Robinhood, the Silicon Valley-based brokerage known for disrupting Wall Street with zero-commission trading and meme-stock mania, is making a bold play for Europe. Its strategy? Rewire equity markets using blockchain.
By offering tokenized versions of U.S. blue-chip stocks, the firm sidesteps traditional securities licensing, while promising a new era of round-the-clock market access. The question now facing Europe’s financial establishment is whether its banks and regulators are prepared for the speed and scale of Robinhood’s next wave of disruption.
When Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev took to the company’s Q2 earnings call last week, he mentioned “tokenization” eleven times. That wasn’t by accident. The U.S. brokerage, best known for its gamified trading app and meme-stock era influence, has made the blockchain-based representation of assets a cornerstone of its European expansion.
“Tokenization is going to open the door to a massive trading revolution,” Tenev said, underlining it as “the biggest innovation in capital markets in more than a decade”.
One month before, Robinhood’s tokenized products launched across all 31 European countries. It’s letting users trade synthetic versions of U.S. stocks like Apple and Nvidia around the clock, commission-free. Behind the tokens of public companies sit real shares held by a custodian, with blockchain-based claims offered to users.
Amsterdam and Vilnius
Research shows that Robinhood established a legal presence in Vilnius, Lithuania, earlier this summer, securing both a Category A financial brokerage licence and a MiCA crypto-asset service provider licence from the Bank of Lithuania. These authorisations allow it to operate across the EU as a brokerage under the MiFID II framework, while the crypto licence grants EU-wide passporting rights for its digital asset services.
Robinhood’s European operations are understood to be managed from Amsterdam, where the firm leased office space in the Zuidas business district and formally registered as a foreign financial service provider with the Dutch regulator AFM on 17 April 2025.
“Positioned in the heart of Europe, the Amsterdam office at Strawinskylaan 3101 serves as a gateway for Robinhood’s European operations, fostering international growth,” noted company location platform Clay, which lists Amsterdam among six capitals where Robinhood has a presence. In the Netherlands, Robinhood was already formally registered as Robinhood Europe BV and Sherwood Netherlands BV from 2020.
Anything but subtle
Robinhood’s ambitions are anything but subtle. In an interview with Bloomberg, Tenev recently announced the launch of a full banking platform, including checking and savings products, putting legacy lenders and neobanks on notice, in the Americas as well as in Europe.
“Every financial company competes with every other one,” he said. “If your goal is to get customer assets and greater wallet share, the competitive lines blur.”
Jeroen van Oerle, portfolio manager at Lombard Odier IM and specialist in financial innovation, warns that European banks are underestimating the risk. “Big banks are comfortable in their dominant position,” he said. “But they risk losing market share, especially among younger users, if they don’t innovate.”
Van Oerle sees clear parallels with what’s happened in FX markets, where Wise and other low-cost platforms have steadily eroded bank margins. “Does it hurt now? Maybe not. But over time it will, and by then it may be too late to catch up technologically.”
Despite these signals, most banks aren’t talking. Investment Officer approached several large institutions in the Netherlands and across Europe with questions about Robinhood. None provided comment.
In the US, Robinhood’s formula has proven to be a success. Robinhood Markets Inc., last Wednesday posted a 45 percent jump in year-over-year revenue and a profit that more than doubled compared to a year ago. Second-quarter revenue was 989 million dollars, beating a FactSet forecast of 915 million dollars, according to Marketwatch. Robinhood’s stock price has risen more than 160 percent this year, and has almost tripled since its low in April.
Robinhood’s share price has surged since April
Staying on the sidelines might be costly, JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon during the company’s second-quarter earnings conference.
“You know, these guys are very smart,” Dimon said of his fintech competitors. “They’re trying to figure out a way to create bank accounts, to get into payment systems and rewards programs, and we have to be cognizant of that. And the way to be cognizant is to be involved.”
A different game in Europe
Unlike in the U.S., Robinhood’s European expansion hinges on tokenization because it avoids certain securities licensing requirements by operating under the EU’s crypto rulebook, MiCA. In the U.K., the app offers direct stock trading. In the EU and EEA, users can only access synthetic tokens, which come with no voting rights and no investor protection under traditional compensation schemes.
For now, that’s enough for Robinhood to enter the market. But it also limits the product’s legitimacy in the eyes of some investors and regulators. OpenAI, for instance, publicly objected to its equity being tokenized by Robinhood. Soon after, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission warned that tokenized securities must comply with securities laws.
Tenev dismissed the warning as non-specific. Still, he acknowledged that “some things need to happen” on the regulatory front before tokenization can truly scale, including reform of investor accreditation laws.
Building the guardrails
That regulatory gap hasn’t stopped Robinhood from laying the groundwork for a broader transformation. Robinhood’s tokenization plan has three phases. First, create a sustainable supply of tokens for major U.S. stocks. Second, enable trading of those tokens on Bitstamp, the European crypto exchange it acquired earlier this year. Third, integrate stock tokens into decentralized finance, or DeFi, protocols, allowing users to trade, lend, or collateralize assets directly on-chain.
“The technical capabilities are already here,” Tenev said. “It’s just a matter of going through the regulatory process.”
The strategy echoes a broader shift among fintechs to rebuild financial services from the ground up using blockchain architecture. Back in 2022, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink called tokenization “the next generation for markets”. But for now, few have gone as far or as fast as Robinhood.
Still, not everyone is convinced the model will succeed in Europe.
“You shouldn’t assume Robinhood can do in Europe what it’s allowed to do in the U.S.,” said Van Oerle. “Stablecoins, for instance, are unlikely to take off here the way they have in the U.S., as Europe is headed toward central bank digital currencies and operates stablecoins under the MiCA regulation, which is a completely different ball game versus the regulatory regime under Trump in the U.S. And tokenizing private shares? That’s never going to get through in its current form. Frankly, it’s not even clear that it’s fully legal in the U.S.”
“Europe may offer growth potential, but ultimately it’s a very different regulatory game. Whether this is the right move for Robinhood is debatable,” he said.
Robinhood did not respond to a request to discuss its European plans with Investment Officer.