Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev: Stock Tokens Expand to Thousands
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev stated in an interview with The Rollup that the next step for stock tokens is to expand the variety, currently around 200 will be increased to thousands, and private stock tokens will also be launched on a large scale.
He also linked two business lines together: using Robinhood Ventures to connect with private companies that are not yet listed, while acting as an underwriter to consider retail strategies for these companies when they go public. Public records show that Robinhood Ventures Fund I issued 12,615,608 shares at $25 per share on March 5, 2026, raising approximately $315 million; Fund II issued 8 million shares on August 12, raising $200 million. In June, the company stated that Robinhood Securities had been approved to act as an IPO underwriter, and in September it entered the Oura S-1 underwriting list.
The existing stock tokens are not the same as US stocks. The products are issued by Robinhood Assets in Jersey, structured as debt securities collateralized 1:1 by the underlying stocks or equivalent positions, primarily targeting non-US users, as regular chat accounts in the US currently cannot purchase them. Initially, around 200 US stocks and ETFs were available in Europe, and later private tokens like OpenAI and SpaceX were given as gifts, which were explicitly stated as non-tradable. Tenev has now stated, "We have figured out how to do it, and we should expect large-scale emergence."
The on-chain market remains small with high turnover. In mid-September, the overall market value of tokenized equity was approximately $2.9 billion, with Robinhood's stock tokens valued at about $170 million, contributing around 60% of the transfer volume in this segment. After Robinhood Chain went live on the mainnet on July 1, the tokens were made into ERC-20, with Chainlink pricing, and can be directly accessed by third-party wallets and DEXs. The company also promised to provide 1:1 physical redemption and voting rights, as existing terms often involve cash redemption, and voting rights do not automatically transfer with the tokens.
Controversy has intensified concurrently. AMC CEO Adam Aron called the product a "fake market" and threatened to report it to the SEC. Tenev responded that the issuer manages its own stock rights and obligations and cannot control third-party issued securities that are only linked to its stock price, comparing it to unsponsored ADRs and structured notes. Recent SEC consultation drafts tend to require issuer permission, which does not align with Robinhood's current Jersey structure.
In terms of market mechanisms, buyers are European and offshore retail investors and on-chain market makers, while sellers are Robinhood using its own chain and Jersey entity to wholesale price exposure. The event-driven aspect comes from private tokens transitioning from gifts to scalable issuance, with underwriting licenses and venture funds being established simultaneously. Funds are flowing from traditional brokerage IPO quotas and competitors like ONDO/Kraken to Robinhood's 24-hour tradable small and mid-cap tokens; benefiting are platform trading volumes and pre-IPO customer relationships, while under pressure are issuer control, redemption authenticity, and when the US compliance entry will open.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Vlad Tenev has pushed Robinhood from a commission-free stock app into crypto, building its own L2, and now entering the underwriting space. The 2021 IPO access was merely a distribution team, and it wasn't until June 2026 that they obtained underwriting qualifications, yet their two closed-end venture funds still paid around $20 million in underwriting fees to Goldman, Citi, JPMorgan, etc. The path is to first use retail traffic to gain Wall Street positions, then use those positions to feed retail: OpenAI and SpaceX token gifts, NYSE-listed venture funds, Jersey stock tokens, all pointing to the same batch of "pre-IPO assets."
The capital mobilization does not involve buying private equity and then going on-chain, but rather mirrors prices with debt tokens, uses closed-end funds to take on qualified private positions, and exchanges underwriting positions for retail IPO quotas. The motivation is to turn the years a company remains private into the product lifespan of Robinhood: the later the stock goes public, the longer the tokens and funds can be sold. Resource allocation is very specific—Fund I's holdings narrative includes OpenAI, Databricks, Stripe, while on-chain it has made SPY, NVDA, SpaceX tokens into composable ERC-20s. Money is shifting from subscriptions and trading commissions to issuance price spreads, management fees, and on-chain turnover.
Comparative examples include Schwab bringing IPOs to retail, Coinbase using Base to capture the settlement layer, and Backed and ONDO using 1:1 custody to compete for the same batch of US stock tokens. Robinhood is at the overlapping stage of expansion and control: it needs to expand from 200 to thousands while reclaiming redemption, voting, underwriting, and its own chain. Historically, during the GameStop period, it was accused of cutting off retail access due to buy restrictions; this time it wants to become the pipeline itself, only that the flow in the pipeline is linked certificates, not a shareholder register.
The structural judgment belongs to the reconstruction of the industry chain. The mechanism is: when pre-IPO companies need retail narratives, retail needs private pricing, and brokers need 24-hour transactions, the traditional "VC holding—investment bank pricing—exchange opening" is broken down into token issuance, closed-end funds, and underwriting allocations. Whoever controls the retail entry and the default trading pairs on-chain will seize pricing power in advance, and issuers will only realize later that they need veto rights and voting rights.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
First sell the entry, then supplement the ownership
The later the asset goes public, the longer the intermediaries survive
Expanding categories occupies the market faster than supplementing rights