Is Robinhood (HOOD) a Crypto Company or a TradFi Company?

If you wanted a snapshot of where crypto is heading, you got it at Token2049.

What began as a scrappy meetup in its early days has become, as Tatler now calls it, the ‘Davos of digital assets.’

This big one is Singapore now, mainly because it coincides with the Singapore F1 Grand Prix.

Which means 20,000 attendees, a thousand side events, hedge-fund chiefs rubbing shoulders with DeFi coders, and, crucially, TradFi power brokers taking the stage.

When you’ve got World Liberty Financial’s Eric and Donald Trump Jr., Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, and Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev all on the same bill, it’s pretty clear there’s going to be some headlines from it all.

Most relevant so far, Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev…

Tokenization, he said, is a freight train. Not ‘coming soon.’ Not ‘early innings.’ A freight train that will ‘eat the entire financial system[1].’

Robinhood’s Big Bet

Robinhood has already pushed over 200 tokenized U.S. equities into Europe with zero commissions.

Why Europe? Because regulators there have always had a bit more openness to treating tokenization appropriately, the U.S. is catching up, but slowly, and its previous approach of enforcement before innovation still bites.

Tenev’s point was that America’s comfortable incumbents don’t see the urgency like Europe does.

But he does.

Next up for Robinhood is tokenization of real estate. ‘Mechanically no different from tokenizing a company,’ he said[2].

And it doesn’t stop there.

With Bitstamp now under Robinhood’s roof and a bespoke Layer-2 in the works, the company isn’t content to just be an exchange. It wants to own the digital asset infrastructure themselves.

Tenev’s vision isn’t about dabbling in crypto on the side, it’s about reconstructing finance so that every asset you know, stocks, bonds, real estate, even private equity, lives onchain and trades 24/7.

This is not the vision of a TradFi stalwart, Tenev is… one of us!

Which makes me wonder, is Robinhood a TradFi play, or a crypto play? Its stock has outperformed Bitcoin by some margin this year. And their growth is largely off the back of their digital assets, tokenization, and embrace of the crypto world.

He speaks like crypto is the future, I guess he thinks crypto is the future. And as one of the most relevant investment apps/companies in the world right now, Robinhood might just be that gateway for billions of people into the crypto world.

I can see a very near future where the two biggest financial institutions in the world are actually Robinhood and Coinbase. And yes, that means bigger than BlackRock too.

Tight T-Shirts

Token2049’s importance to get this kind of insight from the people reshaping global finance shouldn’t be lost on anyone.

Sure, it’s jam-packed full of posers and crypto-bros in far too tight t-shirts. But show me a conference these days without that.

The key is that you get some of the brightest minds in crypto explaining what the future will be built out as.

That’s why you need to pay attention and watch carefully who’s in the driver’s seat.

As Tenev said, tokenization will ‘eat the entire financial system.’ The only question left is who’s smart enough to get on board now before that train leaves the station for good?

Trust in crypto,
Adam Atlantic

Source:

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/02/tokenization-of-assets-is-freight-train-coming-to-markets-robinhood-ceo.html

[2] https://commstrader.com/business/crypto/tokenization-is-going-to-eat-the-entire-financial-system-says-robinhood-ceo/