Robinhood launched tokenized U.S. stock trading Europe in June, here is why it could change everything.
In 2022, Robinhood began developing its blockchain applications. On June 30, 2025, it officially launched tokenized stock trading in France. For the first time, European users could buy and sell over 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs as tokens, companies like Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft, among others. All of these trades happen on the blockchain, with markets running 24 hours a day, five days a week. The commission? Still zero.
Let’s say a user in Europe opens the Robinhood app and buys one share of Microsoft. Behind the scenes, Robinhood’s broker buys that share in the U.S. market. Then, on the blockchain, it mints a token representing that share, a kind of digital certificate, and sends it to the user’s account. That token can then be freely traded on-chain, like passing a coin from one hand to another, but digitally.
Robinhood has said it plans to expand to thousands of securities by the end of the year. It also wants to support 24/7 trading and allow users to self-custody their assets. That would mean people holding their tokens themselves, rather than relying on a platform to hold them on their behalf.
There’s more. Robinhood has announced tokenized shares of private companies, like SpaceX. That means regular people, who usually have no access to such deals, could invest in high-growth startups. These are companies that could triple in value in just two years. According to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, many private tech companies are already interested in this kind of tokenized offering.
It might be hard to make sense of all this. What, exactly, is Robinhood doing? And why does it matter?
To me, what Robinhood is building, putting U.S. equities on the blockchain, isn’t just about technology. It’s about removing friction. It’s about giving investors more control and flexibility than they’ve ever had. Traditional exchanges operate on limited hours and outdated infrastructure. But Robinhood is native to the phone, native to the internet. It’s fast. That combination—network effect, early mover advantage, and zero commission—is hard to beat. The more real-world assets that get tokenized, the more likely it is that Robinhood becomes a kind of central hub for digital trading. Maybe even more than a hub. A replacement. One day, it could be what Nasdaq is now, but better.
I mentioned in my previous post that stablecoins were fascinating because they solved a practical problem: they made cross-border payments faster and cheaper. No bank delays, no cut-off times. Money moved in minutes. Now, Robinhood is applying that same idea to stock trading. Stocks that used to be locked in by timezone and geography can now move freely on the blockchain, around the clock. Think about weekends. A major event happens on a Saturday. Right now, you have to wait until Monday to act on it. But with tokenized stocks, Robinhood could let you trade immediately. No more waiting. No more being caught flat-footed.
And because tokens can represent fractions of a share, even someone with just a few dollars can buy into a company. For a stock like Berkshire Hathaway Class A, one share costs more than $700,000. But in the future, you could buy a tiny piece of it as a token, and still share in Buffett’s strategy. You could even combine multiple companies into a single token—like a personalized, tokenized index fund.
Robinhood’s trades are still commission-free. There are no custody fees either. That means more trades are likely to happen inside Robinhood’s ecosystem. Traditional exchanges might be reduced to little more than “clearing houses”, places that handle the paperwork for dividends, voting rights, and legal ownership. Robinhood could do that too, eventually, though it still has legal and compliance challenges to sort out.
Once most stock trading moves on-chain, the idea of companies issuing shares directly on the blockchain won’t feel revolutionary. It will feel obvious. Robinhood could become the first fully digital stock exchange, complete with all the legal status and functionality of Nasdaq, but built for this century, not the last.
And maybe, over time, it won’t even need to mirror existing systems. Just as stablecoins were once pegged to the dollar and then began forming their own economies, a platform like Robinhood might start by mimicking Nasdaq but eventually evolve beyond it. One day, it might not just replace the Nasdaq, it might leave it behind.
A Trading Center for the Virtual World
And if you zoom out even further, you start to see that stocks are just the beginning. Robinhood isn’t limited to equities. It could eventually handle tokenized versions of nearly everything: bonds, commodities, real estate, even art and intellectual property. The new tokens for private companies like SpaceX? That’s Robinhood testing the waters of private equity.
Traditionally, private equity has been a closed system—risky, opaque, and only accessible to qualified investors. That’s part of why liquidity has always been poor and exit costs high. But now, Robinhood is creating special entities, think of them like holding companies, that own equity stakes in these private firms and then issue tokens linked to those stakes. Holders of these tokens aren’t legal shareholders, but they do get exposure to the company’s growth.
There are still regulatory issues to solve, and no one’s pretending otherwise. But the signal is clear: any real-world asset that has value and can be traded may eventually be tokenized. And when that happens, Robinhood isn’t just a trading platform. It becomes something much bigger, an issuance and trading center for the virtual economy.
In Closing
Robinhood is already ahead in the tokenized trading space. It looks like a tech company, but its real edge isn’t just tech. It’s scale. It’s the network effect. It’s millions of users and hundreds of millions of trades. It’s zero commissions.
Yes, it still needs to work closely with regulators. It needs to find a way to protect the system without strangling innovation. But if it can cross that regulatory finish line first, then it will likely secure its place as a winner.
Not just in the market as it exists, but in the one that’s coming.