Robinhood Bets Big on Tokenization and 'Degen Money' Revolution

Robinhood, once synonymous with the meme stock revolution and the GameStop saga, is evolving its platform to welcome 'degen money' - a generation of traders that moves at internet speed, embraces risk, and sees memes, DeFi, tokenized assets, and onchain communities as part of the same financial ecosystem.

The company's CEO, Vlad Tenev, has acknowledged this shift in investor behavior, stating that these 'degens' are comfortable trading tokenized stocks alongside stablecoins and seamlessly moving between decentralized finance, NFTs, prediction markets, and meme coins.

Robinhood Chain is the company's biggest bet yet on tokenization, bringing real-world assets (RWAs), cryptocurrencies, and decentralized finance onto a single platform. This move reflects how modern investors actually behave - they don't separate traditional finance from crypto; they expect both to exist in the same app, on the same network, with the same seamless experience.

The original Robinhood story was about giving retail investors access to Wall Street, but Robinhood Chain is being built for the next generation of crypto-native participants who understand that markets are increasingly global, always on, and powered by online communities as much as institutions.