Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on tokenizing stocks, expanding access to private shares, fintech's future

Robinhood’s next major bet is turning stocks—including private-company stakes—into blockchain tokens that retail investors can trade. In Europe it has already tokenized exposure to OpenAI and SpaceX, and Tenev says the company is now working on U.S. structures and intends to expand the model substantially.

Tenev sees private-market access as more important than 24/7 public-stock trading because ordinary investors are excluded from the companies driving AI and space. He argued that giving people meaningful ownership in AI companies could align them economically with technology that may otherwise disrupt their jobs and livelihoods.

Robinhood wants accredited-investor rules loosened so ordinary people can qualify for risky private investments largely by acknowledging the risk themselves. Tenev proposed self-certification—even simply confirming that an investor understands they could lose 100%—rather than limiting access primarily by wealth.

The regulatory change in Washington materially altered Robinhood’s posture from defense to expansion. Tenev said the previous administration repeatedly pursued enforcement and issued a Wells notice while declining in-person meetings, whereas the current administration has been far more willing to engage and collaborate.

Robinhood is deliberately evolving from a brokerage into a household’s primary financial institution. Tenev said retirement accounts and credit-card adoption increased customers’ brokerage deposits rather than cannibalizing them, encouraging Robinhood to pursue direct deposit, family accounts and children as part of a broader financial platform.

Robinhood is positioning itself to capture part of the enormous generational wealth transfer from older Americans to younger customers. Tenev cited more than $130 trillion expected to change hands and said Robinhood already holds more than a quarter-trillion dollars of customer assets, which he considers small relative to the opportunity ahead.

Tenev is separately building Harmonic, an AI company aimed at “mathematical superintelligence,” not simply another chatbot. He says its formal model achieved gold-medal-level International Mathematical Olympiad performance, while its deeper goal is mathematically verifiable reasoning that could reduce hallucinations and automate verification of massive volumes of AI-generated software.