Robinhood Stock Tokens test 24/7 trading for shares online

Robinhood Stock Tokens are becoming Robinhood’s answer to a weaker crypto market. Vlad Tenev says real assets, not memecoins, will drive growth.

The company’s chief executive framed tokenized equities as the next useful layer for digital assets, a day after Robinhood expanded the product. His argument is that crypto’s next cycle depends less on new speculative tokens and more on putting existing financial assets on blockchain rails.

Tenev favors tokenized assets

Tenev said Thursday morning that the digital-asset industry should focus on real-world assets rather than tokens without a practical claim on cash flows, collateral or utility. "The future of crypto is in real-world assets," Tenev said.

He contrasted that with memecoins, a segment that has often driven retail trading bursts but offers little underlying economic function. "If an asset is not tied to an underlying utility, it's not a productive asset. What's the benefit of making a million different memecoins?" he said.

The comments put Robinhood’s crypto strategy closer to tokenization than to the casino-like edge of retail digital-asset trading. That matters for a company that built its brand around low-friction stock trading and has since moved deeper into crypto products, retirement accounts and international brokerage services.

Stock Tokens trade around clock

Robinhood launched Stock Tokens on Wednesday for eligible users, giving them access to tokenized equities that can trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The product extends the trading window beyond the market hours that still define most listed equities.

The company also plans to let users deploy those tokenized assets into lending pools, where they could serve as trading collateral across decentralized finance protocols. That would move tokenized stocks from a brokerage wrapper toward crypto market infrastructure, if the collateral, custody and regulatory structure holds.

Robinhood is also working on ways to give users exposure to privately held companies, including OpenAI, according to the company’s product push described by Tenev. The private-company angle is load-bearing: access to late-stage private firms remains limited for most retail investors, while public listings often arrive after years of private-market gains.

A weaker crypto tape

Tenev’s remarks came as major digital assets have traded lower this year. Bitcoin was quoted at $61,601.41 at 11:43 a.m. ET on Thursday, down 30% from the start of the year, while the broader crypto market had lost roughly $1 trillion in market capitalization over the same period.

Ethereum and bitcoin remain the best-known institutional entry points, but Tenev argued that bitcoin’s role does not need to shrink for tokenized assets to expand. His view is that crypto can become infrastructure for markets that already exist, rather than a parallel market built mainly around new coins.

"Crypto is becoming infrastructure that powers financial markets," Tenev said. "Everything that is running on traditional rails will eventually become onchain, tokenized. It's like a freight train that can't be stopped."

Wall Street tests blockchain rails

Institutional adoption has been one counterweight to this year’s weaker token prices, with large financial and payments companies testing blockchain-based settlement and tokenized assets. Tenev’s thesis fits that direction: tokenization is easier to defend when it cuts settlement time, extends trading hours or creates programmable collateral.

The risk is that tokenized equities are not just a technical product. They sit between securities law, brokerage regulation, custody rules and DeFi market plumbing, and each layer can limit how useful the tokens become outside Robinhood’s own ecosystem.

If tokenized equities remain mostly a Robinhood trading feature, the macro effect is likely narrow: more retail access to around-the-clock exposure, but limited change to core market settlement. For Robinhood, that path could still deepen user engagement; for the wider industry, it would make tokenization a brokerage product before it becomes market infrastructure.

If regulators and counterparties allow tokenized stocks to move into lending pools and collateral networks, the mechanism changes. Crypto would gain more productive collateral, Robinhood would have a differentiated bridge between stocks and DeFi, and exchanges, brokers and custodians would face pressure to offer similar rails.

If token prices keep sliding and retail demand weakens, Robinhood’s product timing becomes harder. The company would then need real-world-asset utility to offset lower speculative trading volumes, while the broader sector would have to prove tokenization can grow without a memecoin cycle behind it.