Vlad Tenev on tokenized stocks, and the row with AMC

Robinhood's tokenized-stock push has drawn a sharp response from parts of the entertainment industry over the past week. We sat down with chief executive Vlad Tenev to talk through the criticism, and to get a plain-language explanation of how the product actually works.

The disagreement began when AMC's chief executive publicly questioned Robinhood's move to offer tokenized versions of listed equities, arguing that a token trading on a blockchain is not the same thing as owning the underlying share. The comments circulated widely, and Tenev has spent the week fielding the same question from customers and reporters alike.

He was unbothered by the framing. “I understand why it sounds strange the first time you hear it,” he said at the start of the conversation. “People hear ‘token’ and they think we've invented some parallel thing that only looks like the stock. That's not what this is.”

What a tokenized share actually is

The interviewer pressed him to explain it without jargon, as if to someone who had never touched crypto. Tenev leaned into the example.

“For example, if you own Spaghetti 500 on the NASDAQ, we have it on Robinhood Chain with a tethered price. The token moves when the real thing moves. It isn't a guess about the price, it is the price.”

The point he kept returning to is that the token is a wrapper, not a replacement. Each tokenized share on Robinhood Chain is backed one-for-one and its price is tethered to the corresponding security on its home exchange. When the listed share moves, the token moves with it. The blockchain, in his telling, is simply a faster and cheaper set of rails for recording who owns what.

Why do it on a chain at all

Asked why any of this needs a blockchain, Tenev argued the benefits are practical rather than ideological. Settlement that today takes a business day or two can happen in seconds. The market does not have to close at a fixed hour. And a share can be divided finely enough that someone can hold a few dollars of an expensive stock without a broker having to stitch the fraction together behind the scenes.

“The exchange listing doesn't go anywhere,” he said. “The company still reports to its regulator, the shares still exist where they always did. We're adding a way to hold and move exposure to them that works the way the internet works, not the way the plumbing worked in 1975.”

The criticism

On the specific complaint from AMC, Tenev was measured. He said he understood the instinct to defend the traditional model, and acknowledged that a tokenized share and a share held directly at a custodian are not identical in every legal respect. Holders of the token have economic exposure to the underlying security rather than a direct entry on the company's share register, and Robinhood spells that distinction out before anyone buys.

“Nobody should think a token is a magic trick,” he said. “It is a claim, backed and tethered, and we're upfront about exactly what it is. If someone would rather hold the share the old-fashioned way, that option never went away. We're offering a second door, not closing the first one.”

What token holders actually get

We asked him to be concrete about the economics. If a tokenized company pays a dividend, he said, that value flows through to the token holder; if it splits its stock, the tokens adjust to match. The exposure is designed to track the real security through corporate actions, not just its day-to-day price.

Voting is the one area he flagged as different. Because the underlying shares are held through a custodian rather than registered individually to each token holder, direct voting is not automatic today. Tenev said the company is working on a way to pass through voting rights and expects to say more later in the year, but he did not want to promise a date.

We would rather ship the thing that works and tell you plainly what it doesn't do yet, than dress it up and let you find out later.

On regulation

The interviewer asked whether regulators were comfortable with the model. Tenev said the tokenized products were being rolled out market by market, in step with each regulator, and that the company had no interest in getting ahead of the rules. “We are not trying to route around anybody,” he said. “The whole pitch falls apart if people don't trust it, and trust comes from doing this in the open with the regulator in the room.”

He argued that much of the current friction is simply unfamiliarity, and that the same objections were once raised about commission-free trading and fractional shares, both of which are now unremarkable. “Give it a year,” he said. “The argument about whether this should exist will be over, and the only argument left will be about who does it best.”

What comes next

Tenev said the company would keep expanding the list of tokenized securities where regulation allows, and that it saw the current back-and-forth as a normal part of introducing anything new to a market that has worked the same way for decades. He expects more issuers to come around as the mechanics become better understood.

“Every time finance gets cheaper and faster, the people who did well under the slow expensive version push back,” he said near the end. “That's fine. We'll keep explaining it until it's boring.”