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Robinhood Adds Redemption and Voting Rights to Stock Tokens: Is It Finally a Stock?

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Tokenized stocks are a key component of Robinhood's growth narrative, and the addition of voting rights and redemption rights reduces the tail risk of a regulatory shutdown.

Original title: "Robinhood Adds Redemption Rights and Voting Rights to Stock Tokens: Is It Finally a Stock?"

Original author: Xiaobing, Shenchao TechFlow

Let's first revisit the real drama from before: AMC CEO Adam Aron spent ten days using a string of adjectives ("despicable, infuriating, disgusting, abhorrent, unforgivable, vile") to describe Robinhood's stock tokens.

Aron discovered that Robinhood, without notifying AMC, had turned AMC stock into a tokenized product sold in over 120 countries worldwide, called "AMC Stock Token," with its price tracking AMC's share price and holders even receiving dividends.

But when Aron checked the legal documents, he exploded — the holders of these tokens were not AMC shareholders at all.

What they held was a debt security issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited, a Jersey-registered entity. This security provides "economic exposure" to AMC's stock price but does not grant holders any legal or beneficial rights to AMC. No voting rights, no right to redeem for physical shares, and strictly speaking, they don't even qualify as "shareholders."

On September 14, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev announced on X: physical redemption and voting rights are coming soon. Robinhood's head of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, added that the team is actively developing 1:1 physical stock redemption functionality, with voting rights also on the roadmap.

On the same day, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong also stated: Coinbase's tokenized stocks already support 1:1 redemption and dividends, with voting rights coming soon.

Get on the train first, buy the ticket later — now it's ticket-buying time.

Three Tokenization Paths

In a statement released in January 2026, the SEC categorized securities tokenization into three models. Understanding these three models is the prerequisite for grasping the entire debate.

Model One: Issuer self-tokenization. The listed company itself puts its shares on-chain, with shareholder rights fully preserved. The representative case is Securitize helping Exodus complete the tokenization of common stock — the token is the stock, and holders appear directly on the company's shareholder register. The tokenized stock trading platform that the NYSE is developing in partnership with Securitize also follows this path.

Model 2: Third-party custody + tokenized certificates. A third party holds the actual shares and then issues tokens representing ownership. This is the path Coinbase has taken, holding shares through an offshore special purpose vehicle, custodied by U.S.-licensed broker-dealer Alpaca Securities, with token holders having actual economic rights and redemption rights to the underlying shares. Coinbase claims its tokens already have built-in dividend functionality, with voting rights "coming soon."

Model 3: Synthetic exposure. Issuing a separate securities product that tracks the price of a stock, but holders have no ownership whatsoever in the underlying shares. Robinhood's current Stock Token falls into this category.

All three models may use the same stock ticker, but what investors actually get in hand is completely different.

By analogy: Model 1 is like buying a house with your name on the property deed; Model 2 is like buying a trust unit where the trust holds a house and you have the right to demand the house be transferred to you; Model 3 is like buying a note linked to the price of that house — you profit if the house rises, you lose if it falls, but throughout the entire process, that house has no legal relationship with you whatsoever.

Robinhood's Legal Structure

Opening Robinhood Stock Token's product documentation, the legal structure isn't complicated, but it's enough to confuse ordinary investors:

The issuer is Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited (RHJ for short), incorporated in Jersey, British Crown Dependency. The tokens' legal nature is "tokenised debt securities," issued as derivatives under the EU's MiFID II framework. The underlying shares are custodied by U.S.-licensed broker-dealer Alpaca Securities LLC, with claims of 1:1 backing. The tokens are issued in standard ERC-20 format, transferable and tradeable on-chain, and can even be accepted as collateral by DeFi protocols.

The key lies in that last point: these tokens are composable on-chain. After Robinhood Chain (the self-built L2 launched in July 2025) went live, Stock Tokens can be used as collateral for lending protocols — precisely the feature Tenev emphasized in the product roadmap he unveiled last November.

This composability creates the most alluring use cases for tokenized stocks, but it also amplifies the risks of the legal structure. If a token gets liquidated in some DeFi protocol, the liquidator receives a debt certificate from a Jersey entity — not shares of a U.S.-listed company. Are the underlying shares truly locked 1:1? Have these shares been lent out for short selling? Robinhood has not published a transaction-level reserve audit report.

This is exactly the question Aron pressed on September 13: if those tokens are theoretically backed 1:1 by real shares, but those underlying shares are then lent out to short sellers, are the tokens really still 1:1 backed?

The Real Divide: Who Represents the Future of Tokenized Stocks?

The public spat between Aron and Tenev is lively, but the industry divergence beneath the quarrel is more worth watching.

The on-chain tokenized stock market is currently about $3.6 billion in size. Kraken's xStocks (issued by Backed Finance) have reached cumulative trading volume of $25 billion, with more than 80,000 holders. Binance's bStocks reached about $118.5 million in scale within two months of launch, accounting for roughly 90% of on-chain stock DEX trading volume. Ondo Finance leads TVL in the tokenized fund sector. Securitize, meanwhile, holds the high ground on the institutional side, having already helped BlackRock, KKR, Apollo and others complete fund tokenization.

These players broadly split along two paths:

One is "from the chain, to the chain": first issue synthetic or certificate-like tokens, rapidly scale up, then gradually fill in rights. Robinhood, Kraken and Binance take this path. Their advantage is speed and broad coverage (190+ stocks, 120+ countries), but their legal structure always carries a layer of "intermediary risk."

The other is "from the issuer, to the chain": partner with listed companies and tokenize directly at the transfer agent level, so the token is the stock itself. Securitize takes this path. It is slow, but the rights structure is clean, and token holders appear directly on the company's shareholder register, with no "look-through" problem.

Robinhood's announcement of adding voting rights and redemption rights is essentially an effort within the first path to move as close as possible to the second. How far this stitched-together path can go depends on how many shareholder rights the Jersey debt securities legal framework can actually carry, a question regulators have not yet formally answered.

For HOOD's stock price, this is a risk-mitigation signal. Tokenized stocks are an important part of Robinhood's growth narrative (2,000+ stock tokens, covering a potential user market of 400 million in the EU), and filling in voting rights and redemption rights reduces the tail risk of a regulatory shutdown.

As for Aron's original challenge, whether these tokens are actually stocks, the answer may be: not yet, but they are desperately trying to become stocks.

This is an upgrade that technology can accomplish, but the law is not yet ready for.