Author: Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood

Translator: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

It's becoming increasingly clear that we are in the early stages of a global tokenization super cycle. Last year, I described it as an unstoppable freight train that will ultimately consume the entire financial system.

Since then, tokenization has entered the mainstream public eye and is not merely remaining at the discussion level. In markets outside the United States, Robinhood has been early to launch related products and continues to drive the development of this emerging industry.

Just over a month ago, we launched the Robinhood Chain mainnet at the "The World Is Flat" event in London, which is the first blockchain designed specifically for real-world assets (RWA). Since then, it has become the fastest EVM chain to reach 100 million transactions.

Stock Tokens are one of the core components of Robinhood Chain. Currently, users from over 120 countries and regions can gain economic exposure to more than 190 U.S. stocks through it, with each stock token backed 1:1 by the corresponding stock.

However, there is a very obvious gap here:

Stock tokens are still not usable in the United States.

The debate around the tokenization of U.S. stocks is roughly divided into two camps.

On one side are enthusiastic supporters, who keep asking: When will the U.S. be able to trade tokenized stocks? On the other side are skeptics: What is the point of this?

After all, unlike many overseas markets, U.S. investors can easily access U.S. stocks. Companies like Robinhood have provided multiple low-cost and convenient investment channels.

There is also considerable debate about what kind of structure stock tokens should adopt.

Currently, Robinhood Stock Tokens have corresponding underlying securities as full support, and holders can gain economic exposure to these assets on-chain, including dividends. This does not equate to directly holding the underlying stocks themselves. But if you only focus on this point, you will miss the real changes.

For the first time, we can tokenize the economic exposure of high-quality financial assets, allowing these tokens to be freely transferable, programmable, self-custodial, and tradable in an open financial ecosystem 24/7.

And this is just one structure of tokenization. As regulatory frameworks mature, we expect the design of stock tokens to continue to evolve, and in the future, we may even see tokenized equity that carries full rights of traditional stocks.

Tokenization is one of the best paths for the modernization of the U.S. financial system and can provide more people with opportunities to own financial assets, and U.S. investors should also benefit from this.

Tokenization is not about "going on-chain for the sake of being on-chain." The real change is reconstructing the infrastructure behind asset ownership, allowing assets to flow freely like information on the internet. For U.S. investors, this new infrastructure can directly provide three advantages.

1. Real-time settlement makes the market more resilient

The GameStop incident must not happen again.

I already wrote about this issue in January, so here’s a brief recap.

The core trading restrictions during the GameStop incident mainly stemmed from risk management rules set by traditional clearing institutions around the two-day settlement cycle.

Since then, we have pushed the entire industry to shift from a two-day settlement, or T+2, to a one-day settlement, T+1.

Even so, there is still a time gap between the completion of stock transactions and final settlement. To reduce the risk during this period, brokerages still need to prepare large amounts of cash.

But on the blockchain, stock tokens can trade in real-time and settle in real-time as well.

Real-time settlement means the overall risk and capital pressure faced by the system will significantly decrease, especially during times of severe market stress.

2. Native support for 24/7 trading

The financial markets are highly globalized today, but significant news does not only occur during regular trading hours.

Major events often happen after the market closes or even on weekends. By the time the market reopens on Monday, prices may have experienced huge changes.

For decades, institutional investors have managed such risks through complex hedging strategies, but retail investors typically lack such capabilities.

Therefore, 24/7 trading is not just a tool for capturing new opportunities; it is also a risk management tool.

Robinhood has already promoted 24/5 trading in the U.S. through traditional financial infrastructure, and we will continue to innovate towards a market that never closes.

But achieving this through traditional means requires connecting different exchanges and alternative trading systems, which is a very complex process.

On a blockchain like Robinhood Chain, 24/7 trading and asset fractional ownership is already a native capability.

We have seen the potential of this model on Robinhood Chain and other protocols.

Even on weekends, users outside the U.S. are still trading stock tokens worth millions of dollars.

The internet doesn’t take breaks, and neither should the market.

3. Assets can be freely transferred, and financial platforms must truly compete

Tokenization can also give users more control over their assets while forcing financial platforms to compete with each other.

In the traditional financial system, if you want to transfer assets from one brokerage to another through the traditional ACATS transfer system, it often takes days, and the whole process is quite cumbersome.

Many people ultimately do not transfer because no one wants their assets to be in an uncertain "in transit" state for long, especially when the market is still fluctuating.

Tokenization allows assets to be instantly transferred globally.

It can move between different traditional financial platforms or go directly into the DeFi world.

When the barriers and costs of asset transfer drastically decrease, financial platforms will be forced to compete on price and innovation.

Users can choose based on which platform offers the best experience, rather than being trapped in a closed ecosystem.

Transferability is just one of the advantages of self-custody.

Self-custody means users can directly hold stock tokens in their own crypto wallets.

In addition to providing users with greater control over their assets, self-custody also allows these assets to have more uses, such as lending through DeFi or serving as collateral for trading.

We've already seen developers building stock token applications on Robinhood Chain that even we did not anticipate.

As we continue to refine the RWA foundational components and provide developers with more tools, we believe this trend will only accelerate further and ultimately lead to an increasingly vibrant on-chain economy.

But to truly unleash these advantages in the U.S., relying solely on technology is not enough.

Over a century of securities legislation and regulation has created an extremely complex regulatory framework in the U.S., many of which are built around the last generation's market structure and technology.

Many of these rules indeed play an important role in protecting investors and maintaining market integrity.

However, at the same time, their specific implementation has further entrenched traditional financial infrastructures, which have increasingly fallen behind modern technological developments.

Market participants have already begun to turn to blockchain-based systems.

But policymakers also need to push for the modernization of rules, while retaining the goals of investor protection and market integrity, to allow markets to adopt truly more advanced infrastructures.

Moreover, they must accelerate their pace.

Other jurisdictions will not wait for the U.S. to catch up, and this will ultimately have very far-reaching implications.

Tokenized public stocks are just the beginning.

The tokenization of publicly listed stocks can help us gradually build the necessary infrastructure, liquidity, and on-chain ecosystem, further supporting a broader range of asset classes.

The next direction that is already vaguely visible is those assets that currently have higher barriers to entry and more limited liquidity, especially equity in private companies.

Of course, technology itself cannot eliminate all barriers.

For example, the current U.S. "accredited investor" qualifications still exclude the vast majority of Americans from private markets.

But if we can first build the infrastructure for publicly listed stocks, it could pave the way for broader market access, better liquidity, and entirely new forms of asset ownership.

U.S. investors should also benefit from this innovation.

After all, many of these tokenized assets are already U.S. assets, and American companies like Robinhood are driving this innovation.

If the world’s other regions eventually establish future ownership systems around U.S. assets, while U.S. investors themselves are unable to participate, that would be a very strange outcome.

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