World.xyz says Robinhood Chain migration was a prank, not a move away from Solana

World.xyz said its announced migration from Solana to Robinhood Chain was a prank, reversing a widely circulated July 8 claim that the prediction market was leaving only a week after launch. The platform had gone live on July 1 inside Phantom Wallet on Solana, using Chainlink for data and settlement, and Solana’s official account had promoted the debut. The fake move gained traction because Robinhood Chain is a real Arbitrum-based Layer 2 that also launched on July 1 for tokenized stocks. Several outlets reported the migration as genuine before World disclosed the joke the next day. The stunt drew 2.3 million views by World’s own count and prompted a split reaction across crypto: Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko amplified it, while CoinGecko co-founder Bobby Ong described it as attention-grabbing marketing, though critics argued that staged deception can undermine trust in a platform built around real-money event contracts. On-chain data suggests the platform had already been gaining traction before the prank. An independent dashboard built by analyst ario_57 showed roughly $4.37 million in notional volume and peak daily users near 3,000 since the July 1 launch, with volume cresting around July 6, two days before the stunt. That indicates the viral episode coincided with existing momentum rather than creating it. Robinhood Chain, meanwhile, had become one of crypto’s busiest new networks, posting a record $563.9 million in daily volume that week, according to DefiLlama, largely driven by meme coins rather than tokenized stocks. The key question now is whether the attention converts into durable users as prediction markets face heightened scrutiny over trust and execution.