Robinhood Adds Redemption and Voting Rights to Stock Tokens: Are They Finally Stocks?

Original title: "Robinhood Adds Redemption and Voting Rights to Stock Tokens: Are They Finally Stocks?"

Original author: Xiao Bing, TechFlow

First, a recap of the real story so far: AMC CEO Adam Aron spent ten days using a string of adjectives ("despicable, infuriating, disgusting, abhorrent, unforgivable, vile") to describe Robinhood's stock tokens.

Aron discovered that Robinhood had tokenized AMC stock without notifying AMC, selling the product in over 120 countries worldwide. The token was called "AMC Stock Token," its price tracked AMC's stock price, and holders could even receive dividends.

But when Aron checked the legal documents, he was furious: the holders of these tokens were not AMC shareholders at all.

They held a debt security issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited, a Jersey-registered entity. This security provided "economic exposure" to AMC's stock price but granted holders no legal or beneficial rights to AMC. No voting rights, no right to redeem for physical shares, and strictly speaking, they weren't even "shareholders."

On September 14, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev announced on X that physical redemption and voting rights were coming soon. Johann Kerbrat, head of Robinhood's crypto business, added that the team was actively developing a 1:1 physical stock redemption feature, with voting rights also on the roadmap.

The same day, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also stated that Coinbase's tokenized stocks already supported 1:1 redemption and dividends, with voting rights coming soon.

Get on board first, pay later—now it's time to pay up.

Three Tokenization Paths

In a statement released in January 2026, the SEC divided securities tokenization into three models. Understanding these three models is a prerequisite for grasping the entire debate.

Model 1: Issuer-led tokenization. The listed company itself puts its shares on-chain, with shareholder rights fully preserved. A representative case is Securitize helping Exodus complete the tokenization of its common stock, where the token is the stock and holders appear directly on the company's shareholder register. The tokenized stock trading platform that the NYSE is developing with Securitize also follows this route.

Model 2: Third-party custody + tokenized certificates. A third party holds the real shares and then issues tokens representing ownership. Coinbase follows this path, holding shares through an offshore special purpose vehicle, with custody by US-licensed broker Alpaca Securities. Token holders have actual economic rights and redemption rights to the underlying shares. Coinbase claims its tokens already have built-in dividend functionality, with voting rights "coming soon."

Model 3: Synthetic exposure. An independent security product is issued that tracks the price of a stock, but holders have no ownership of the underlying shares. Robinhood's current Stock Tokens fall into this category.

The three models may use the same stock ticker, but what investors receive is completely different.

An analogy: Model 1 is like buying a house with your name on the title deed; Model 2 is like buying a trust unit where the trust owns a house and you have the right to demand the house be transferred to you; Model 3 is like buying a note linked to the price of that house—if the house appreciates, you profit; if it depreciates, you lose—but from start to finish, the house has no legal relationship with you.

Robinhood's Legal Structure

Opening Robinhood Stock Token's product documents, the legal structure is not complicated, but it is enough to confuse ordinary investors:

The issuer is Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited (RHJ), registered in Jersey, British Isles. The token's legal nature is "tokenised debt securities," issued as derivatives under the EU's MiFID II framework. The underlying shares are held in custody by US-licensed broker Alpaca Securities LLC, claimed to be 1:1 backed. The tokens are issued in standard ERC-20 format and can be transferred, traded on-chain, and even accepted as collateral by DeFi protocols.

The key lies in the last point: these tokens are composable on-chain. After the launch of Robinhood Chain (a self-built L2 launched in July 2025), Stock Tokens can be used as collateral in lending protocols—a feature emphasized in the product roadmap Tenev announced last November.

This composability creates the most enticing use cases for tokenized stocks, but it also amplifies the risks of the legal structure. If a token is liquidated in a DeFi protocol, the liquidator receives a debt instrument from a Jersey entity, not a share of a US-listed company. Are the underlying shares truly locked 1:1? Have these shares been lent out for short selling? Robinhood has not published a per-token reserve audit report.

Aron's follow-up question on September 13 was exactly this: if those tokens are theoretically backed 1:1 by real shares, but those underlying shares are then lent to short sellers, are the tokens still truly 1:1 backed?

The Real Divide: Who Represents the Future of Tokenized Stocks?

The public spat between Aron and Tenev is entertaining, but the industry divergence beneath the quarrel deserves more attention.

The current on-chain tokenized stock market is approximately $3.6 billion. Kraken's xStocks (issued by Backed Finance) have reached a cumulative trading volume of $25 billion, with over 80,000 holders. Binance's bStocks achieved a scale of about $118.5 million within two months of launch, accounting for about 90% of on-chain stock DEX trading volume. Ondo Finance leads in TVL in the tokenized fund space. Securitize holds the high ground on the institutional side, having already completed fund tokenization for BlackRock, KKR, Apollo, and others.

These players roughly diverge along two paths:

One is "from on-chain to on-chain": first issue synthetic or certificate-type tokens, rapidly scale up, then gradually fill in rights. Robinhood, Kraken, and Binance follow this path. Their advantages are speed and broad coverage (190+ stocks, 120+ countries), but the legal structure always carries a layer of "intermediary risk."

The other is "from issuer to on-chain": cooperate with listed companies to achieve tokenization directly at the transfer agent level, where the token is the stock itself. Securitize follows this path. It is slower, but the rights structure is clean—token holders appear directly on the company's shareholder register, with no "look-through" issues.

Robinhood's announcement of adding voting and redemption rights is essentially an effort to move from the first path toward the second. How far this stitching path can go depends on how many shareholder rights the legal framework of Jersey debt securities can actually accommodate—a question that regulators have not yet formally answered.

For HOOD's stock price, this is a risk-mitigation signal. Tokenized stocks are an important part of Robinhood's growth narrative (2000+ stock tokens, covering a potential market of 400 million users in the EU), and the addition of voting and redemption rights reduces the tail risk of regulatory shutdown.

As for Aron's original question—whether these tokens are actually stocks—the answer may be: not yet, but they are desperately trying to become stocks.

This is an upgrade that technology can complete, but the law is not ready for.