's return.