The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) charged Robinhood engineers Hefu Chai and Huaisong Xiang with commodities and wire fraud, alleging they used confidential information about upcoming Robinhood Crypto listings to trade on Hyperliquid before public announcements. Jamie McDonald, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), said each accused made more than $50,000. McDonald said corporate insiders cannot avoid securities and commodities laws by using misappropriated information in derivatives such as perpetual futures (derivatives without fixed expiration dates), tokenized securities, or similar instruments. The case comes as the DoJ intensifies scrutiny of alleged criminal activity across crypto markets, including RICO claims against memecoin launchpad Pump.fun and alleged pump-and-dump activity involving market makers. The effect on Robinhood's platform traction remains unclear, but its memecoin-focused strategy in Q3 appears to be supporting its tokenization effort: Robinhood held more than 60% of tokenized stock trading volume in September so far, according to Token Terminal.