Robinhood sparks the 'Napster moment' for US stocks, AMC's opposition fails to stop stocks from going on-chain.

BlockBeats news, September 14: Fortune wrote that the dispute between Robinhood and AMC over tokenized stocks may just be the beginning of a larger transformation in the U.S. brokerage industry. Robinhood recently tokenized U.S. stocks, including AMC, through blockchain, allowing users to obtain financial rights related to the stocks, which triggered strong opposition from AMC's CEO.

The article argues that one of the greatest values of tokenized stocks is lowering the threshold for global investors to buy U.S. stocks. For markets such as Brazil and South Africa, where trading costs are higher and some U.S. stocks are difficult to trade directly, blockchain can provide cheaper and more convenient channels for investing in U.S. stocks, similar to how Napster broke the traditional music distribution model.

But putting stocks on-chain is also controversial, including that token holders usually do not have voting rights associated with traditional stocks, and questions over whether the stocks behind the tokens are actually held in custody. Platforms such as Robinhood and Coinbase currently rely on FINRA-registered intermediary Alpaca for related record-keeping and custody arrangements, but "air stock tokens" without real asset backing may still appear in the market, potentially triggering investor panic.

The real solution is not to stop stock tokenization, but to establish a clear regulatory framework that allows compliant institutions to participate. As Nasdaq invests $100 million in blockchain financial company Payward, and the SEC studies innovation exemptions for certain on-chain stocks, U.S. stock tokenization may be accelerating into the mainstream market.

BlockBeats note: "Napster moment" can be understood as "a key turning point when a new technology begins to disrupt an old industry and the traditional pattern of interests is forced to change."