Stock tokens traded two months of volume AMC does in two days

Adam Aron of AMC Entertainment told Robinhood to stop offering tokens tied to his company's shares, called the result a fictitious synthetic equity market and threatened to take it to the SEC. Vlad Tenev answered on Friday with a claim about property law, CoinDesk reports.

“A company should control the rights attached to its shares, not every lawful use of those shares once they're in investors' hands. Going onchain shouldn't give the issuer a veto it never had offchain.”

— Vlad Tenev, Robinhood, 11 September 2026

Vlad Tenev, chairman and chief executive of Robinhood

Aron's case rests on three harms: the tokens weaken AMC's ability to raise capital, they confuse investors about what they own, and they create a market carrying the company's name without its permission. The second and third are arguable. The first has a number attached, and the number is small.

The capital-raising claim, measured

The tape puts a size on that threat:

• Binance's tokenized equity product did about $118.5 million of volume in its first two months.
• AMC shares have averaged $78.9 million of volume a day on the regular market over the past year.
• The whole tokenized venue therefore traded, in two months, about a day and a half of AMC alone.

A company that raises equity does it against the price and depth of its own listing, and both sit on the regular market. A venue that turns over a day and a half of your stock in two months does not move the price you issue at. Aron's stronger argument is the one about the name, because a market quoted in AMC's ticker that AMC never authorised is a reputational fact regardless of its size.

Fourteen months of the same fight

Robinhood switched on more than 200 stock and ETF tokens for EU users on 30 June 2025, announcing them at Cannes. The catalogue now runs past 2,000 with a one-euro minimum, first on Arbitrum and moving to the firm's own chain. Each token is a separate instrument backed one-for-one by the underlying share, which is the distinction Tenev leans on: no change to shareholder rights, no change to the official ledger.

The issuer-veto fight is 14 months old and Robinhood has lost round one on presentation. The day after Cannes, OpenAI disowned the tokens Robinhood had handed out under its name, writing that they were not OpenAI equity. Those were wrapped exposure to a special purpose vehicle holding private shares, which is further from a share than an AMC token is, and the correction still landed on Robinhood.

Why Robinhood keeps pushing

Its August crypto volume rebounded 61%, and most of that rebound came from the institutional exchange it bought rather than the retail app, so the retail product needs new inventory. Tokenized equities are that inventory, and the legal question of whether an issuer can refuse decides how large the catalogue can get.

No regulator has answered that question, in the United States or anywhere else. Tokenization keeps arriving in pilots that are smaller than their announcements, as India's bond programme demonstrated this week. The AMC fight settles a rule that will outlast the volumes it governs today.

None of this should be read as personalized investment advice.