Robinhood: Tokenization will ‘eat’ the financial system

Robinhood Markets CEO Vlad Tenev believes the tokenization of assets will completely transform financial services, opening the door to greater liquidity and capital.

At the Token2049 conference in Singapore on Oct. 2, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said that the tokenization of assets will eventually take over the financial system. The use of blockchain technology to tokenize assets ranging from stocks to real estate has been on the rise as of late, with more and more institutional firms adopting the model.

Tenev said to Bloomberg that linking real-world assets to blockchains and minting them on-chain can elevate the financial market from single-digit trillions to tens of trillions of dollars. He went on to describe RWA tokenization as a “freight train” that will “eat the entire financial system.”

“It really starts to get interesting when all of those assets, public and private, get on crypto technology,” said Tenev.

Tokenization can play a key role in unlocking assets that were previously considered illiquid, making them more accessible to the market while also reducing costs. Tenev predicted the trend is initially going to see faster adoption in markets outside of the U.S. This is due to the fact that U.S regulation still has to catch up with other regions that have more advanced frameworks for asset tokenization, such as Europe.

Robinhood started offering tokenized equities like U.S stocks as early as June 2025, with expansion into the European Union not long after it launched in the U.S. In late June, it was revealed that the company was in the process of developing a new Layer2 blockchain meant to accelerate the tokenization of real-world assets.

According to data from RWA.xyz, the global RWA market on-chain is valued at over $32 billion with a total of 411,126 asset holders recorded on-chain. As of Oct. 2, there are a total of 223 total asset issuers using blockchain technology to tokenize real-world assets.

Robinhood wants to expand prediction markets

Aside from RWA tokenization, Tenev stated that the company is also currently exploring prediction markets as a viable business opportunity. Mainly, the firm wants to expand access of its event contracts product beyond just the U.S.

Prediction markets like Polymarket are often considered controversial due to their nature of blurring boundaries between financial markets and gambling. However, Tenev says that they are a completely different industry because it combines media, wagering and trade.

“It’s a slightly different animal and it has the potential to disrupt each of these major industries. Robinhood will be front and center in terms of giving access to retail,” he said.