Robinhood's Tokenized AMC Shares Spark a Fight Over What Stock Tokens Really Are

Ram Ahluwalia (0:00)

We're not going to see rate hikes. Kevin Warsh is talking like a hawk, but he's a dove. Two, we got productivity growth bailout coming from AI. That's going to save the day. We are in this disinflationary period with these temporaries price shocks due to geopolitical concerns, energy production is a bit higher than ever, and it's going to continue to go up. Three, the AI buildout itself is inflationary. It's contributing like a point and a half to GDP.

So that is part of the cost of this buildout. They're not going to get down to the 2% inflation target for at least a few years. That means that you should be owning assets that reprice in nominal terms, especially equities that are indexed to the data center theme.

Austin Campbell (0:41)

Hey everyone, welcome to Bits and Bips, where we explore how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. Today is Monday, September 7th, Labor Day here in the United States, and we're still here to discuss the latest stories in the worlds of crypto and macro. So before we begin, a quick commercial break.

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Austin Campbell (1:20)

All right, everybody. As always, I'm your host, Austin Campbell, High Scholar of Zero Knowledge Group. I'm here with Chris Perkins, the golden hand of Franklin Crypto. And Chris, today we're gonna start with a fight. So over the weekend, AMC CEO Adam Aron 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 Aron's answer was eight paragraphs in a demand that Robinhood voluntarily cease and kiss, 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 want to 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? What are you seeing?

Chris Perkins (4:32)

I mean, there's so much going on right now where you're seeing innovation, creativity. I'm sure we're going to talk about some of the meme coin stuff pairings that are also going on in 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-Google financial crisis.

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

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 a 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.