Robinhood CEO Says Tokenization Is in Its Early Supercycle, Urges U.S. to Modernize Market Infrastructure

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said tokenization is still in the early stage of a global supercycle, calling it a trend that will reshape financial ownership over time. In a public letter, Tenev said Robinhood has been pushing tokenized products outside the U.S. and launched the Robinhood Chain mainnet more than a month ago at its "The World Is Flat" event in London. He described it as the first blockchain built specifically for real-world assets (RWA) and said it has since become the fastest EVM chain to reach 100 million transactions. Stock Tokens sit at the center of that effort. According to Tenev, users in more than 120 countries and regions can use them to gain economic exposure to more than 190 U.S. stocks, with each token backed 1:1 by the underlying share. He also pointed out a major gap: the product is still unavailable in the U.S. Tenev said the debate over U.S. stock tokenization has split into two camps — supporters asking when tokenized stocks will be available in America, and skeptics questioning what problem they solve, given that U.S. investors already have broad access to U.S. equities through low-cost, easy-to-use platforms such as Robinhood. Tenev argued that the key issue is not whether a token is the same as direct share ownership. Robinhood Stock Tokens are backed by underlying securities and can pass through economic rights such as dividends, but they are not equivalent to holding the shares directly. The larger shift, he said, is that high-quality financial exposure can now be tokenized, transferred freely, programmed, self-custodied, and traded around the clock inside an open financial system. He framed tokenization as one way to modernize the U.S. financial system and broaden access to financial assets. That, in his view, starts with infrastructure. The first benefit is real-time settlement. Tenev said the GameStop episode exposed how trading restrictions were tied to clearing-house risk rules built around the old T+2 settlement cycle. The industry later moved to T+1, but there is still a delay between trade execution and final settlement, which forces brokers to hold large amounts of cash. On blockchain rails, tokenized stocks can trade, settle, and move in real time, which Tenev said would reduce systemic risk and funding pressure, especially in stressed markets. The second benefit is native 24/7 trading. Market-moving news does not wait for regular trading hours, and prices can change sharply after the close or over the weekend. Institutional investors can hedge those gaps with more complex strategies, but retail investors usually cannot. For that reason, Tenev said, 24/7 trading is not just a way to capture opportunity — it is also a risk-management tool. Robinhood already offers 24x5 trading in the U.S. through traditional market infrastructure, but on Robinhood Chain, around-the-clock trading and fractional ownership are native features. The third benefit is transferable assets and real competition among financial platforms. Tenev said moving assets through ACATS can take days and is often cumbersome, which discourages transfers in the first place. Tokenization, by contrast, can make assets move instantly across the world, either between traditional platforms or directly into DeFi. When the cost and friction of moving assets fall, brokers and platforms must compete on price and product innovation rather than keeping users locked in closed ecosystems. Self-custody is part of that model as well. Users can hold stock tokens in their own crypto wallets, giving them more control and opening up new uses such as DeFi lending or trading collateral. Robinhood has already seen developers build stock-token applications on Robinhood Chain that it did not expect, and Tenev said the pace of that experimentation should accelerate as the company expands its RWA tools and infrastructure. Tenev said technology alone will not be enough in the U.S. The country’s securities regime has been built over more than a century, and many of its rules were designed for an older market structure. Some of those rules still serve important investor-protection and market-integrity goals, but their implementation has also locked in legacy infrastructure that is increasingly out of step with modern technology. Market participants are already moving toward blockchain-based systems, he wrote, and policymakers need to modernize the rules as well. The goal should be to preserve investor protection and market integrity while allowing the market to adopt better infrastructure — and to do it quickly, because other jurisdictions will not wait for the U.S. to catch up. For Tenev, listed stocks are only the beginning. Tokenizing public equities can help build the infrastructure, liquidity and onchain ecosystem needed for broader asset classes later on, including private company equity, which still remains hard to access and relatively illiquid. If the U.S. gets the groundwork right for listed stocks, he said, it could open the door to broader market access, better liquidity and new forms of ownership. Otherwise, he warned, it would be strange if the rest of the world built the future ownership stack around U.S. assets while U.S. investors themselves were left out.