Singapore – The most important story in Crypto right now is tokenization and it comes quickly to interfere with traditional funding, according to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev.
Tenev told the audience at the Token2049 conference in Singapore that tokenization is a “freight train” that tønder against the heart of traditional funding.
“Crypto and traditional funding have lived in separate worlds, but they will fully merge. In the future, everything will be on-chain in some form and the distinction will disappear,” he said.
As Robinhood now offers tokenized shares in Europe as well as private shares in some of the hottest non-public startups and Openai, the company is investing heavily in a future where assets trading 24/7, on-chain and globally.
“Just as stableecoins have become standard way to get digital access to dollars, tokenized shares will become the standard way for people outside the United States to get exposure to US stocks,” Tenev said on stage. “That’s why we launched our warehouses in Europe first, it’s the future of how global investors will keep US assets.”
Although many in the crypto industry have praised the direction that the United States is taking place on digital asset policy, Tenev said the country has to play legislative catching up to Europe.
There is no urgency to change things – such as creating rules to facilitate 24/7 trade in tokenized shares – because the current system is already working well enough. Tenev compared it to the lack of high -speed trains in the United States, somewhat ubiquitous in Europe and Asia.
“The biggest challenge in the United States is that the financial system basically works. That’s why we don’t have a bullet train between speed trains getting you there well enough,” he said. “So the step -by -step effort to move to fully tokenized will just take longer.”
Tokenization of real estate
Next up to Robinhood is to tokenize real estate.
Tenev told the audience that tokenization of property is “mechanical” no different from tokenizing a private company, such as SpaceX or Openai: You place the assets in a corporate structure and then emit tokens against it.
While Openai called the move to tokenize his private shares “unauthorized” and crypto lawyers who spoke with Coindesk said the move was a legal tightening, Tenev rejected controversy as part of a broader regulatory delay and argued that the most important obstacles are not technical but legal.
Europe is already moving forward, he said, while the United States is likely to be traced, but he framed real estate as the next logical step in Robinhood’s tokenization -push – an asset class that could one day be traded as easily as a stock or stableecoin.
“In the end, it will eat the whole financial system,” Tenev said.
