Robinhood is preparing to give its tokenized stock products two features they have lacked since launch: the ability to redeem a token for the actual underlying share, one for one, and the right to vote it. CEO Vlad Tenev confirmed both are on the roadmap, telling users the features "are on the roadmap and will be live soon," while crypto lead Johann Kerbrat said the company is "actively working on redemptions for shares 1:1 with voting for eligible Stock Token holders."
The announcement follows weeks of public scrutiny over what Stock Token holders actually own. CoinDesk reported that the dispute escalated after AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron publicly objected to Robinhood offering tokenized exposure to his company's stock without authorization, arguing that token holders lacked the protections of real shareholders. That critique landed because it was structurally accurate: Robinhood's Stock Tokens are offered offshore through a Jersey-domiciled subsidiary and are legally structured as debt instruments rather than equity. Holders get one-for-one price exposure backed by real shares held in custody, but until now they have had no path to redeem a token for the underlying share and no voting rights attached to it.
Robinhood isn't alone in facing this question, and it isn't the only one moving to answer it. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said his company's competing tokenized-equity product already supports one-for-one redemption and dividend pass-through, with voting rights described as "on the way." That two of the largest platforms in the space are converging on the same fix within days of each other suggests the industry sees this less as a competitive feature and more as a baseline requirement it can no longer avoid building.
Not everyone is convinced the fix goes far enough. Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo argued that products built this way "are not 'stocks'" at all, and that branding them as such is misleading regardless of what redemption or voting mechanics get bolted on afterward, particularly once voting rights start circulating through blockchain wallets that were never designed for the identity verification real shareholder votes require. Tenev has separately pushed back on a related line of criticism, arguing that listed companies don't have veto power over third parties creating tokenized exposure to their shares in the first place, a position that puts Robinhood at odds with issuers like AMC even as it moves to address their specific complaints about token holder rights.
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For Robinhood, closing this gap matters beyond reputation management. Tokenized equities have become a meaningful part of the company's business, and regulators in other jurisdictions are already worried about tokenized-stock products fragmenting liquidity across competing clones of the same underlying shares. Building genuine redemption and voting rights into the product is as much a defense against that regulatory scrutiny as it is a response to Aron's specific complaint: a token that behaves more like the share it represents is a harder target for a regulator, or an issuer, to argue should be restricted or shut down. Kerbrat's reference to Robinhood's existing Say shareholder-engagement platform as the infrastructure the company could adapt suggests the rollout may lean on tools already built for traditional brokerage clients rather than a from-scratch blockchain voting system, which would shorten the path to actually shipping the features Tenev has now publicly promised.
The bigger test will be whether "eligible" ends up meaning most Stock Token holders or only a narrow subset able to clear jurisdictional and identity checks, since the offshore structure that made the tokens easy to launch quickly is the same one that complicates extending real shareholder mechanics to every wallet holding them. Robinhood has not published a timeline more specific than "soon," and until it does, the announcement functions mainly as a public commitment device: a way of telling AMC, Securitize, and Robinhood's own users that the redemption and voting gap is now something the company has agreed to close rather than defend.
