The launch of the program last week drew criticism from companies like OpenAI and questions from the Bank of Lithuania, Robinhood’s main regulator in the European Union.
“They have some questions,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said of the Lithuanian central bank in an interview with Bloomberg Television Tuesday (July 8). “They want to make sure that everything is proper because it’s a new innovative offering. We’re confident. We think that these are not only important, but they’ll withstand the highest form of scrutiny.”
The issue arose when Robinhood announced June 30 that its retail investors using its app in the EU could begin trading tokens that represent shares of U.S. equities on blockchain.
The launch included a giveaway of tokens for companies such as SpaceX and OpenAI, the latter of which later warned traders that the tokens were not equity in the company.
“We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it,” OpenAI wrote Wednesday (July 2) in a post on social platform X. “Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval — we did not approve any transfer.”
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Meanwhile, the Bank of Lithuania said Monday (July 7) that it asked Robinhood to clarify the structure of OpenAI and SpaceX tokens to “assess the legality and compliance of these specific instruments,” per a CNBC report.
Tenev told Bloomberg that the tokens representing private stocks like OpenAI and SpaceX are not yet tradeable. As neither company is public, Robinhood values them with its own internal metrics and hopes to be able to launch tokenized equities in other markets like the United States and the United Kingdom.
“For tokenization in the U.S., we do believe that the [Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)] has the authority to make it happen without legislation,” he said, per the report. “The U.S. shouldn’t be far behind.”
Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan and Kraken made similar tokenization-related announcements last week.
“While the initiatives may appear distinct, ranging from environmental credits to fractionalized equity exposure, the connective tissue is the same: moving traditional financial services onto the blockchain,” PYMNTS reported Thursday (July 3). “These moves represent a coordinated push by financial giants to tokenize real-world assets (RWAs), sidestep traditional clearing infrastructure, and begin transitioning toward 24/7, programmable trading markets.”
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