Market Insider – The tokenization of real-world assets (RWA)—from traditional stocks to real estate—is poised to revolutionize financial markets worldwide, according to Vlad Tenev, Chief Executive Officer of Robinhood Markets Inc. Speaking at the Token2049 conference in Singapore on Wednesday, October 1, 2025, Tenev delivered a stark metaphor for the disruptive trend.
“Tokenization is like a freight train. It can’t be stopped, and eventually it’s going to eat the entire financial system,” Tenev declared, signaling a seismic shift in how assets will be owned and traded.
A Decade-Long Transformation
Tenev projects that the shift toward asset tokenization—the digital representation of RWAs on a blockchain or distributed ledger—will rapidly gain regulatory traction in major economies. “I think most major markets will have some framework in the next five years,” he stated. However, he cautioned that a complete, 100% tokenization of the financial system could take more than a decade.
The potential for greater market efficiency through blockchain technology has long been a central thesis of the crypto industry. Now, this prediction is gaining real-world momentum. Institutional heavyweights like Morgan Stanley and BlackRock have recently signaled their interest, adding institutional validation to the concept.
Tenev believes the integration of digital assets and traditional finance is inevitable. “I actually think cryptocurrency and traditional finance have been living in two separate worlds for a while, but they’re going to fully merge,” he asserted. He pointed to stablecoins—digital currencies pegged to fiat currency like the U.S. dollar—as an early, successful example of a tokenized RWA.
“I think that crypto technology has so many advantages over the traditional way we’re doing things that in the future there’s going to be no distinction,” Tenev concluded.
Tokenized Stocks and the Regulatory Race
Robinhood itself is actively driving this transformation. In June, the company launched an offering of over 200 tokenized U.S. stocks for customers in the European Union (EU). The strategic move, which gave European investors new exposure to underlying American assets, sent Robinhood’s stock soaring to a then-record high.
Tenev is confident in the model’s future, expecting it to become the “default way to get exposure to U.S. stocks outside the U.S.”
He anticipates that regulatory clarity will be the key accelerant, predicting that this clarity will “come, starting in Europe, but then expanding to the rest of the world.” The ability to scale the practice hinges on greater licensing and regulatory frameworks emerging across more jurisdictions.
Conversely, Tenev expects the U.S. to be one of the last major economies to fully embrace tokenization. He attributes this delay to the existing financial infrastructure’s “greater sticking power,” which resists rapid replacement.
