🌐 Robinhood CEO: “Everything will be on-chain”

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev called tokenization a “freight train barreling toward the heart of traditional finance” at Token2049 Singapore. His point was this: the future isn’t “crypto vs Wall Street”, it’s a merger.

Tenev thinks that whether equities and real estate or basically anything else, everything will be on-chain in some way. Just as stablecoins have emerged as the default way to access dollars digitally, tokenized assets could become the default way the world gets exposure to stocks, property and even start-up equity.

But — What exactly Is Tokenization?

Tokenization is the mechanism that represents real-world assets as digital tokens in a blockchain.

That means:

• Stocks that trade 24/7, globally

• Real estate ownership sliced into fractional tokens

• Bonds or equities in private companies that are made instantly tradable

The promise: settlement faster and cheaper than ever, global liquidity and the familiar promise of reduced barriers for the retail investors.

Tokenization market 101 — What do players like McKinsey think?

But there is also some pushback, OpenAI and other startups have pushed back, saying the secondary trading of their tokenized shares is unauthorized. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce cautioned that tokenized equity is not free of securities laws.

Leading projects & experiments in the Tokenization

The legal minefield

1. Are tokenized equities really equities? U.S. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce has also sent a message to the market that just because something’s on chain doesn’t exempt it from securities laws.

2. Issuer pushback: OpenAI publicly lashed out against Robinhood’s tokenized OpenAI shares, saying they’re not equity and weren’t approved.

3. Regulatory warning: The European Securities and Markets Authority warned that tokenized stocks could be deceptive because many do not entail shareholder rights or claims form governance.

4. Market integrity / custody risk: A call from the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE), to regulators to crack down on tokenized stocks due to misrepresentation, through the prospects for lack of rights or structural fragility. Reuters

5. Bankruptcy, SPVs & claims: In case of a platform of tokenizing assets failing, holders have no claim to recourse for underlying rights, particularly if the SPVs or custodial chains are not transparent.

Signal vs Hype

The hype: “Tokenize everything.”

The signal: It’s not that tokenization will replace legacy systems overnight, but rather that it will create an entirely new way to access markets across the globe for a new class of investors.

Why this matters for you

• Investors: Tokenization equals cheaper, faster access to assets you couldn’t reach as easily in the past.

• Crypto natives: It’s the bridge between DeFi and IRL.

• Traditional finance: Chances are you’ll just be accessing some number of crypto rails even if you don’t buy a token.

Tenev might be correct, the train is here. The only question is whether the U.S. gets on board before it’s too late.

For the first time since 2022, ZCash (ZEC) climbed past $150 riding a wave of shorts getting squeezed, liquidations and social media hype. It even broke the token back into the top 65, with a daily trading volume exceeding $1B.

ZEC is still down 95% from ATH, but it’s a great example of how “forgotten” altcoins can roar back once when liquidity + hype intersect. Privacy coins (XMR, ZEC) are now suddenly back on the radar. Naval Ravikant even labeled ZEC “insurance against Bitcoin.”

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