The button

On January 28, 2021, Robinhood removed the buy button.

Not the sell button. You could always sell. You could sell into a market with no buyers, into a price falling because the buyers had been switched off, and Robinhood would process that trade with total efficiency. What you could not do was buy.

The company said it was a collateral call. Maybe it was. The clearinghouse wanted billions Robinhood didn't have, and so the app that told you it was democratizing finance did the one thing a broker is never supposed to do, which is decide on your behalf which direction you were allowed to trade. Vlad Tenev sat in front of Congress and explained the plumbing. The explanation was probably even true.

That's the part people misunderstand. It doesn't matter whether the reason was good. What matters is that there was a switch, that it was in someone else's hand, and that when it was flipped it was flipped against you. Every retail trader learned the same thing that day, and it wasn't about GameStop. It was that the button is a permission. Somebody grants it. Somebody can revoke it.

Two years later they did it again, more quietly.

In June 2023 the SEC sued Coinbase and Binance and named Solana an unregistered security. Robinhood delisted it. Customers were given a window: sell, or move your coins, or we'll sell them for you. On June 27 the leftovers were converted to cash. SOL was trading around sixteen dollars. Nobody's account was hacked. No margin was called. A broker looked at a regulatory letter, looked at its own risk, and decided its customers would no longer be holding this asset — and the customers, who had bought it with their own money and believed it was theirs, found out they had been holding a permission the whole time.

Within a year Solana traded above two hundred and fifty dollars.

Robinhood is not unusually evil. That's the uncomfortable part. It behaved the way custodial intermediaries behave: when the interests of the institution and the interests of the customer diverge, the institution resolves the divergence in its own favor and issues a statement afterward. The statement is always reasonable. The button is always still off.

So: $BUYBUTTON

It does nothing. It is not a company. There is no roadmap, no treasury, no utility, no team allocation, no seed round, no partnership announcement, no Series A of any kind. It will never have a product. It has no plan to be worth more tomorrow than today, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not speaking for it.

It has exactly one property: you can always buy it.

No compliance department can turn that off. No clearinghouse can raise a collateral requirement that makes it impossible. No general counsel can look at a subpoena and decide, on a Tuesday, that today you're position-closing-only. The contract does not have a function for that. Nobody wrote one. Nobody can write one now.

And the door opens both ways. You can always sell it too — there's no honeypot, no sell tax that only the deployer can lift, no function that traps you in once you're holding. Robinhood left the sell button on and turned it into a weapon. Here it's just a door: if you're not interested, you leave, and nobody decides that for you. That's the whole difference. Not who holds the switch — that there is no switch.

That is the entire thing. A monument to a switch that somebody else was holding, cast in the one material that can't be switched off.

Buy it or don't. That was always the point.

What I hold

Presale

None

Team allocation

None

Reserved supply

None

My position

0.05 ETH, bought at launch

My wallet

0x… (fill in)

Contract

Not yet deployed

I bought in at the same contract and the same curve as everyone else. I was first, which means I paid the lowest price that will ever exist. I'd rather tell you that than have you find it.

This token does nothing. It has no product, no revenue, and no mechanism that would make it worth more later. Any money taken out of it was put in by someone who bought after. Most people who buy tokens like this lose most of what they put in. Nothing here is financial advice. Don't spend money you need.

The record