Robinhood still cannot roll out crypto staking across the entire United States. CEO Vlad Tenev said on X that staking remains the most requested crypto feature on the platform, yet “regulatory gridlock” continues to block the service in California, Maryland, New Jersey, and Wisconsin.
Users in most of the country can earn rewards on eligible holdings, but customers in those four states remain excluded. The issue, as framed by Robinhood, is not demand or product readiness. It is the lack of consistent rules across jurisdictions, leaving parts of the U.S. market closed off even as the company offers staking elsewhere in the country.
Stock tokens are live in the EU, but not in Robinhood’s home market
Tenev extended that criticism beyond staking. He pointed to Robinhood’s stock tokens, which let users trade tokenized versions of traditional equities. The feature is already operating in the European Union, yet it remains legally unavailable in the United States.
He called on Congress to pass the long-awaited Market Structure Bill, arguing that regulatory uncertainty is doing more than frustrating users. In his view, it is pushing the next wave of financial technology outside the U.S. The contrast he drew was sharp: products can launch overseas, while similar efforts stall at home.
Senate crypto bill loses momentum as industry split deepens
Tenev’s comments came as crypto legislation in Washington hit another obstacle. A planned markup of a broad crypto bill in the Senate Banking Committee was postponed this week after Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong withdrew his support.
Armstrong said the latest draft was “riddled with flaws.” The concerns listed in the report included a de facto ban on tokenized equities, the same type of product Robinhood wants to bring to the U.S.; DeFi restrictions that could choke decentralized finance activity; and stablecoin provisions that would prevent platforms from paying rewards to users. The debate has turned into a fight over whether passing any bill is better than passing one the industry sees as damaging.
According to the report, Circle and Ripple favor moving legislation forward, while Coinbase and Robinhood are pushing for rules that do not smother the technology before it has room to develop. That divide is now central to how the U.S. crypto market may be regulated.
Tenev also links the debate to a broader view on AI and work
In a separate interview with FOX Business, Tenev shifted from crypto policy to artificial intelligence. He said he is optimistic about AI’s effect on employment, predicting an explosion of new jobs and entirely new job families that do not yet exist.
He compared the current AI transition with earlier periods of technological disruption, while noting that this cycle is moving much faster. His position was that AI will reshape how people work, not make humans obsolete. Across both crypto and AI, Tenev’s message stayed consistent: the bottleneck is not the technology itself, but the pace of policy and regulation.