Robinhood is jumping into the fray against the crypto industry's very own Sheriff of Nottingham.

Why it matters: The trading app arguably has less at stake than some others already caught in the SEC's crypto crackdown, but Robinhood yesterday joined their publicized quest to prove the regulator wrong.

Catch up quick: The Menlo Park, Ca.-based firm disclosed yesterday that the SEC was preparing to come after it for alleged securities violations posed by its crypto business.

• The so-called Wells notice received over the weekend comes almost 18 months after the SEC had subpoenaed the company for information related to the business, back in December 2022.

What they're saying: Robinhood cofounder and chief Vlad Tenev took to social media, taking issue with "the SEC's continued attack on crypto" and vowing to "contest this matter in the courts," both defending itself and "establishing regulatory clarity."

• Coinbase's Brian Armstrong, referencing Tenev's post, said: "Welcome to the club."

Zoom out: By many measures this is Coinbase's, or Kraken's fight — both have listed hundreds of coins on their respective crypto trading platforms.

• Robinhood's coin offerings in the U.S., by contrast, include just 15 tokens: AAVE, BCH, DOGE, LTC, XTZ, AVAX, LINK, ETH, SHIB, UNI, BTC, COMP, ETC, XLM, and USDC, per its last annual filing.
• And crypto chipped in just 7% of Robinhood's transaction-based revenue last year.

That list of tokens hasn't changed since it ended support for three last year — ADA, MATIC and SOL — implicated in SEC lawsuits against Coinbase and Binance.

Yes, but: Robinhood's crypto roots run deeper than that recent snapshot suggests.

• When it was debuting as a publicly-listed company back in 2021, it touted crypto as big business (though it has mostly relied on fees generated from options trading).
• That year, crypto accounted for almost a quarter of transaction-based revenue. And the company notes that trading activity on its platform can fluctuate in terms of asset classes due to seasonal trends and macro-driven factors.

The intrigue: In the first quarter of 2021, more than a third of Robinhood's crypto business was driven by dogecoin, the firm said in their S-1.

• It isn't clear to what extent dogecoin is carrying that business now, but it's notable as the meme coin is the only other coin on a list of safeguarded user cryptocurrencies, alongside bitcoin and ether — meaning what Robinhood has in custody for users is accounted as assets on its balance sheet.

Our thought bubble: How much is that DOGE worth sitting in the app window? Shareholders might want to know, that is if Robinhood is winding up for a lengthy legal battle.

What we're watching: Robinhood is set to report first quarter earnings tomorrow after the market's close, when the public will get a better idea of what that dog is and how much it's worth now.

Robinhood used to be a meme stock, but it hasn't seen a moon since its IPO year.

💭 Our thought bubble: Attention from a regulatory battle might help.

Fun fact: Coinbase's shares (COIN) has gained 286% since the SEC's lawsuit landed on June 6, and bitcoin was up just 146% over that time.

• Bitwise Asset Management's Matt Hougan said yesterday Coinbase was seeing the added benefit of a "hostile regulatory environment" as an "artificial moat" for its business.

"To me, the fundamental question is 'how do we ensure that the American investor is protected?' And right now they're not getting the required or needed disclosures, and the intermediaries in the center of this rather centralized market, generally, are conflicted, and doing things we would never allow the New York Stock Exchange to do."

🇺🇸 U.S. crypto super PACs have raised more than $100 million, with more than half of that from Coinbase and Ripple, according to a report. (Public Citizen)

🐋 A bitcoin whale moved $44 million worth of bitcoin after a decade. (Decrypt)

👝 The maker of the Exodus wallet will have its stock on the NYSE and tokenized representations of its stock on the Algorand blockchain. (Decrypt)

What's old is new again.

The big picture: The blockchain world loves to game the fame of its best known proponents.

The latest: Fantasy Top is a new NFT game running on the Blast blockchain (which is associated with Blur, a top-performing NFT marketplace).

• NFT cards representing famous folks on Crypto Twitter are traded and assembled into dream teams. Points on those dream teams are based on actual engagement on Twitter.
• The people the cards represent get a cut of trades of their cards.

Flashback: We've seen this before — several times.

• In 2018, there was Crypto All Stars. This NFT game had an innovative feature: what was called the snatch mechanic. Anyone could take anyone else's NFT if they were willing to pay more for it than the last person paid.
• In 2019, there was TCR Party. This one was more an experiment than a real money maker, but it used tokens for crypto users to curate a list of the smartest people in the industry.
• In 2021, there was BitClout, which created tokens representing noteworthy folks, so investors could kind of own shares in them.
• In 2023, we got Friend.Tech on Base, which was similar to BitClout in many ways and remains a going concern.

If these sound like popularity contests, that's because they are.

💭 Our thought bubble: Imagine when some enterprising geek ports one of these games to an American high school.

• That day is coming.