Three Pathways Reshaping Finance: How Robinhood's Vlad Tenev Envisions the Next Decade

Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev recently articulated a compelling vision for the intersection of traditional finance, decentralized systems, and artificial intelligence—three parallel tracks that he believes will define the financial infrastructure of the coming decade. Rather than viewing these as competing forces, Tenev frames them as interconnected layers that could fundamentally reshape how retail investors access markets and how capital flows globally.

The Case for Layer 2 Tokenization: Strategic Clarity Over Speed

The decision to build Robinhood Chain as a Layer 2 rather than a Layer 1 network reflects a deliberate philosophical choice. While competitors like Stripe and Circle pursue Layer 1 chains to control every architectural detail, Tenev argues the infrastructure decision matters less than execution. The interoperability advantages of Layer 2—standing on Ethereum’s security while avoiding reinventing foundational components—provide a pragmatic foundation. At the same time, Robinhood retains control over the intermediary layer, sequencer mechanisms, and smart contract logic where user experience and economic models are truly determined.

This positioning reveals a deeper insight: Robinhood’s competitive moat is not technological purity but rather the intersection of two massive markets. As a platform operating at scale in both crypto and traditional assets, Robinhood possesses institutional capabilities that pure-play chain builders lack—fraud prevention, seamless onboarding, custody infrastructure, and regulatory navigation experience.

The Real Opportunity: Private Markets at Scale

If public market tokenization is the headline story, private market access represents the structural inflection point. Companies like OpenAI and SpaceX remain perpetually private partly because public markets have become burdensome, but also because late-stage venture funding provides sufficient capital without shareholder dilution or disclosure obligations. The consequence: ordinary investors miss decades of value appreciation in the world’s most transformative companies.

Tokenization addresses this through multiple mechanisms. First, it unbundles the liquidity challenge that plagued secondary private markets—traditional platforms struggle to match sellers with buyers for illiquid securities. When connected to global on-chain networks, liquidity constraints dissolve. Second, it sidesteps the “adverse selection” problem where only struggling companies seek retail capital by enabling employees, early investors, and other stakeholders to trade without requiring company consent. The issuer of tokenized shares need not be the company itself; it can be a custodian holding positions obtained through legal channels.

This model does not require unanimous private company participation. Instead, it creates optionality: founders who embrace retail participation can include it from seed stage onward, while others retain the traditional institutional-only approach. Over time, as institutional investors and employees recognize the value of liquidity, market forces will shift.

Reshaping the Public-Private Boundary

The current distinction between public and private markets rests on regulatory foundations established before the internet. Retail investors were deemed insufficiently informed to handle private company risk; tighter disclosure rules compensated for information asymmetry. Tenev argues this rationale has deteriorated. Public information about transformative companies is abundant and accessible. The real asymmetry now lies not in information but in access itself.

Consider the contradiction: retail investors can freely purchase meme coins carrying speculative risk with no fundamental utility, yet are barred from owning shares of OpenAI or Stripe despite having engaged with these services and possessing clear understanding of their value propositions. This creates perverse incentives—capital flows toward disconnected assets while genuine innovation remains cordoned off.

The proposed resolution is not to eliminate the public-private distinction but to reform it. Move toward disclosure-based frameworks where investors self-certify their understanding rather than rely on binary qualified/unqualified status. This opens the door for earlier-stage private companies to access retail capital voluntarily, while those preferring opacity can opt out.

Crypto’s Missing Layer: Bridge to Real Assets

For over a decade, crypto markets developed in isolation from traditional finance. Stablecoins represent the breakthrough exception—they function as a bridge currency for cross-border dollar transmission, particularly outside the U.S. where conventional banking is restrictive or expensive. Tokenized securities will follow the same pattern: adoption will accelerate first in emerging markets with capital controls, limited banking infrastructure, or currency instability, then gradually penetrate developed markets as regulatory frameworks clarify.

Robinhood’s entry point is therefore geographically calibrated. Initial launches target jurisdictions where the value proposition is sharpest: countries where accessing U.S. equities or private company stakes typically requires expensive intermediaries or is unavailable entirely. The U.S. market will eventually follow as regulatory clarity emerges, but the early wins will come from global markets where tokenization solves immediate friction points.

This approach also reveals why controlling the chain matters. Robinhood can ensure token-to-fiat conversions flow seamlessly back to users, that margin mechanisms function smoothly, and that custody arrangements integrate with both crypto and traditional settlement rails. Vertical integration across the stack—custody, tokenization, trading, and redemption—yields pricing power and user experience that pure infrastructure plays cannot match.

The AI Question: Verification as Infrastructure

Less visible but potentially more profound is Tenev’s involvement with Harmonic, an AI company pursuing formal verification through mathematical theorem proving. The headline achievement was noteworthy: the Aristotle model reached International Mathematical Olympiad gold medal standard on competition problems that would stump leading large language models.

The significance transcends mathematics. As AI systems generate exponentially more code, financial models, and smart contracts, human auditors face a capacity ceiling. Manual code review by senior engineers will become the bottleneck, not the gateway. Formal verification—using Lean theorem provers to generate machine-verifiable proofs—transforms the problem. Outputs no longer require human line-by-line inspection; they require verification that proofs are logically sound.

In finance, this is transformative. Smart contract failures have destroyed hundreds of millions in value because traditional auditing is slow and catches only obvious errors. Current standard practice—hiring external firms to spend months reviewing code—will not scale. Formal verification of margin calculations, options pricing models, settlement logic, and liquidation mechanisms shifts from theoretical elegance to operational necessity. Once feasible at scale, it will be table stakes for institutional trading infrastructure.

The overlap between these three vectors—on-chain assets, retail access, and verifiable AI—crystallizes when considering AI agents conducting commerce autonomously. Whether those agents are bots coordinating trades, robots paying each other for services, or smart contracts executing complex financial transactions, the requirement for provable correctness becomes absolute.

The Longer View: Ten-Year Horizon

Tenev’s strategic vision extends beyond quarterly earnings. Within a decade, he envisions Robinhood’s international revenue potentially exceeding U.S. operations, and institutional client business dwarfing retail. This requires simultaneous execution on three fronts: tokenized assets on Robinhood Chain, 24/7 trading across asset classes, and institutional-grade margins and custody services that institutional investors already demand from primary dealers. The infrastructure that makes retail customers more efficient traders—eliminating market hour constraints, offering fractional ownership, enabling micro-cap access—holds equal appeal to institutions.

The architecture supporting this is deceptively simple: as Robinhood expands from custody of U.S. stocks into tokenized stocks, private equity, stablecoins, and other on-chain assets, the platform becomes increasingly a settlement and clearing utility more than a brokerage. Exchanges for trading emerge; Robinhood provides the underlying rails. Some revenue comes from trading activity; increasingly, it derives from custody, settlement services, and network effects as liquidity concentrates around commonly traded assets.

The counter-narrative exists: private companies may resist tokenization; retail investors may make poor choices when given access; regulators may tighten rather than relax constraints on retail participation in private markets. Yet Tenev’s framing suggests these as friction points, not terminal obstacles. Markets that survive friction tend to expand. Stablecoins faced constant regulatory skepticism and adoption accelerated regardless. The question is not whether these shifts will occur but whether Robinhood will be positioned to orchestrate them.

For now, the strategy concentrates on execution: Robinhood Chain infrastructure, private market tokenization pilots, international expansion, and betting that AI-powered formal verification becomes an industry standard. If those threads converge, the modest current crypto business at 20-30% of revenue could easily invert over five years, with on-chain finance becoming the dominant revenue stream rather than a supplementary one.