Tokenised shares and prediction markets have developed in parallel, but have barely overlapped. The former provided access to share prices via the blockchain, whilst the latter allowed users to place bets on the outcome of events. Robinhood Chain, launched in July 2026, is making significant moves specifically in the tokenised-assets space – notably with its stock tokens and RWA infrastructure..
Robinhood tokenised shares: what they are and how they work
Robinhood tokenized stocks shares are digital tokens that track the price of real shares in NVIDIA, Apple, Google, Tesla and other companies. They are issued via Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited as debt securities. Holders gain economic exposure: the token price tracks the share price, and holders can receive the equivalent of dividends. However, there are no legal ownership rights attached to the securities – no voting rights and no share in assets in the event of liquidation.
Robinhood stock tokens are traded round the clock, seven days a week. Traditional stock exchanges close overnight and at weekends, whereas tokenised shares do not. This is the key practical difference. When Nasdaq is closed, the price of a stock token is determined by trading on the DEX within the Robinhood Chain. They are available in over 120 countries, but not in the US, Canada, the UK, Switzerland or the UAE – jurisdictions with their own securities regulations.
Scale and growth
At launch, on 1 July 2026, Robinhood issued 95 stock tokens. By the end of August, there were more than 200. The cumulative DEX trading volume for stock tokens exceeded $3 billion in two months. According to MEXC, in the 30 days to 24 September, Robinhood Chain stock tokens generated $10.4 billion in DEX trading volume. The number of token holders rose by 159.7 per cent over the same period.
NVIDIA’s stock tokens alone accounted for $2.1 billion in trading volume. The tokenised SPY (an S&P 500 ETF) rose by 1,314 per cent over 30 days – from a negligible market capitalisation to $17.4 million. This is not merely speculation: SPY, QQQ and SPCX together accounted for $7.1 billion, or 44.7 per cent of total DEX volume in the tokenised shares category over 90 days.
A significant shift occurred in August. In July, over 55 per cent of RWA volume was accounted for by ‘meme coin – stock token’ pairs. By August, the share of standalone stock token trades had risen to 78 per cent of RWA volume, whilst meme coin pairs had fallen to 12 per cent. Users began trading shares for the sake of the shares themselves, rather than to speculate on a pair with a meme coin.
SEC Innovation Exemption: what’s changing
On 17 September 2026, the SEC granted the Innovation Exemption – a five-year exemption allowing the trading of tokenised shares in the US via permissioned AMM pools without registering as an exchange. However, there is a condition: the tokens must confer full shareholder rights – dividends, voting rights and a share in the assets.
Robinhood’s current stock tokens do not meet this requirement. They provide synthetic exposure, and the SEC explicitly excludes such products from the exemption. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has stated that the company plans to add 1:1 redemption and voting rights by the end of 2027. For now, stock tokens remain a product for non-US residents.
Prediction markets: explosive growth
Prediction markets are platforms where users place bets on the outcomes of events: elections, sports matches, economic indicators. In 2026, the sector grew by an order of magnitude.
The combined monthly volume of Kalshi and Polymarket – the two largest platforms – rose from $26 billion in May to $53 billion in July 2026. Sport, particularly the FIFA World Cup, provided the main impetus: for the final alone, Kalshi processed $1.9 billion, whilst Polymarket processed $4 billion.
Prediction markets have become one of Robinhood's main sources of revenue, generating more transaction revenue in the second quarter of 2026 than stocks or cryptocurrencies did individually. In Q2 2026, event contracts generated 156million–morethanshares(129 million) and cryptocurrencies ($100 million). Over the quarter, 13.6 billion contracts were traded, a tenfold increase year-on-year. Robinhood launched its own exchange, Rothera, in partnership with Susquehanna – in its first month, it processed 2.1 billion contracts and generated $17 million.
But the market is not defined solely by major players. More and more new projects are emerging that are pushing the boundaries of the category. One of them is Dexsport, a popular Web3 bookmaker supporting over 10,000 markets. Dexsport has launched a prediction market on its platform covering politics, crypto, technology and other topics. This is an example of how Web3 infrastructure – shared liquidity pools, transparent smart contracts and the absence of intermediaries – makes prediction markets more accessible to a wider audience, rather than just institutional traders.
Bernstein forecasts that the size of prediction markets will reach $1 trillion by 2030 – with an average annual growth rate of around 80 per cent.
Where tokenised shares and prediction markets intersect
Key thesis: stock tokens on the Robinhood Chain create an on-chain infrastructure that changes the mechanics of prediction markets. Not in theory, but in concrete scenarios.
Round-the-clock trading as a price discovery mechanism
Traditional shares are traded from 9.30 am to 4.00 pm US Eastern Time. Prediction markets operate 24/7. When the Nasdaq is closed, stock tokens on the Robinhood Chain continue to trade. This creates an on-chain price that is determined by night-time traders rather than exchange data.
Tiger Research tracked this effect on Korean tokenised shares. Overnight movements in perpetual contracts for Samsung and SK Hynix predicted the direction of the next session’s opening in 82–95 per cent of cases for Samsung and 78–96 per cent for SK Hynix. The correlation was 0.85–0.89. Accuracy increases at the weekend: Friday’s perpetual price movements predicted Monday’s opening in 93 per cent of cases for Samsung.
This logic could potentially be applied to the Robinhood Chain as well. Stock tokens for NVIDIA, Apple and SPY are traded overnight when the real market is closed. Their price is not based on Nasdaq data, but on the consensus of on-chain traders. If prediction markets were to obtain a reliable on-chain oracle pegged to the stock token price, contracts for events such as ‘NVDA will close above $150 on Friday’ could be calculated using the on-chain price, rather than waiting for data from the exchange. But for now, this remains a hypothesis rather than a working product.
Tokenised shares as collateral
Stock tokens are not only tradable assets but also serve as collateral. Aave V4 on Base already accepts Coinbase’s tokenised shares (Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Tesla) as collateral for USDC loans. Kraken allows xStocks to be used for futures and margin positions. Arch Lending plans to launch loans backed by tokenised shares.
Prediction markets can utilise the same mechanism. A user locks up an NVIDIA stock token as collateral and receives liquidity to place bets on events. There is no need to sell the share position – it acts as collateral. As tokenisation grows, this scenario is becoming increasingly realistic.
Meme coin–stock pairs as hybrid markets
Robinhood Chain has launched trading pairs between meme coins and stock tokens. According to Binance Research, between 26 July and 9 September 2026, such pairs generated $2.49 billion in trading volume on Robinhood Chain. 32.1% of the total DEX trading volume for stock tokens came from trading against other tokens, mainly memecoins.
This is not merely speculation. A meme coin–stock pair is, by its very nature, a hybrid trading pair. The meme coin is ‘backed’ by a share. The price of the pair reflects the consensus on the value of a speculative token pegged to a real corporate asset. It is not a classic event contract, but in terms of its mechanics, it is a bet on which token will rise in value relative to the other.
A bridge between the blockchain and traditional finance
The Robinhood Chain Bridge connects the network to the Ethereum mainnet. Asset transfers operate via an optimistic rollup scheme: withdrawals to Ethereum take up to seven days. This is the standard mechanism for L2s on Arbitrum Orbit.
The bridge is critical for prediction markets for one reason: liquidity. Stock tokens on Robinhood Chain must be accessible to protocols on Ethereum and other Layer 2 solutions. Without the bridge, tokenised shares would be locked within a single network. With the bridge, they become a cross-chain asset that can be used as collateral, an oracle or an underlying asset for event contracts on any compatible network.
The volume of the bridge is already substantial: according to DefiLlama, bridged assets on the Robinhood Chain had exceeded $2.5 billion by September. This is not so much the capital of DeFi protocols as the total value of assets transferred to the network – including stock tokens, stablecoins and ETH.
Risks and limitations
The integration of tokenised shares into on-chain infrastructure gives rise to three categories of risk: technical, regulatory and structural. Each of these directly influences how feasible the use of stock tokens is in prediction markets.
The oracle problem
Tokenised shares used as collateral in DeFi create a risk of manipulation. In July 2026, the Edel protocol suffered a $403K exploit: the attacker used a flash loan to manipulate the exchange rate between wGOOGLx and GOOGLx, inflating the value of the collateral by a factor of 78.
For prediction markets, this means that if the on-chain price of a stock token can be manipulated via a DEX with low liquidity, then any event contract pegged to that price is vulnerable. The solution lies in independent oracles, such as Chainlink Price Feeds, which source data directly from traditional exchanges rather than from on-chain pools. Aave V4 on Base is already using Chainlink for tokenised Coinbase shares.
Regulatory uncertainty
The SEC’s Innovation Exemption is a five-year experiment, not a permanent regime. Robinhood’s tokens do not yet meet the criteria. Morgan Stanley expects Robinhood to restructure the product to comply, but this will take time.
Liquidity concentration
99.5 per cent of DEX volume on Robinhood Chain passes through a single Uniswap deployment. This has been confirmed by Uniswap founder Hayden Adams. For prediction markets, which rely on order book depth, such concentration poses a risk. If the sole liquid venue loses volume, the stock token ceases to be a reliable oracle.
Forecast: where is the market heading
Citi forecasts that the tokenised securities market will grow from $17bn in 2026 to $5.5tn by 2030. The base case scenario assumes that 10 per cent of US Treasury bonds and 3 per cent of US company shares will be tokenised. Standard Chartered expects $4 trillion in on-chain assets by 2028.
Galaxy Research predicts that major banks will begin accepting tokenised shares as collateral as early as the end of 2026. This has partly come to pass: Aave V4 on Base added tokenised Coinbase shares as collateral in September.
For prediction markets, this means that as tokenisation grows, the range of asset classes available as the underlying for event contracts will expand. Today, it’s shares and ETFs. Tomorrow, it’ll be bonds, commodities and funds. On-chain protocols, which use transparent liquidity pools and operate without intermediaries, are gaining the infrastructure to create more complex markets – contracts for corporate events, earnings reports and rating actions.
FAQ
Do Robinhood’s stock tokens confer rights to actual shares?
No. Robinhood’s tokenised shares are debt securities that provide economic exposure to the share price. The holder receives the equivalent of dividends but has no voting rights or stake in the company’s assets. Robinhood plans to add these rights by the end of 2027.
How does the SEC’s Innovation Exemption differ from Robinhood’s current model?
The exemption requires that tokenised shares confer full shareholder rights – voting, dividends and a share in liquidation proceeds. Robinhood’s current stock tokens provide only synthetic exposure and therefore do not qualify for the exemption.
Can prediction markets use the on-chain price of stock tokens as an oracle?
This remains a hypothesis for now. Stock tokens on the Robinhood Chain trade 24/7, with their price determined by on-chain traders when traditional exchanges are closed. Overnight price movements in tokenised shares predict the opening of the next trading session in 82–95 per cent of cases. However, to use this price in event contracts, reliable oracles are needed – such as Chainlink. Without them, the on-chain price is vulnerable to manipulation.
Can stock tokens be used as collateral in DeFi?
Yes. Aave V4 on Base already accepts tokenised Coinbase shares as collateral for loans in USDC. Kraken allows the use of xStocks for futures. But there are risks: in July 2026, the Edel protocol lost $403K due to manipulation of the tokenised shares oracle.
What is the trading volume of stock tokens on Robinhood Chain?
Over the 30 days to 24 September 2026 – $10.4 billion in DEX volume. Cumulatively since launch – over $3 billion in stock tokens. The number of token holders rose by 159.7% over 30 days.
What is Citi’s forecast for the tokenisation market?
The base-case scenario is $5.5 trillion by 2030, with a range of $2.7–8.2 trillion. Citi anticipates that 10 per cent of US Treasury bonds and 3 per cent of US company shares will be tokenised. This will create an infrastructure that both prediction markets and DeFi protocols will rely on.
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