Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is predicting that stocks and other traditional finance (TradFi) assets will eventually move on-chain like cryptocurrencies.
In a new interview with investor Anthony Pompliano, Tenev says that the efficiencies gained by using blockchain technology make its adoption by traditional finance inevitable.
He also predicts that US President-elect Donald Trump and his administration will enact policies that will speed up the move to on-chain by stocks, private companies and real-world assets (RWAs) by tokenizing them.
“What will happen is traditional equities – and I think all of this will be accelerated by the new [Trump] administration – will move onto blockchain rails, along with all sorts of other real-world assets. You’ll see private companies going on blockchain rails as well. Once you have public companies, then you’ll have to think through what does it mean to actually go public and list on a blockchain as opposed to on a traditional stock exchange? I think we’ll have to figure that out, and then that opens up private markets as well. And what you gain is interoperability.
I don’t know if you’ve tried to move stocks from a legacy discount broker to Robinhood. A lot of people do it, and it’s very, very painful. And by the way, the big brokerage houses don’t want to make it easy. They want to keep those assets there, so they’ll put all sorts of non-technical barriers in the way too. But contrast that with how easy it is to move dollar stablecoins or Bitcoin from your MetaMask wallet to your Phantom or your Robinhood wallet, everything just kind of works, because the infrastructure underlying the assets and the transactions is all public.”
Tenev believes on-chain transactions are the logical next step in the evolution of TradFi processes since it would simplify them.
“You have no need for transfer agents, for central clearing houses or payment processors. All of that’s replaced by software. My view of crypto is it’s sort of the next step in how financial infrastructure evolves. It started with pen and paper and filing cabinet. It went to mainframe. It went to on-premise and cloud. And then crypto is just the next layer there where you’ll see traditional financial services on crypto rails. They’ll be easier to use, better, more interoperable, and I think the US will have to adopt it. The efficiency gains are just going to be too high to ignore.”
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