AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron has publicly questioned whether Robinhood’s stock tokens can truly be described as 1:1 backed if the underlying shares are lent to short sellers. His challenge, posted on X on Sept. 12 and widely reported by Sept. 13, escalates a dispute over Robinhood’s non-U.S. tokenized equity products.
Robinhood says each public-company stock token is a debt instrument issued by Robinhood Assets Jersey Limited and backed one-for-one by the corresponding underlying share. Token holders receive economic exposure and dividend adjustments but do not appear on the company’s shareholder register and have no voting rights. The products are unavailable to U.S. persons. Aron asked Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev and Chief Legal Officer Dan Gallagher whether the one-for-one claim still holds if reserve shares are used in securities-lending transactions.
“If those tokens are theoretically backed 1:1 by real shares, but hypothetically some of those underlying real shares are in turn lent out to short sellers, are the tokens really backed 1:1 in fact?” Aron wrote. He called the stock token model “abhorrent” and argued it conflicts with the purpose of public share ownership, while questioning whether customers could misunderstand the rights attached to products using listed companies’ names and prices.
Tenev defended the model in a Sept. 9 CNBC Squawk Box interview and in a Friday post on X. He argued that publicly traded companies should not automatically be able to block third-party stock tokens linked to their shares. The key issue, he said, is not blockchain technology but the legal rights a product creates. Issuers control the rights and obligations of the stock they issue, but once shares belong to investors, they should not control every lawful subsequent use. He cited options, unsponsored American depositary receipts and structured notes as existing products that reference public shares without issuer control. Tenev said a company should be involved only if a token claimed to rewrite the rights attached to the original shares, replace the official stock ledger, or impose new obligations on the issuer or its transfer agent.
Neither Robinhood nor its executives had publicly answered Aron’s specific collateral-lending question as of Sept. 13. No lawsuit by AMC had been identified, and the SEC had not announced an enforcement action. Gallagher had previously rejected AMC’s demand to stop offering the product, writing on X: “We know a little something about the U.S. securities laws and will not ‘DECIST.’” European regulators have separately warned that tokenized instruments may cause investor confusion when buyers do not receive governance rights attached to conventional shares. Robinhood also faced a similar ownership distinction in 2025 after promoting a token tied to private company OpenAI, which said the instrument was not its equity.
The broader stakes involve tokenized equity platforms expanding access to U.S. stocks for investors outside the country and experimenting with around-the-clock trading. The question of whether issuers can demand a veto over such products may shape how quickly that market grows. Robinhood is developing Robinhood Chain to support tokenized assets, and crypto.news has reported that its architecture creates a revenue stream for Arbitrum through chain-related fees.
