He built the app that made stock trading free, sat at the center of the GameStop crisis, launched a blockchain, dismissed memecoins, embraced one six days later, and runs an AI company chasing mathematical superintelligence on the side.
Summary
- Vlad Tenev is co-founder and CEO of Robinhood Markets, the brokerage that popularized commission-free trading and now runs its own blockchain, roughly 28 million customers across 38 countries.
- He co-founded the company with Baiju Bhatt. Before it was Robinhood, they called it CashCat, a discarded name that a memecoin resurrected in 2026.
- Robinhood was at the center of the 2021 GameStop episode, and in the second quarter of that year, 62% of its crypto revenue came from Dogecoin. Its history with joke-driven investing is long.
- In July 2026 he launched Robinhood Chain, told CNBC that assets without underlying utility are not productive, then posted six days later that the chain works great for memes too.
- He is also co-founder of Harmonic, an artificial intelligence company pursuing what it calls mathematical superintelligence, and predicts AI agents will soon trade as well as experienced humans.
Most crypto figures are one thing. Vlad Tenev is the chief executive of a publicly listed American brokerage, the person who made retail stock trading free and then had to explain to Congress what free actually cost, a blockchain founder, an advisor to a decentralized perpetuals exchange, and the co-founder of an artificial intelligence company trying to build mathematical superintelligence. In July 2026 he did all of those jobs in the same fortnight, and in the middle of it dismissed memecoins on television and then endorsed one on X. Understanding him is less about biography than about a pattern that repeats: Tenev builds the infrastructure for a kind of trading he describes as serious, and the traffic that shows up is not.
The company he built
Tenev co-founded Robinhood with Baiju Bhatt. The pitch was simple and, at the time, radical: stock trading with no commissions, on a phone, designed for people who had never owned a brokerage account. It worked. Robinhood now serves roughly 28 million customers across 38 countries and trades on Nasdaq under HOOD.
The name almost was not Robinhood. Before settling on it, the founders called the company CashCat, a detail preserved in a New Yorker profile and largely forgotten until 2026, when a memecoin on Robinhood’s own blockchain resurrected it and briefly reached a $156 million market capitalization. Tenev had tweeted about the CashCat name himself back in April 2021, which meant the lore was documented and personally acknowledged long before anyone tokenized it.
The commission-free model is what everything else follows from, and it is not what most users think. Robinhood does not charge commissions because it routes customer orders to market makers who pay for that flow. The practice is called payment for order flow, and the economics rest on retail orders being valuable precisely because they are uninformed. That structure made Robinhood large, made it controversial, and, as of 2026, has been rebuilt on a blockchain by a company Tenev advises.
GameStop, and what it proved
In January 2021, Robinhood ended up at the center of the most chaotic retail trading episode in modern American history. GameStop’s stock, propelled by a retail crowd largely trading on Robinhood, ran to levels that threatened the firms on the other side. Robinhood restricted buying in the affected names. The decision triggered accusations that the platform had sided with institutions against its own users, congressional hearings, and a durable reputational cost that shaped how the company is read to this day.
The technical explanation, that clearing house collateral requirements spiked and the firm had to restrict activity to meet them, is broadly accepted and did little to change the narrative. The episode fixed Robinhood in the public imagination as the company that democratized trading right up until democratization became expensive.
It also proved something about the business. In the second quarter of 2021, 62% of Robinhood’s crypto revenue came from Dogecoin. A single joke asset produced the majority of a public company’s crypto business. Robinhood has never been a stranger to speculative retail enthusiasm. It has monetized it repeatedly, and the July 2026 memecoin episode is the third act of a pattern rather than a departure from one.
The blockchain bet
On July 1, 2026, Tenev unveiled the blockchain he launched at a livestream from the Old Royal Naval College in London, billed as The World is Flat and described by the company as its most ambitious global expansion and product vision to date.
The architecture was serious. Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum layer 2 built on Arbitrum’s Orbit stack, using ether for gas, running roughly 100-millisecond block times, and settling to Ethereum mainnet. Its flagship product is Stock Tokens: on-chain instruments tracking equities including Nvidia, Apple, and Alphabet, tradeable around the clock and usable in DeFi. The launch stack included Chainlink for oracle pricing, BitGo for custody, Uniswap for liquidity, Morpho for lending, and Lighter for perpetual futures inside Robinhood Wallet.
The business logic is visible in the earnings. Robinhood’s crypto transaction revenue fell 47% year over year to $134 million in the first quarter of 2026, and native-app crypto trading volume dropped 48% to $24 billion. The company cut roughly 10% of its workforce, about 290 people, weeks before the launch. Total revenue of $1.07 billion and platform assets up 39% to $307 billion show the wider business is healthy, but the chain is an explicit attempt to swap volatile transaction revenue for infrastructure income. Tenev is not experimenting. He is trying to own the rails.
The strategy has a wrinkle worth knowing: Stock Tokens are structured as tokenized debt securities, conferring no shareholder rights and no legal ownership of the underlying shares, and they are unavailable to US persons. The CEO of an American brokerage built a tokenized equity product his American customers cannot buy.
The six days
The sequence that defines his 2026 is short enough to state precisely.
On July 2, the day after the chain went live, Tenev told CNBC that the future of crypto is in real-world assets, drawing an explicit line between productive tokenized assets and speculative tokens without underlying utility. His formulation was that an asset not tied to an underlying utility is not a productive asset.
On July 8, as CASHCAT climbed toward a nine-figure market capitalization on his own chain, he posted on X that while the company is building Robinhood Chain to be the best chain for real-world assets, it works great for memes too. He followed the token’s account. For the full context, crypto.news has covered his memecoin reversal in full.
Six days. The charitable reading is that a permissionless chain cannot control what deploys on it and a CEO refusing to acknowledge the most visible thing on his own network would look absurd. The uncharitable reading is that the endorsement, however light, told the market what the company actually values, which is volume, and that a regulated brokerage asking institutions to tokenize serious assets on its chain does not advance that case by cheerleading a cat token. Robinhood’s crypto chief stayed on message throughout, insisting the focus remains a secure and scalable foundation for real-world assets.
Both readings are available and Tenev has not resolved them, which may itself be the position.
The trade the market noticed
One episode from July belongs in any honest account, because it is the kind of detail that shapes how a CEO is read.
Filings show Tenev sold 375,000 HOOD shares in early July, at weighted average prices ranging from roughly $112.22 to $118.14, for a total in the region of $43.6 million. Robinhood’s chief legal officer, Daniel Gallagher, sold shares on July 6 for approximately $1.1 million. Robinhood Ventures Fund I sold as well. The sales landed in the same window as the chain launch, the CNBC interview, and the CASHCAT post.
Context matters and cuts in both directions. Tenev continued to hold more than 48.2 million Class B shares after the transaction, so this was a trim rather than an exit, and by any proportional measure a small one. Executive share sales are also routinely conducted under pre-scheduled plans adopted months in advance precisely so that timing cannot be read as signalling, and a sale executed under such a plan carries no information about what the seller thinks. Anyone drawing conclusions from the timing needs to check whether a plan governed it before drawing them.
What is not in dispute is how it looks, and appearance is the currency a consumer brokerage trades in. A chief executive selling $43.6 million of stock during the fortnight he launched a blockchain and amplified a memecoin on it is a set of facts that arrive together whether or not they are connected. Robinhood’s history makes that harder rather than easier: this is the company whose defining crisis was a decision that looked like it served institutions over users, explained afterward by a technical account that was accurate and did not land.
The broader pattern is what makes it worth stating. Tenev’s public communication is consistently accurate at the level of the individual statement and consistently ambiguous at the level of what the company actually wants. Assets without utility do not last, and the chain works great for memes. Robinhood Chain is institutional infrastructure, and its most famous asset is a cat. The stock is a long-term bet, and here is $43.6 million. Each statement defensible, the aggregate unresolved.
That ambiguity may be deliberate, and it may simply be what running a retail brokerage in 2026 requires: the serious story is what persuades institutions and regulators, and the fun story is what brings volume. Tenev has never had to choose, and the July sequence is the clearest example yet of a career spent not choosing.
The other company
The part of Tenev that crypto coverage almost entirely misses is that he co-founded an artificial intelligence company and it is not a side project.
Harmonic was founded in 2023 by Tenev and Tudor Achim, former chief executive of Helm.ai. Its stated goal is building AI systems that can solve complex mathematical problems, an ambition the company calls mathematical superintelligence, with a flagship model named Aristotle. It raised a $100 million Series B in July 2025 at an $875 million valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, and Paradigm.
Note that last name. Paradigm is one of crypto’s largest venture firms, and it is funding the Robinhood CEO’s AI mathematics company. That crossover is not incidental to how Tenev talks about the future.
Because the AI thesis is now inside Robinhood. He has predicted that AI agents will soon trade financial assets as effectively as experienced human traders. The company is building toward it: Robinhood markets its chain as AI-native and is rolling out Agentic Accounts, which let eligible users connect AI models to Robinhood’s data and tools through a Trading MCP so agents can analyze markets and construct strategies while humans retain control of capital. Third parties have gone further, with the agent platform Bankr integrating Robinhood Chain so users can trade tokenized stocks and memecoins by text command on X or Telegram.
There is an asymmetry there worth noticing. Americans are barred from Stock Tokens and barred from perpetual futures through the wallet. Agentic Accounts are rolling out in the United States. The AI trading product is the one Tenev can ship to his home market.
The business nobody covers
Ask what Robinhood’s fastest-growing crypto-adjacent business is and most people will say the chain. They would be wrong.
Robinhood’s prediction markets platform processed more than 12 billion contracts in 2025, including a record 8.5 billion in the fourth quarter alone. On the earnings call, Tenev noted that NBA contracts had overtaken NFL contracts in trading activity, defying expectations that the end of football season would drag volumes down, and pointed to the Winter Olympics, the FIFA World Cup, and March Madness as catalysts for a strong year. He described the business as being at the beginning. Non-sports contracts are contributing too, with a government shutdown contract driving substantial volume. For more context, crypto.news has explained Robinhood’s fastest-growing business.
For context on scale, the company reported record fourth-quarter revenue of $1.28 billion, slightly below Street estimates of $1.34 billion, with earnings of 66 cents per share against a 62-cent consensus.
That business sits inside the same regulatory fight as everything else Tenev touches. The CFTC is asserting exclusive federal jurisdiction over prediction markets, litigating against states, and doing it with a single confirmed commissioner. Whatever happens to Robinhood’s prediction markets will be decided by the same understaffed agency that the CLARITY Act would make crypto’s primary regulator.
Reading him
The pattern across sixteen years is consistent enough to state.
Tenev builds infrastructure for a serious version of retail finance, describes it in serious terms, and then discovers that what retail actually wants is the fun version.
Commission-free trading was democratization until it was GameStop. The crypto business was portfolio diversification until 62% of it was Dogecoin. Robinhood Chain is institutional settlement infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets, and its defining asset is a cat named after a company name he threw away in 2010.
The uncharitable conclusion is that he keeps building casinos and calling them exchanges. The charitable one, and probably the more accurate, is that he keeps building genuine infrastructure and retail keeps using it for entertainment, which is a fact about retail and not about him. The chain is real. The engineering is real. Tokenized equities settling on-chain is a thesis serious institutions share, and Robinhood is the only brokerage that also built the settlement layer.
What is not resolved is whether Tenev can hold both positions at once, because the entire regulatory proposition of Robinhood Chain is that a licensed brokerage extends institutional standards into DeFi, and that proposition is what would persuade issuers to tokenize serious assets there. The measurable test is close: second-quarter earnings land on July 29 and will show whether Stock Tokens are converting, or whether the $12.8 million of tokenized assets on a $312 million chain is what it looks like. That is the thesis he is betting the company on.
What to watch
Three measurable things will settle how the 2026 chapter is read.
Second-quarter earnings on July 29. This is the first look at Stock Token adoption from the company’s own books instead of from chain metrics distorted by a 90-day gas subsidy. Crypto transaction revenue fell 47% year over year in the first quarter and native-app crypto volume fell 48%. The chain was the response. Either the response is producing revenue or it is producing traffic, and the filing will say which.
The real-world asset figure on the chain. Roughly $12.8 million of tokenized assets against about $312 million in total value locked. That ratio is the entire thesis expressed as a fraction. If it improves substantially while memecoin activity fades, Tenev was right and the speculation was ignition. If it stays flat, the chain attracted a crowd that had no interest in the product.
Whether the American wall moves. Stock Tokens are barred to US persons. Wallet perpetuals are barred to US persons. Agentic Accounts are rolling out in the United States. That asymmetry is a map of what American law currently permits, and it is why the CLARITY Act and the CFTC’s staffing matter to Robinhood more than to almost any other listed company. If tokenized equities come onshore, Tenev has already built the rail and 28 million customers become addressable. If they do not, he has built a product for everywhere except home.
The through-line is that every one of those depends on decisions made outside the company, by regulators and legislators, which is an unusual position for a founder who spent a decade routing around gatekeepers. Robinhood’s original insight was that you could give retail direct access and let the incumbents object afterward. The chain inverts it: this time the access requires permission first, and Tenev is waiting on Washington like everyone else.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Vlad Tenev?
Co-founder and chief executive of Robinhood Markets, the brokerage that popularized commission-free stock trading and now operates its own Ethereum layer 2 blockchain. He co-founded the company with Baiju Bhatt. Robinhood serves roughly 28 million customers across 38 countries and trades on Nasdaq under HOOD. He is also co-founder of Harmonic, an artificial intelligence company, and an advisor to the perpetuals exchange Lighter.
What was Robinhood’s original name?
CashCat. Tenev and Bhatt used it before settling on Robinhood, a detail recorded in a New Yorker profile. Tenev tweeted about the name himself in April 2021. In July 2026, a community memecoin called CASHCAT resurrected the discarded name on Robinhood’s own blockchain and briefly reached a market capitalization near $156 million, with no affiliation to the company.
What was Tenev’s role in GameStop?
Robinhood was the primary platform for the retail crowd driving GameStop’s 2021 surge, and it restricted buying in the affected stocks at the peak. The move triggered accusations that the company had sided with institutions against its users and led to congressional hearings. Robinhood explained that clearing house collateral requirements had spiked, an account broadly accepted technically and largely ineffective reputationally.
Did Tenev change his position on memecoins?
The sequence is documented. On July 2, 2026, he told CNBC that assets not tied to an underlying utility are not productive assets and that real-world assets were crypto’s durable direction. On July 8, as CASHCAT climbed on his chain, he posted that the chain works great for memes too and followed the token’s account. Whether that constitutes a reversal or an acknowledgement of a permissionless network is contested.
What is Harmonic?
An artificial intelligence company Tenev co-founded in 2023 with Tudor Achim, former chief executive of Helm.ai, aiming to build AI systems that solve complex mathematical problems, an ambition it calls mathematical superintelligence. Its flagship model is Aristotle. It raised a $100 million Series B in July 2025 at an $875 million valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins with Sequoia, Index Ventures, and the crypto venture firm Paradigm participating.
Why did Robinhood build a blockchain?
Business pressure and strategic positioning. Crypto transaction revenue fell 47% year over year to $134 million in the first quarter of 2026 and native-app crypto volume dropped 48% to $24 billion, prompting roughly 290 layoffs. The chain is an attempt to replace volatile transaction revenue with infrastructure income, and Robinhood is the only major brokerage that built its own settlement layer instead of partnering for one.
What are Robinhood’s prediction markets?
Its fastest-growing and least-covered business. The platform processed more than 12 billion contracts in 2025, including a record 8.5 billion in the fourth quarter. Tenev has said NBA contracts overtook NFL contracts in activity and pointed to the Winter Olympics, FIFA World Cup, and March Madness as catalysts. The sector’s regulatory future rests with the CFTC, which is claiming exclusive jurisdiction while operating with one confirmed commissioner.
What is Tenev’s view on AI and trading?
He has predicted AI agents will soon trade financial assets as effectively as experienced human traders, and Robinhood is building toward it. The company markets its chain as AI-native and is rolling out Agentic Accounts, letting eligible users connect AI models to Robinhood’s data and tools through a Trading MCP while retaining control of capital. Notably, Agentic Accounts are rolling out in the United States, where Stock Tokens and wallet perpetuals are unavailable.
Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. It describes a public company, its executives, and its products, and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security or token. Company figures, product availability, and jurisdictional restrictions change frequently and should be verified independently. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of July 17, 2026.
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