Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on tokenizing stocks, expanding access to private shares, fintech's future

A fintech company remakes the rules of ownership

When Vlad Tenev speaks about Robinhood today, he does so from the vantage point of a company that has already remade retail trading and is quietly redesigning the plumbing of modern finance. The easy headlines — a stock that has more than doubled, membership milestones such as 3.5 million Robinhood Gold subscribers, and a place among broad market indexes — are only the first act. What follows is an argument about who should own the future's biggest companies, how that ownership can be delivered, and what institutions and regulators will need to accept along the way.

Tokenization as a practical blueprint for broader access

Tenev’s team staged a provocative demonstration in the south of France under the name "To Catch a Token." The idea was simple and deliberate: build the Robinhood experience on crypto-native rails to show what public and private securities might look like as tradable tokens. The demonstration pegged tokens to reserves in a way that resembles stablecoin mechanics — mint a token against a dollar or treasury bucket, trade it across public blockchains, and burn it when the reserve is redeemed. That architecture, Tenev argues, is not theoretical theater. It is a practical blueprint for 24/7 stock trading, instantaneous settlement, and — most consequentially — new ways to open access to traditionally illiquid private assets.

From giveaways to proof of concept

Robinhood’s experiment included tokenized slices of well-known private companies, notably OpenAI and SpaceX, which were distributed to retail customers in Europe as part of a giveaway. That move was as much about proving a model as it was about marketing: by securing a block of private equity and issuing tokens against it, Robinhood showed that fractionalized ownership of private companies can be made tradable. The gesture was controversial; some founders and corporate teams saw it as a distraction from their missions. Others recognized the potential to expand participation beyond venture firms and accredited investors.

Regulation, politics, and a changing Washington

Tokenizing securities lives at the intersection of law, technology, and politics. Tenev described a different relationship with recent regulators than the company had in years prior — a transition from defense to active engagement. Where the previous administration’s approach left Robinhood on its heels, the new policy environment created space to discuss frameworks like the Genius Act that formalize tokenized dollars. One practical lesson emerges from these conversations: public securities are an easier starting point because of disclosure regimes, while private securities raise thornier questions about shareholder identity and disclosure obligations.

Self-certification and the ethical trade-off of access

One of the more striking policy proposals discussed by Tenev and other participants was a loosening of investor accreditation through forms of self-certification. The premise is blunt: informed adults could attest they understand the risks — ‘‘I understand I could lose 100% of this investment’’ — rather than being locked out by wealth-based gates. That approach reframes consumer protection as an educational and disclosure challenge, not just a line-drawing exercise about who is allowed to participate.

Democratizing ownership of transformative technology

There is a philosophical argument in the room when you talk about tokenizing private companies: some forms of technological disruption — particularly AI — affect ordinary lives broadly, yet their early economic upside is often captured by a narrow slice of investors. Robinhood frames tokenization as a corrective: when everyday people can own a piece of the platforms and labs reshaping labor, education, and trade, they become stakeholders in a different sense. The claim is not merely sentimental; it is an economic thesis that broader ownership will align interests and diffuse the social friction that comes with concentrated control of powerful technologies.

The business product bet: more products, deeper engagement

Beyond tokens lies a simpler growth strategy: make Robinhood the place people keep their money. The company has observed that adding complementary products — retirement accounts, credit card products, direct deposit — increases time spent on the platform and the amount of capital users expose to the company. The logic is evident: if customers consolidate payroll, savings, retirement, and everyday spending in one digital hub, the platform becomes a primary financial relationship rather than a single-service app. That positioning also makes the case that incumbents with scale will have to pick up speed or lose share to more nimble, engineering-led challengers.

When mathematics becomes an instrument of trust in AI

In a surprising pivot from brokerage to research, Tenev also described Harmonic, a separate initiative that targets what he calls mathematical superintelligence. The project’s recent milestone — gold-medal performance at the International Math Olympiad level for a formal model — is more than a trophy. It signals a conviction that formal verification and provable correctness are the paths out of the hallucination economy: if models can produce statements that are verifiably true, they are far more useful in engineering, legal, and financial workflows where errors carry real cost.

Formal models as a foundation for enterprise trust

For engineers who now spend a great deal of time reviewing machine-generated code, a formally verified model offers a different reward signal for training: high-quality, provable outputs that can be trusted at scale. The promise is not only improved consumer assistants or chat interfaces, but back-office automation where correctness is a requirement, not a feature wish list.

A concluding thought on ownership and public life

The debate that emerges from these conversations is elemental: should innovations in market design and digital representation tilt toward inclusion or preservation of gatekeeping? The experimental token that makes a private company tradable is both a technological artifact and a political act — it demands a legal frame, a cultural shift in how companies think about shareholders, and a public conversation about risk and agency. Whether the future arrives with tokenized OpenAIs and SpaceXs or with stricter accreditation tests, the central question remains the same: who gets to participate in the gains of the next industrial wave, and on what terms will society prefer to distribute that access?