Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev had to remind AMC that you can't actually stop people from making financial products based on your stock. This is like discovering water is wet except somehow AMC's legal team needed a press statement to figure it out.
The clash escalated. That's the word they used. Escalated. Two companies arguing about tokens while one sells popcorn at seventeen dollars a bucket and the other sells order flow to Citadel had an escalation. The Securities Act of 1933 did not prepare us for this timeline.
Tenev acknowledged token holders don't get voting rights. So you own a token of a stock that gives you none of the rights of the actual stock. It's a representation of a thing that has value except your version has no value. This is the financial equivalent of buying a photo of a sandwich and wondering why you're still hungry.
AMC is mad that someone tokenized their stock without permission. They want control over derivatives of their equity. Good luck with that. The entire options market would like a word. So would every ETF. So would every contract for difference broker operating out of Cyprus. Public companies don't get to choose what gets built on top of their ticker symbol. That ship sailed sometime around 1973 when the CBOE opened.
Retail traders are now buying tokens of stocks they could just buy directly. They're paying fees to own something that gives them less than the thing they could own for the same price. This is optimization in the same way that cutting off your leg optimizes your marathon time.
The AMC apes spent two years screaming about synthetic shares and now they're being offered actual synthetic shares with extra steps. The irony is so thick you could tokenize it.
Photo by appshunter.io on Unsplash
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