Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev on Tokenization and Prediction Markets for Everything

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:18)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

**Tracy Alloway** (0:23)
And I'm Tracy Alloway.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:24)
Tracy, I think I've mentioned it before, but an idea that I've had for podcasts in general, maybe this one one day, other podcasts, I wanna do everything in two parts. So-

**Tracy Alloway** (0:34)
Oh, yes, yeah.

**Joe Weisenthal** (0:35)
Interview the guests, because sometimes it's like all of the questions I wanna ask are only after I've talked to a guest for an hour and have some better understanding of the situation. So I wanna interview the guest, think about it for a few days, let the listeners listen to it and have their questions. And then it's like, okay, you know what, we've thought about it for a few days, come back. Also our listeners wants to know about this and then have the second part of the conversation, just like a follow up. I wanna like form a lot, I wanna do that more.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:01)
I think it's a good idea. It's also just a flywheel of content.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:03)
It's a flywheel of content.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:05)
It'll be never ending that way.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:06)
Yeah, I think that-

**Tracy Alloway** (1:07)
It's good job security.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:08)
Anyway, we did an episode last year that was great, but it also provoked a lot of questions. I'll just like jump right into it. We did an episode last year with Vlad Tenev, the co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, and that was about the company's tokenization efforts. Basically, his ability to create instruments that would allow users to actually trade shares, not shares, I guess, but quasi-equity or equity-linked instruments in private companies, like an OpenAI or something like that. Then after that came out, a bunch of people, including the company, was like, what the-

**Tracy Alloway** (1:41)
There was a lot of reactions.

**Joe Weisenthal** (1:42)
Yeah, they're like, what the heck we did? Since when did these private companies, they're like, since when the heck did we authorize our equity to be traded like this? There are all kinds of stuff. I didn't even really think about that aspect of the time, so I wanted to know more.

**Tracy Alloway** (1:54)
I think there's a lot to talk about here. It does feel like the trajectory of history right now is marching towards tokenizing everything and just allowing markets in everything.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:05)
In everything, in every form, yeah.

**Tracy Alloway** (2:07)
From quasi-derivatives to one-off event bets, that just feels like the trend at the moment. But at the same time, there are so many interesting questions that this actually raises, not least of which is the safety aspect and how much of our lives are just going to be watching lines going up or down and making bets on them.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:27)
Absolutely right. You know, like with the prediction markets and something I've been thinking about with prediction markets is you can replicate equity through that, right? Because you could just have like prediction markets on, will Tesla go up 1% today? We'll go up 2%. You can just re-

**Tracy Alloway** (2:40)
stop go up or down.

**Joe Weisenthal** (2:41)
Yeah. You can recreate all of these instruments in all these different formats. So it definitely feels like a jump ball, especially with a very sort of liberal regulatory environment. Anyway, very excited to say we're going to get a chance to do the second half of that conversation that came out last July. So we are rejoined once again by Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood. So Vlad, thanks for coming back on Odd Lots.

**Vlad Tenev** (3:01)
I'm happy to be here again. And I think from the guest perspective, I'd also like this if there was an opportunity to replace any of my answers from part one with better answers now that I know the questions.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:14)
You can't replace them. The first one is going to live on forever.

**Vlad Tenev** (3:17)
It's a very interviewer friendly format that you've created.

**Joe Weisenthal** (3:21)
That's right. Of course we did. Well, let's talk about that because we did that episode where you talked about these tokenization efforts. And I was like, I don't know why I didn't even think like, are the companies whose private shares are being tokenized, are they cool with this? But apparently they weren't. What's going on with that? What happened with that? Because it does seem weird to be able to offer instruments of privately traded companies when the company is themselves like, just to be clear, this is not us.