AMC Slams Robinhood Over Tokens Tracking Its Stock

Adam Aron did not hold back. The AMC Entertainment chief publicly tore into Robinhood. The reason: tokens that supposedly track AMC's stock.

What the AMC chief wrote

On Friday, Aron posted on X. AMC, he said, has no connection to the tokens and does not condone them. He asked how the offering could possibly be legal.

"I find this practice to be contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable, vile."

- Adam Aron, CEO of AMC Entertainment, X post from September 3, 2026

Aron added that the tokens are not registered under US securities laws. The company will instruct outside securities counsel to look into the matter immediately, he said. Robinhood's program, according to Aron, covers more than 190 companies. Robinhood launched the program back in the summer, and until now no major company had pushed back this hard. Aron's statement marks the first open public clash between a company executive and Robinhood over it.

What these tokens actually are

Robinhood launched the tokens back in July. Legally, they are not shares but debt securities. They are issued by Robinhood Assets, a company registered in Jersey.

Per Robinhood's own documentation, a token holder gets only economic exposure to the share price. There are no rights of any kind against AMC itself. The tokens cannot be sold to US persons, and further restrictions apply in Canada, the UK and Switzerland. The base prospectus was approved by Liechtenstein's financial regulator under EU rules.

Robinhood itself describes the Jersey structure as unregulated. The consents it holds there amount to neither oversight nor endorsement from a regulator.

In practice, this looks more like a bookmaker's bet than buying a share on an exchange. The token's price follows AMC's stock price, but the holder gets no dividends, no voting rights and no legal tie to the company at all.

In February, Robinhood launched a public testnet for its own network, Robinhood Chain. It is a layer-2 network built on Arbitrum technology, designed specifically for tokenized assets like these. The tokens themselves are issued as standard ERC-20 tokens, meaning they are technically no different from any other crypto asset.

Not Robinhood's first tokenization controversy

Last year, Robinhood airdropped tokens tied to OpenAI and SpaceX to European users. OpenAI publicly stated at the time: there was no partnership, and it had not consented to any transfer of its equity. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev still called the launch a milestone and predicted thousands of similar tokens would follow. None of those companies has ever publicly confirmed such plans.

Days later, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce warned that blockchains do not have a "magical ability" to change the legal nature of an underlying asset. Anthropic and OpenAI separately warned this year that unauthorized vehicles selling exposure to their shares could leave buyers with nothing.

The pattern keeps repeating. Robinhood launches a tokenized product, and the company whose assets it tracks finds out after the fact and publicly distances itself. This is now the third time in a year that this exact story has played out.

Robinhood's response was evasive

Tenev responded on X, asking Aron to specify his concerns. The company issued no official statement. Cointelegraph reached out to Robinhood for comment on the regulatory status of its tokenized stock offerings. No reply has come so far.

This is not the first stumble for Robinhood's tokenization push. In June, several exchanges, including Binance and Bybit, canceled tokenized SpaceX IPO allocations. They blamed partner xStocks for being unable to deliver the underlying assets to holders. Bitget Wallet and MEXC joined Binance and Bybit in scrapping their programs. All four platforms pulled the plug at roughly the same time. The more often this pattern repeats, the more attention it draws from regulators on both sides of the Atlantic.

• Robinhood's AMC, OpenAI and SpaceX tokens grant no rights to the companies themselves.
• The issuer, Robinhood Assets, is registered in Jersey and calls itself unregulated.
• None of the three companies whose stock these tokens track has confirmed a partnership with Robinhood.
• The tokens' base prospectus was approved in Liechtenstein, not directly in the US or EU.

What this means for token holders

The AMC episode highlights the core risk of tokenized stocks. Legal protection here is close to zero. If the issuer disappears or a company disputes the use of its brand, a token holder is left with no real asset and no recourse.

Kurslog's advice is to treat these instruments as a price bet, not as an investment in a company. Before buying a tokenized stock, check exactly who the issuer is and whether the original company acknowledges the product at all. It is also worth checking whether the token is registered in the US at all. If it is not, a buyer's legal protection comes down to the issuer's own terms, not securities law.