Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has admitted, to say the least, that his company has admitted his recent foray into offering tokenized stock, but remains steady in his commitment to expanding the initiative.
“It’s a huge milestone to actually tokenize those great companies,” Tenev said. Decryption In the interview Friday. “Of course, every time you do something interesting in the first place, it has an element of controversy.”
Earlier this month, Robin Hood unfolded Give it Tokens issued on the Ethereum Layer-2 network Arbitratorrepresenting stocks in private companies, including Openai. However, Openai’s inventory tokens were not actually permitted by the artificial intelligence giant. Condemnation The product is announced as soon as it is released.
The Openai stock tokens, which were broadcast only in Europe, did not represent the company’s actual fairness or did not provide holders with the right to vote. It simply tracked the company’s perceived prices in the secondary market.
Tenev certainly knew the media’s impact of the pushback from Openai and the flashy entry point of Robinhood to tokenized inventory, but the executive said he was focusing on the potential of an emerging asset class he considers to be huge.
“I don’t think much about splash,” the CEO said. “It’s putting a real product in the hands of a really useful customer. I think (launch) has achieved that a lot.”
Tenev said he wants to move forward with Robinhood’s Tokenized Stock initiative. Thousands of private companies.
“Now we just know the path to expand it to more companies and enable defi phase 2 and phase 3,” he added, referring to Robinhood’s long-term plan to integrate tokenized inventory products with decentralized financial markets.
Robinhood’s bold tokenized stock rollouts have not only attracted the rage of involved companies like Openai. It may also have attracted the attention of the SEC. A few days after the product was launched, the SEC issued a statement on the need to comply with securities laws when tinkering with stocks, even when blockchain technology is involved.
“It’s as powerful as blockchain technology, but it doesn’t have the magical ability to change the nature of the underlying asset,” says SEC Commissioner Hesterpearth. I said. “Tokenized securities are still securities.”
“According to that,” she added. “Market participants must consider and comply with federal securities laws when trading these devices.”
TENEV has pushed back the notion that his company’s recent experiments could have played a role in triggering SEC warnings.
“The co-founder of Robin Hood said, “I don’t think Commissioner Perth’s response that I don’t think was concrete to us, I don’t think it was concrete to us, and of course we were part of it.”