Tokenized Stocks on Robinhood, Kraken: Legal in the US?

Robinhood and Kraken have turned tokenized stocks robinhood kraken into one of crypto's fastest-growing categories this year, with on-chain equity trading volume hitting roughly $9 billion year-to-date, up nearly 800% since January, and a fresh monthly record of $11.3 billion in July. The honest answer to the question everyone is actually asking, "can I buy this in the US," is no. Not on Robinhood, not on Kraken, not on Coinbase, and not legally on any regulated US platform, because every one of them explicitly blocks US persons from the products driving that growth.

That gap is why Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev spent last week publicly pushing US regulators to act. On August 18 and 19, he called tokenization an "early-stage supercycle" and urged the SEC to clear a path for US access. The market reaction was immediate: Robinhood's stock added roughly $12 billion in market value in the days that followed, even though the comments changed nothing about what US customers can actually trade. That's the split worth understanding: real product, real volume, real offshore growth, and a US regulatory vacuum that has now stalled twice.

The immediate driver of the volume boom isn't US demand catching up with regulation — it's the opposite. Because the SEC hasn't opened a legal door for US persons, every major platform is racing to plant a flag everywhere else first. Robinhood offers roughly 190 tokenized US stocks across more than 120 countries on its own layer-2 network, Robinhood Chain. Kraken's parent, Payward, runs a rival product called xStocks with more than 500 tokenized securities and roughly $35 billion in cumulative volume, and it just expanded into Hong Kong, the UK and South Korea through a partnership with GTN. Binance's bStocks product, anchored by a tokenized version of the Nasdaq-100 ETF, drove about 83% of July's record monthly volume on its own. Coinbase has announced a similar product but hasn't launched it, and like the others, it excludes US customers from day one.

That's the capital-rotation story here: money isn't moving from one crypto asset into another, it's moving into a new offshore financial infrastructure that mirrors US equities without touching US securities law. The platforms and jurisdictions that can move fastest without a US launch to worry about are the winners so far. The US retail investor asking about this on Robinhood's own app is, for now, the one part of the market this boom was not built for.

The mechanism behind the US exclusion is a single stalled piece of regulation: the SEC's proposed "innovation exemption," which would give tokenized-securities platforms a legal path to operate in the US. It's been delayed twice this year, first around May 18 and again when an August 14 meeting on the exemption was cancelled outright. The first delay followed closed-door pushback from incumbent exchanges — Nasdaq, NYSE and Cboe. The second followed a different alignment: the White House reportedly worried a fast SEC exemption could complicate parallel CLARITY Act negotiations, while the securities-industry group SIFMA argued that changes this large needed a full rulemaking process rather than an exemption.

That pushback is rational self-interest as much as caution: Nasdaq and NYSE have no reason to rush a framework that lets crypto-native platforms compete for order flow before they've built comparable products themselves. The practical effect is that the SEC has no incentive to move quickly, and no new date has been set since the August cancellation. Until that changes, "no US access" isn't a temporary hiccup — it's the working rule.

Not every tokenized-equity product is built the same way, and that distinction matters more as the sector scales. Ondo Finance, which holds an estimated 70%-plus share of the tokenized-equity market, structures its products around direct or redeemable claims on real shares. Kraken's xStocks and Robinhood's tokens, by contrast, are both structurally synthetic, just through different issuers: xStocks are collateralized mirror tokens issued through Backed Finance, while Robinhood's stock tokens are tokenized debt securities issued by its own Jersey subsidiary, Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited. Neither structure gives holders a direct legal claim on the underlying share — both track its price through a claim on an intermediary instead.

That's the strongest-versus-weakest split in this sector right now. Ondo's model is more likely to survive a future SEC framework intact, because a redeemable claim on an actual share is a more familiar legal structure than a debt claim or derivative wrapped in a token. Whether that durability advantage pays off depends entirely on what the SEC eventually writes into its rulebook, and there's no evidence yet of which structure regulators will favor.

Two dated events actually matter here, and neither is the exemption itself. The first is the CLARITY Act's Senate cloture vote, scheduled for September 15, which would set clearer market-structure rules that any future securities exemption would likely have to fit inside. The second is simply whether the SEC sets a new, credible timeline for the innovation exemption after scrapping the last one; as of this writing, it hasn't.

The base case through the rest of 2026 is that nothing changes: US access stays closed, offshore volume keeps compounding, and Robinhood and Coinbase are already planning around a 2027 US launch rather than anything sooner. The bull case is that CLARITY clears its September hurdle and the SEC follows with a real exemption date, opening a much larger addressable market than the offshore user base currently trading. The bear case, and the more likely one given two straight delays, is that Wall Street incumbents keep winning the fight, no new date arrives, and the answer to "can I buy tokenized stocks in the US" stays no well into 2027. Tenev's pressure campaign is best read as an attempt to stop that outcome from becoming permanent, not evidence it's already been avoided.