Robinhood Chief Executive Vlad Tenev says the company’s newly launched Robinhood Chain has entered the top five blockchains for decentralized-exchange trading volume, putting tokenized stocks and stablecoin-based finance at the center of its effort to expand beyond conventional crypto trading.
Speaking about the network’s early performance, Tenev said total value locked — the amount of crypto committed to applications and trading pools — has risen rapidly since launch. He said tokenized stocks are now available to eligible users in more than 120 countries and regions, excluding the United States, where access remains restricted.
The rollout gives Robinhood’s international users a way to trade blockchain-based representations of shares including Tesla and Nvidia, move them between blockchain addresses, and use them in decentralized-finance applications. Tenev said the assets can be placed in trading pools, used as collateral, or borrowed against where supported by on-chain protocols.
Tokenized shares move into defi markets
The design goes beyond offering a digital version of a stock inside a brokerage account. Tenev said stock tokens on Robinhood Chain can interact with the same decentralized applications used for stablecoins and cryptocurrencies.
A user could exchange a tokenized equity for crypto where a liquidity pool exists, while developers can build applications around lending, trading, or other automated financial functions. Liquidity pools are smart-contract systems in which users deposit assets to facilitate on-chain swaps, usually in return for fees or other incentives.
Tenev said early activity was concentrated in stablecoins, including USDG, before developers expanded the network with pools and protocols involving meme coins, larger cryptocurrencies, and tokenized equities. Some structures link speculative tokens to stock-token rewards, including pools where holding a meme coin can trigger an airdrop of tokenized shares.
That approach places Robinhood’s stock-token offering closer to an open finance network than a conventional overseas equity product. The availability of exchanges between stock tokens and cryptocurrencies depends on whether developers or liquidity providers have created usable pools, rather than on a brokerage establishing a separate trading route for every market.
The model could make tokenized shares more flexible for users comfortable with defi, but it also ties the trading experience to on-chain liquidity. A stock token may be transferable between wallets, yet its practical usefulness for swapping or borrowing depends on available pools, collateral rules, and demand from other participants.
Crypto trading volume falls as event contracts surge
Robinhood’s own July 2026 operating data show a sharp contrast between its crypto and prediction-market activity. Cryptocurrency trading volume fell 33% from the prior month to $10.9 billion, while customers traded a record 6.1 billion event contracts, according to the company.
Tenev said Robinhood’s prediction-markets operation is generating annual revenue in the “hundreds of millions of dollars” and has become the company’s fastest-growing business line. Robinhood entered the category after prediction markets gained legal standing in the United States, he said, and expanded its offering within weeks.
The figures suggest Robinhood’s growth is increasingly being driven by products that sit alongside spot crypto trading rather than depend on it. Prediction contracts allow users to take positions on the outcome of defined events, while tokenized equities extend stock-market exposure into blockchain-based trading and lending environments.
Robinhood has also had to adjust its app design as the product menu grows. Tenev said some customers want prediction markets prominently available, while others would prefer not to see them. The company has added controls allowing users to disable the feature and is placing greater emphasis on personalization.
He said Robinhood is also separating services into standalone applications when the experience differs substantially from its core brokerage app. Banking is one example, while the company’s dedicated wallet serves users who want to interact directly with decentralized-finance services.
Demand shifts toward Korean shares and ai-linked sectors
Tenev said Robinhood began seeing increased customer interest in South Korean stocks roughly one to two months before sharp moves in the country’s market. Requests asking when Korean shares would be listed became the most frequent question he received in interviews, he said.
He linked recent market attention to artificial-intelligence spending, which has focused traders on semiconductor companies and, more recently, energy-related businesses. Tenev said buying has come from hedge funds and other trading firms, including participants buying chips with the expectation that they can be resold at higher prices rather than put to direct industrial use.
His comments reflect a familiar feature of ai-related market activity: demand has spread beyond software developers and chip designers into companies supplying power, infrastructure, and equipment needed to operate data centers.
Tenev also argued that Robinhood’s customer base can behave differently from users of older brokerages. During the 2020 market decline surrounding the covid-19 shock, he said Robinhood users were buying shares while customers at other brokerages were selling. He attributed part of that pattern to younger users having longer investment horizons.
A more complex product mix
Robinhood Chain’s early dex ranking and its tokenized-stock tools show how the company is combining brokerage products, stablecoins, defi applications, and event contracts in a single commercial strategy. Tenev said the network processed more than 100 million transactions shortly after launch.
The operational challenge is ensuring that customers can navigate an increasingly complex set of services without losing the simplicity associated with Robinhood’s original trading app. Tenev said the company is working on a cleaner interface and more individualized product displays as it adds functions.
On his own trading, Tenev said his Robinhood shares are held outside the Robinhood platform and that his transactions are limited by employee stock-plan requirements and a Rule 10b5-1 trading arrangement. He said he uses Robinhood personally, favors exchange-traded funds because they are easier to manage under those restrictions, and remains positive on Bitcoin over the long term without offering a price target.
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