At the end of June, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev stood in front of a reflecting pool overlooking the Mediterranean, clad in a striped cream suit that made him look like a crypto bro version of Jay Gatsby. Speaking to a giddy Cannes crowd, Tenev reached into a briefcase. He pulled out a metal cylinder. “I’m holding in my hands right now the keys to the first-ever stock tokens for OpenAI,” Tenev announced. “I’d like to transfer these tokens to you,” he told the seated onlookers, who politely waved paper fans to survive the summer heat.
Tenev’s gambit was the highest-profile launch yet of an increasingly buzzy product in the world of crypto and fintech: tokenized stocks, which are traditional equities in a blockchain wrapper. Proponents argue that by tokenizing publicly traded shares like Apple and Tesla, investors will be more easily able to trade and access assets, including outside the U.S. Robinhood took an even bolder step by claiming that it could tokenize shares in private companies, like OpenAI and SpaceX, that are typically only available to the world’s wealthiest through venture funds or secondaries.
