Adam Aron said synthetic AMC shares could divert demand from the actual stock and strip investors of shareholder rights, drawing support from some tokenization executives.
- AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron called on Robinhood to stop trading tokens linked to AMC shares and threatened legal action, arguing that the products could undermine capital raising and deny investors shareholder rights.
- Several crypto and tokenization executives weighed in, saying that synthetic products can diverge from underlying share prices and lack conventional market safeguards.
- The tokenized stock market has grown to $3.6 billion and potentially may reach trillions by the end of the decade, raising the stakes of the debate how equities should come onchain.
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.
He also pointed to the redemption structure. Retail investors cannot redeem Robinhood stock tokens directly for shares, Ferrante said, leaving that process to authorized participants.
Graham Rodford, CEO of Archax, a U.K.-regulated digital asset exchange and tokenization platform, drew an even sharper distinction between tokenizing shares and creating instruments that track them.
“A tokenized stock should mean the stock, tokenized,” Rodford said. He argued that some products marketed as tokenized stocks are instead debt instruments issued through separate vehicles and carrying a public company’s ticker without its involvement.
Rodford also argued that wrappers don’t automatically carry the safeguards of conventional equities, such as regulated trading venues, market surveillance, settlement infrastructure and identifiable ownership.
Joris Delanoue, CEO of regulated transfer agent Fairmint that uses blockchain for recordkeeping, drew a line between owning a stock and owning a product that tracks it.
“A token is not equity, but equity can be a token,” Delanoue said. “If the holder is not on AMC’s official ownership record, the token is not an AMC share.” He said synthetic products can have a place in the market, but should be clearly labeled as derivatives that provide exposure to AMC rather than shares carrying rights directly against the company.
Carlos Domingo, CEO of tokenization specialist Securitize (SECZ), also weighed in, pointing to a wide price dislocation in one AMC-linked token. One trading pair for the token traded at roughly 60 times AMC’s reference share price, Domingo noted.
That example shows how thin liquidity, fragmented market and limited ways to arbitrage price differences can cause the token and the stock it is supposed to track to diverge.
“Tokenization was meant to improve markets, not make them worse,” Domingo wrote.
The executives’ arguments highlight that the debate is increasingly about how equities should onchain and what investors actually own when they buy a tokenized stock.
The stakes are increasing as the overall tokenized stock market reaches $3.6 billion and is rapidly growing, a CoinDesk Research report showed. Meanwhile, Citi projects $5.5 trillion of assets could be tokenized by 2030, including $2.7 trillion of equities.
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Anvil: The Missing Collateral Layer
Anvil: The Missing Collateral Layer
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Anvil is a shared on-chain collateral layer built on a programmable letter of credit: reserve assets as a guarantee -no loan, no interest, keep custody & yield.
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