Early in an episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, host Peter Diamandis read back a claim from Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev. The publisher's episode notes say the episode was recorded on September 18, 2026, and it was published on September 19. On CNBC the previous month, Tenev had said tokenization would take over the entire financial system. Tenev recalled his own wording: it was a "freight train" that "can't be stopped" and would eat the whole financial system.
Not everyone on the panel agreed that the train needs the tracks Tenev is laying. The disagreement came down to one practical question. Do features such as round-the-clock trading require assets to be put on a blockchain, or could the existing market plumbing simply be upgraded?
What tokenization means here
To tokenize an asset is to create a digital token on a blockchain (a shared ledger that records who owns what) that stands for that asset. Diamandis described the goal this way: today a stock, a private company's share, a building and a loan sit in four separate systems. Each has its own trading hours and its own set of eligible buyers. As tokens, he said, they could use the same system, trade at the same hours and be held by anyone with a digital wallet.
Tenev said part of this already exists outside the United States. Robinhood launched a blockchain called Robinhood Chain. It launched with what Robinhood calls stock tokens, which track US shares; Tenev said about 200 are live, including NVIDIA and SpaceX tokens. He described them as "little stock Legos": developers can combine them with other apps in decentralized finance, or DeFi, a set of financial services that run as code on blockchains without a bank or broker in the middle. He said the chain handles "well over a billion" in daily trading volume on decentralized exchanges and called it one of the fastest-growing blockchains. Both figures are his account.
His longer-term aim is one global platform for US stocks, private companies, art, real estate, private credit, options and futures. According to Tenev, it all gets "much simpler and much more scalable" if Robinhood abandons the need to connect to each country's exchanges and clearinghouses. Instead, it would use a "tokenization engine" that places an asset in a box and issues and redeems tokens against it.
The objection: a few database tables would do
When Diamandis raised the idea of AI agents trading tokenized stocks, Alex Wissner-Gross, a computer scientist and founder of Reified, said he would say "something mean about tokens" and then something nice about Tenev.
The mean part: "most of these use cases could operate perfectly well without any tokenization at all. Crypto unnecessary." He said all that was needed was "a few database tables" run by a central, trusted clearinghouse, which he said is essentially how stocks already work. A clearinghouse is the middleman that settles trades and keeps track of who owns what. He argued that if the clearinghouse were allowed to run around the clock and list extra symbols, such as private companies, it could support 24/7 trading of private companies without tokens. He added that he "would love to be proven wrong."
The nice part: if Robinhood could open up what he called America's "dark matter" of privately held companies to the liquidity of the public stock market, it would be "amazing." That would be especially true, he said, if investors could cheaply buy an index covering all of them. That alone, he said, would get him to open a Robinhood account.
Tenev's answer: he built it the hard way
Diamandis asked Tenev to address the choice between a central database and tokens directly. Tenev said he had experienced both sides firsthand. He said Robinhood was the first to offer what it calls the 24 Hour Market in the US, which allows trading 24 hours a day, five days a week in a few thousand stocks, and that competitors are now rushing to copy it. But the main exchanges don't trade overnight. So Robinhood had to "staple together" those exchanges with overnight alternative trading systems, which are privately run trading venues. That meant routing orders between them behind the scenes, which he called "very, very complicated."
Years later, Tenev said, the product still isn't 24/7. He expects to get there through "sheer will and determination": pushing the other firms involved, doing the regulatory work and building the technology. Without Robinhood pushing, he suggested, it might have taken about ten years.
With crypto, by contrast, he said "you get 24/7 for free, you get fractionalization for free," plus self-custody and the ability to combine assets with DeFi apps. Fractionalization means owning a slice of a share. Self-custody means holding the asset in your own wallet rather than having a broker hold it for you. He also highlighted portability. If you hold your own shares, you can move them to a competitor when your broker isn't serving you well. Today's transfers between brokers, he said, are cumbersome: "your assets disappear into a black hole," sometimes for up to a week, and firms have little reason to make leaving easy.
Tenev also made a cost argument. Maintaining old systems and coordinating with all the parties involved is expensive for firms. Even without any benefit to customers, he said, the industry would adopt tokenization for cost and efficiency if there were a clear path for it.
His answer doesn't claim that tokens are the only possible way to get each feature. His own 24/5 product was built without them. His claim is that tokens deliver the features together, without the negotiation and custom engineering. To skeptics who called the tokenization market small, he said his approach is to "ship it," and that the international launch showed "huge demand."
What Robinhood's tokens are, legally
The international product has a specific legal structure. Robinhood announced the Robinhood Chain mainnet and a new generation of stock tokens on July 1, 2026. It described the chain as an Arbitrum-based "Layer 2" blockchain, meaning a network built on top of another blockchain. Eligible users in more than 120 countries could get the tokens through Robinhood Wallet, subject to local restrictions. Listed uses include continuous trading, lending pools and using the tokens as collateral for loans. Robinhood's earlier tokens were renamed Classic Stock Tokens and remain in its Europe app.
According to Robinhood's product documentation, the newer stock tokens are debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited. The company says real shares held by a custody partner back them one for one. The tokens give economic exposure, meaning they track the stock's price, but they carry no legal or beneficial rights in the shares or against the companies that issued them. US persons are excluded, and other countries are restricted too.
The SEC's conditional opening
Tenev said he was glad to see the "innovation exemption" announced "yesterday," which he said creates "a path for bringing tokenization to America." The Securities and Exchange Commission announced it on September 17. It is temporary relief for venues trading tokenized versions of US-listed stocks and for certain liquidity providers, the firms that stand ready to buy and sell.
Trading must take place in permissioned pools, meaning only approved participants can join. These pools use automated market makers, software that sets prices from the assets held in a pool. The conditions include:
- limits on the number of stocks and trading volume
- shareholder rights equivalent to owning the stock
- notice to companies, with a chance to object when a third party tokenizes their shares
- smart contracts (self-executing blockchain programs) that are public, auditable and run on public, open blockchains
- disclosures about how the venue operates
- a requirement to stop trading whenever the stock's main exchange halts it
The exemptions expire five years after publication, and the SEC asked for public comment on changes and further rules.
These are two different arrangements. Robinhood's international tokens give price exposure without shareholder rights and exclude Americans. The SEC's framework requires equivalent shareholder rights and permissioned venues. It opens a conditional route for tokenized stock trading in the US. It does not approve the tokens Robinhood already sells abroad.
Tenev's broader goal remains 24/7 trading in individual private companies, which he called the "North Star." He said it will probably arrive outside the US first. Diamandis asked whether regulatory capture explained the delay. Tenev blamed incumbency instead, comparing it to high-speed rail: the US built trains first and its trains work well enough, so there is less pressure to reach the frontier. He said he hopes tokenization "won't be like high speed rail" and that the US will adopt it quickly.