Written by: Azuma, Odaily
By making a series of moves to aggressively enter the "stock tokenization" market, Robinhood has dominated financial media headlines in recent days, with its stock price breaking $100 and reaching a historic high.
Besides introducing already listed stocks to the on-chain market through tokenization, Robinhood has expanded the scope of stock tokenization to unlisted private companies, planning to gift stock tokens of not-yet-listed OpenAI and SpaceX to EU users, which the market widely interprets as Robinhood's attempt to seize Pre-IPO market pricing power.
OpenAI Condemns Robinhood for Unauthorized Action
However, on the morning of July 3rd, OpenAI officially clarified on X: "These so-called OpenAI tokens are not OpenAI equity. We have no collaboration with Robinhood, did not participate in this matter, and do not endorse it. Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval - we have not approved any transfer. Please be careful."
[The rest of the translation follows the same professional and accurate approach, maintaining the original meaning and tone while translating to English.]Retail Investor Perspective: Is It Still Worth Pursuing?
Based on the current situation, when tokenizing stocks that are already listed with clear public prices, platforms like Robinhood have some historical experience to draw from, and the implementation path is relatively straightforward. However, tokenizing stocks of private companies like OpenAI and SpaceX is almost an uncharted path, and Robinhood's current proposal still contains considerable uncertainty.
Dragonfly partner Rob Hadick stated: "Robinhood deliberately maintains extreme opacity regarding the exact nature of derivatives, how to hedge, who the counterparties are (where the equity comes from), and what legal recourse you have. Most importantly, private company equity is a derivative asset without a public price, containing numerous securities/profit-sharing plans traded at different prices. Moreover, how derivatives are settled based on different actions of the underlying companies remains completely opaque."
From a retail investor's perspective, uncertainty might sometimes represent opportunity, but more often it points to risk.
