Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has publicly backed the launch of tokenized stocks on the company’s own blockchain, Robinhood Chain, reinforcing the fintech giant’s hard-line position in an escalating legal dispute with traditional corporate America.
The conflict was triggered by AMC CEO Adam Aron’s attack on the tokenization of securities without issuers’ consent.
Robinhood Chief Legal Officer Dan Gallagher responded uncompromisingly: he rejected the cease-and-desist demands outright and sarcastically offered to teach AMC’s lawyers the basics of US securities law.
How blockchain-based stocks work, how much they generate, and what the tokenization supercycle has to do with it
The crypto platform’s interest is backed by numbers. According to Token Terminal, the market capitalization of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) on Robinhood Chain has reached $104.4 million amid the company-promoted “tokenization supercycle.”
Most of the liquidity is concentrated in SPY ($14.0 million) and NVDA ($13.9 million), while the recent historic Nasdaq debutant SPACEX ($6.4 million) ranks third in the on-chain standings. The full breakdown of the distribution is shown in the chart below.
Technically, the instrument is structured as a debt obligation backed 1:1 by real shares and paying dividends. The product is available in more than 120 countries but remains unavailable to US residents due to regulatory risks. On-chain holders do not receive voting rights.
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While the Arbitrum-based network was positioned partly as a platform for meme coins when its mainnet launched in July, Tenev’s rhetoric had shifted toward institutional pragmatism by September — namely, the creation of a global, round-the-clock infrastructure for programmable assets.
The AMC precedent has exposed a systemic contradiction: traditional corporations are warning about the legal risks of unauthorized on-chain tracking, but Robinhood’s leadership has made it clear that it is prepared to defend the emerging market.
