Bits + Bips: AMC's CEO Calls Robinhood's Stock Tokens 'Vile.'

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Austin Campbell (0:21)

So over the weekend, AMC CEO Adam Aaron went after Robinhood's tokenized AMC shares, issued out of Jersey by Robinhood Assets, calling them, quote, contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable vile. He said AMC has no connection to it and does not condone it. Vlad Tenev's entire reply was, what's the concern?

And Aaron's answer was eight paragraphs in a demand that Robinhood voluntarily cease and de-kissed, it was misspelled, desist, with Robinhood's CLO Dan Gallagher, notably former SEC, saying, send your lawyers and we'll educate them. Tenev, in the same minute, said, we stand behind stock tokens. Now, weirdly, AMC stock jumped nearly 21% overnight to $3.07 on this fight, according to the Bloc.

And I think where to start is, what is a stock token? So in this case, tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets expose people to the share price, not the ownership, not the shareholder rights. They are unregistered in the US., they are not offered to US persons. So the substantive charge that synthetic equity decouples stock token ownership in a company having an ability to control its own capital raising efforts and that it sows distrust in markets generally.

But the flip side is there's 13.4 billion of these things and to have some sort of price token like this, you're either creating a derivative, which Robinhood did not really do here, or having the reverse of what is called an ADR. That is to say, you have stocks that are backing this token, which you pass the price reference on for. So previously, OpenAI had disavowed Robinhood's tokens in July 2025, but this to me is a little bit different. OpenAI is not a public company. These are not publicly tradable. That is private stock. Often you need issuer permission for transfers in private stock in a way you do not with public stock. So while this fight has happened once before, it was not the exact same fight. So before we get into the rest of what is going on in this space and how, as always, meme coins somehow get themselves involved, I wanna start here with the first question for you. Chris, you have a lot of thoughts on tokenization. You have been involved in this space for a while. What do you make of this dispute between AMC and Robinhood? Is there a real disagreement here? Is this people not being informed? Like, what are you seeing?

Chris Perkins (3:18)

I mean, there's so much going on right now where you're seeing innovation, creativity. I'm sure we're gonna talk about some of the meme coin stuff pairings that are also going on on Robinhood Chain, which are very hard to discuss at work because of the names involved.

But, gosh, I haven't seen this type of innovation and creativity for decades post-Global Financial Crisis.

I totally understand the challenges, but you were at Wall Street, I was on Wall Street. Synthetic products are a thing, like they're everywhere.

And I think the challenge here, did Robinhood do anything illegal? I think it's very clear that they've done their homework, if you listen to their general counsel. The second question is, okay, why is there conflict here? Well, if you're a CEO, you would love for someone to buy your equity, rather than because like capital markets, US capital markets are where they are today because it's a place for capital formation if you're a company. And so they're making the principles argument saying, wait a second, this isn't right, this isn't fair because you're undermining the principles of capital formation. And frankly, that's one of the things, one of the core goals of the SEC to ensure that capital formation is available and thoughtfully takes place here in the United States. And so that's the conflict is like, hey, you're messing with my capital formation. But again, like you go to a Delta One desk in Wall Street, like there's constantly structures, there's constantly synthetic capabilities.

Oftentimes, those synthetic capabilities, we're probably going to talk about Coinbase single stock futures as well. And futures have also struggled over the years for a number of reasons we can talk about. But futures and spot assets generally are actually helping each other. I'm a little bit surprised that there isn't more coordination. I would think in the future, you're going to see companies, like right now it's conflictual, right? Where AMC and Robinhood are fighting with each other. I think the next generation of this are real companies, working closely with these mass distributors, and really finding ways to distribute true tokenized equities for capital formation. Right now, everyone's like every man for himself, but I think in the future, you're going to see more partnerships being formed. And that's where the real value is going to take place. What do you guys think?