Tokenization of assets is freight train coming to markets: Robinhood CEO

The tokenization of real-world assets, from stocks to real estate, will spread to financial markets around the world, according to Robinhood Markets Chief Executive Officer Vlad Tenev. 

“Tokenization is like a freight train. It can’t be stopped, and eventually it’s going to eat the entire financial system,” Tenev told a panel at a crypto conference in Singapore on Wednesday. 

“I think most major markets will have some framework in the next five years,” he said, though he added that reaching 100% could take more than a decade.

A tokenized asset is a digital representation of a real-world asset, like stocks, bonds, or commodities, that can be recorded and traded on a blockchain or distributed ledger.

In June, Robinhood began offering more than 200 tokenized U.S. stocks to customers in the European Union, giving them a new way to gain exposure to the underlying assets. The move sent its stock surging to a then-record high.

“I think it will become the default way to get exposure to U.S. stocks outside the U.S.,” Tenev said. 

He expects the practice to gain traction once there is greater licensing and regulatory clarity in more jurisdictions.

“I think that will come, starting in Europe, but then expanding to the rest of the world,” he said.

On the other hand, Tenev expects the U.S. to be among the last economies to actually fully tokenize, due to what he calls the greater sticking power of the financial infrastructure. 

The crypto industry has long predicted that a mass tokenization of assets on the blockchain was coming, promising greater market efficiency. 

And, along with Robinhood’s launch of tokenized stocks, there’s been more signs this year that real implementation is coming, with institutional giants Morgan Stanley and BlackRock signaling interest. 

“I actually think cryptocurrency and traditional finance have been living in two separate worlds for a while, but they’re going to fully merge,” Tenev said at the event.

He cited stablecoins — digital currencies designed not to fluctuate wildly, and pegged to a commodity or a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar — as an early example of a tokenized real-world asset.

“I think that crypto technology has so many advantages over the traditional way we’re doing things that in the future there’s going to be no distinction,” Tenev said.