Tokenized stocks and Robinhood Chain

What a tokenized share is, and what it is not

When you own a share through a broker, your ownership is a line in a chain of records that ends at a central securities depository. In the US that depository is the Depository Trust Company, DTC. You get the price moves, the dividends and, through your broker, a vote.

A tokenized stock puts a token in front of that chain. The token issuer buys the real share, or a claim on it, holds it with a custodian, and issues tokens that track it. The holder gains things a brokerage account cannot give: trading on weekends, transfers between wallets in seconds, and the ability to plug the token into other software, for example as collateral for a loan.

What the holder usually gives up is the share itself. In most models the token is a claim on the issuer, not a line in the company's shareholder register, and voting rights rarely come with it. The first chapter calls this the difference between a register and an IOU.

A perpetual futures contract on a stock, the most traded form of stock exposure in crypto, goes one step further. It is a bet that follows a share price with no share behind it, so it fails the RWA test entirely.

Four ways to build a tokenized stock

The models differ in who issues the token, what backs it and who may buy it.

Backed launched xStocks around June 2025 on Solana and Ethereum, and the tokens trade on both exchanges and decentralized venues. Ondo launched its product, first called Ondo Global Markets, in September 2025 and renamed it Ondo Stocks in July 2026, by which time it listed more than 400 stocks and ETFs. Robinhood's tokens are plain ERC-20 tokens, the standard format for tokens on Ethereum-style chains, priced by Chainlink feeds. Coinbase joined in August 2026 with its own tokenized stocks on Base, also priced by Chainlink.

The fourth model is the cleanest and the rarest. Securitize, a tokenization firm, listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 2 July 2026 as SECZ and issued its own shares as tokens. On 23 September that one asset was the largest tokenized stock of all, at about 336 mn USD.

US regulators drew the same line in January 2026. A staff statement from the SEC, the US securities regulator, on 28 January 2026 separated issuer-sponsored tokenization from tokenization by a third party, and said securities law applies to a tokenized share "to the same extent" as to the traditional one.

The market in September 2026

By value the segment is still small. RWA.xyz counted 3.14 bn USD of distributed tokenized stocks on 23 September 2026, up 18% in 30 days. Ondo led, followed by Backed's two product lines.

Two facts temper that growth. Trading in stock exposure happens mostly elsewhere: CoinGecko's September 2026 report found perpetual futures on stocks trading about fifty times the spot market in tokenized stocks. And spot trading is concentrated, with ten assets accounting for 76.6% of volume.

The plumbing also showed its limits. When SpaceX went public in June 2026, exchanges that relied on xStocks had to cancel tokenized SpaceX offerings and refund more than 1 bn USD of orders, because the shared intermediary had not secured an allocation. Ondo was the only issuer to deliver a tokenized SpaceX on the first day, according to CoinGecko. A token is only as good as the issuer's access to the underlying share.

Sign-ups are not use

A holder is an address that holds a token. An active address is one that sent or received it in the last 30 days. For a new product the gap between the two is the most honest number available.

In the first reading, holders more than doubled while activity collapsed: roughly 17 holders for every active address. Three weeks later activity was back near the holder count. Both readings come from the same dashboard.

The mechanism explains the swing. Brokers and exchanges create holders in bulk with promotions and small grants; Robinhood's EU launch offered new users 5 EUR in private-company tokens. In August 2026 many newly listed tokens on RWA.xyz were Robinhood tokens carrying from a few hundred to about 12,000 USD of value each. Every such token creates holder records whether or not any money arrived. A campaign can then light up activity for a few weeks.

So treat a single month of either number with suspicion. The test that matters is whether active addresses stay near holders after the promotions end.

Robinhood Chain: a broker's own blockchain

Robinhood Chain is a blockchain Robinhood launched on 1 July 2026 to host its stock tokens and the software built around them. It is a Layer 2. A Layer 2 is a chain that runs transactions cheaply and quickly on its own and posts them in batches to Ethereum for final settlement. Robinhood Chain is built on Arbitrum's technology, produces blocks about every 100 milliseconds, charges gas in ETH and has no token of its own.

Two months after launch its numbers looked contradictory. It carried a small amount of capital and a very large amount of trading.

TVL, total value locked, is the value of assets deposited in a chain's applications. Rotation is daily trading divided by TVL: how much of the parked capital changes hands in a day. Averaged over the 30 days to 3 September, Robinhood Chain traded about 85% of its TVL every day, more than twice Solana's rate and dozens of times Ethereum's. Single days ran higher: the 24-hour volume in the table is about twice the chain's TVL.

A popular claim says the chain overtook Solana. On trading volume it barely did. In DefiLlama's daily series, read on 24 September 2026, it beat Solana on only 3 of the 65 days from 1 July to 3 September, all of them from 1 September and by narrow margins, while beating Ethereum on 10 and Base on 20. Fees are the clearer case: after a single day in July, it out-earned Solana every day from 30 August to 7 September 2026.

What the fees say

Fees show what people pay for, so they are the clearest view of what the chain is used for.

The top of the list is trading. Uniswap, a decentralized exchange, handled 83% of the chain's DEX volume. Next come launchpads, contracts that let anyone start a new token and trade it before it moves to a regular pool; the Pons launchpad took about 41 mn USD across two versions in 30 days. A trading bot, GMGN, earned 17 mn USD.

Most of this money follows new, speculative tokens. In July about 18,600 new tokens were being created on the chain each day, with a documented wave of scam tokens and impersonated tickers among them.

The stock tokens themselves are a smaller but more original part of the picture. Their value on the chain rose from about 12.8 mn USD in mid-July to more than 84 mn USD by 3 September. Because they are ordinary tokens, other software uses them freely.

Launchpads such as LONG.xyz pair new tokens against a stock token instead of ETH, and those pairings were about a quarter of stock-related volume. Morpho, a lending market curated by Steakhouse Financial, lets users borrow against stock tokens and held 489 mn USD, the largest position on the chain. Lighter, Robinhood's official perpetuals venue, reached 55.7 mn USD locked two weeks after launch.

Deep dive Why the fee total is not Robinhood's revenue

DefiLlama's fee figure adds network gas to what every application charges its users: exchange fees, launchpad takes and bot commissions. Only the gas line goes to the network, and even that is shared: the network paid about 1.49 mn USD, about 10% of its 14.7 mn USD of gas, to Arbitrum under the Arbitrum stack's revenue share. DEX volume also excludes trading inside Robinhood's app and on centralized exchanges. The figures describe activity in contracts on the chain, not the company's income.

What it means

Robinhood did not win on technology. Dozens of Layer 2 chains share the same specification. It won on three things a competitor cannot copy in a week: more than 23 million brokerage customers who can reach the chain from an app they already use, brokerage licences that let it issue stock tokens, and a listing path from its own chain into that app.

The risks are just as concrete. A 90-day gas subsidy ends in early October 2026, the first test of whether activity pays for itself. Robinhood runs the chain's single sequencer, the operator that orders transactions, and its contracts can be upgraded. The stock tokens are debt of a Jersey company rather than shares, and the Bank of Lithuania reviewed Robinhood's earlier EU tokens at launch.

What to watch next

• The end of the gas subsidy in early October 2026. Volume and fees in the weeks after will show how much activity is organic.
• Stock-token value on Robinhood Chain. Growth from 84 mn USD, rather than memecoin volume, is the measure of whether the chain serves its stated purpose.
• Active addresses against holders. If the two stay close for several months, tokenized stocks have users, not just sign-ups.
• The DTC tokenization pilot and exchange rules. DTC's pilot, approved by an SEC no-action letter in December 2025, and the Nasdaq and NYSE rule filings for trading tokenized securities could bring tokenized shares that sit inside the official register. That would compete directly with the IOU models above.
• Ondo's US custodial model. In July 2026 Ondo and Broadridge launched tokenized securities for US investors that keep proxy voting through Broadridge. If that model scales, tokenized stocks start to carry the rights most of them lack today.