Robinhood Dealing With Fallout of Tokenized Equities Offering

Two weeks after it began offering tokenized equities, Robinhood Markets is dealing with continued fallout.

A report Saturday (July 12) by Bloomberg examines the brokerage’s struggles in the wake of the new offering, which launched a $1 million giveaway of SpaceX and OpenAI tokens.

But as Bloomberg notes, OpenAI quickly issued a statement warning traders that these tokens did not represent equity in the artificial intelligence (AI) startup.

“We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it,” the company said in a post on social platform X. “Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval — we did not approve any transfer.”

Days later, the Bank of Lithuania, Robinhood’s chief regulator in the European Union, said it had written to the company seeking clarification on the structure of OpenAI and SpaceX tokens to “assess the legality and compliance of these specific instruments.”

According to Bloomberg, Robinhood has — in offering tokenized equities to its qualifying 150,000 customers in Europe — “supercharged” the focus on the blockchain-based shares, which had until recently chiefly been much smaller scale efforts.

They are still part of a regulatory grey area in the U.S., with stateside brokerages still not making them available. But companies like Robinhood are eager to get into the space. However, the report added, critics argue the tokens dilute value for shareholders, particularly for companies such as OpenAI that haven’t yet gone public.

“The imperative to democratize private markets and give retail investors the same opportunities as institutional investors is real,” said Jonathan Shaffer, CEO of Fission Labs, a decentralized finance platform that offers access to liquid venture capital investments. “But we need to question whether derivatives wrapped as tokens solve the underlying access problem.”

Meanwhile, companies such as JPMorgan and Kraken made similar tokenization-related announcements in the last few weeks.

“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 soon after. “These moves represent a coordinated push by financial giants to tokenize real-world assets, sidestep traditional clearing infrastructure, and begin transitioning toward 24/7, programmable trading markets.”

At the same time, PYMNTS added, these fast-moving developments also pose existential questions for market regulators and central intermediaries.

“Are tokenized securities complementary to, or competitive with, traditional capital markets?” the report said. “Can existing legal frameworks scale across these hybrid asset classes? And who bears responsibility when decentralized and centralized elements collide?”