AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron escalated his fight with Robinhood over its tokenized stocks on Friday, calling on the brokerage to stop trading tokens linked to AMC shares and threatening legal action.
Aron’s comments came in response to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who asked “what’s the concern?” in an X post after Aron first criticized the products on Thursday. Aron said the tokens could undermine AMC’s ability to raise capital, deny investors shareholder rights and create a parallel market using the company’s name without its consent.
“Your setting up some kind of fictitious synthetic equity market decouples stock token ownership from a company’s ability to control its own capital raising efforts,” Aron wrote on X.
Aron also questioned Robinhood’s use of an offshore structure and whether the products comply with U.S. securities laws. “This quasi-fake market you are creating on the island of Jersey sows distrust amongst the public about financial markets in general,” he wrote.
He called on Robinhood to “cease and desist” trading AMC stock tokens and said AMC plans to raise the issue with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Not all stock tokens are created equal
The spat cuts into a growing fault line in stock tokenization as crypto firms, fintechs like Robinhood and Wall Street institutions race to put equities on blockchain rails.
Stock tokens can take several forms. Some providers create synthetic wrappers that track the price of a stock without making the token itself a registered share of the company. Other models tokenize shares held with a regulated custodian, while issuer-sponsored approaches put actual company shares onchain with shareholder rights attached.
Robinhood’s products fall into the first camp, allowing investors to gain exposure to U.S. equities without participation from the companies whose stocks they track. The tokens are not available to U.S.-based customers.
Those distinctions matter because a synthetic token may follow AMC’s share price without carrying voting rights, providing ownership or being recorded on the company’s shareholder register.
Tokenization executives weigh in
Aron’s criticism found support from some crypto executives who otherwise favor bringing stocks onchain.
Armani Ferrante, co-founder and CEO of crypto exchange Backpack — which offers tokenized U.S. equities trading on the Solana blockchain, backed by shares held in custody — said Aron’s concern about capital formation had “real substance.” He argued Robinhood’s structure could separate demand for a stock token from demand for the underlying stock because buying a token does not necessarily result in the same amount of buying in the company’s shares.
“When you’re bidding Robinhood stock tokens, that buy pressure doesn’t necessarily hit the underlying stock market,” Ferrante wrote on X.