On 3 September 2026 Adam Aron, chief executive of cinema chain AMC Entertainment, criticized broker Robinhood on X for issuing a token tracking AMC shares without the company’s consent and said the tokens are not the registered under U.S. securities laws.

Robinhood apparently is behind an effort related to “tokenized real-world assets including Stock Tokens” for AMC Entertainment (and supposedly 190+ other companies). They are not registered under U.S. securities laws !!!!!!

I find this practice to be contemptible, outrageous,…

— Adam Aron (@CEOAdam) September 3, 2026

Aron said: “I find this practice to be contemptible, outrageous, disgusting, detestable, inexcusable, vile. How can it possibly be legal? We have no connection to this at all, and do not condone it in any way. We immediately are going to have our outside securities counsel look into this.”

Vlad Tenev, chief executive and co-founder of Robinhood, replied on X asking “What’s the concern ?” Aron argued that the broker set up a “fictitious synthetic equity market” that decouples stock token ownership from a company’s ability to control its own capital raising efforts, deprives token owners of shareholder rights such as being able to vote their stock and has created distrust amongst the public about financial markets in general.

Seriously? What’s the concern you ask, @vladtenev? The list of concerns is almost existential.

U.S. securities laws are in place to protect investors. For good reason, we spend millions and millions of dollars every year to comply with U.S. securities laws. In good. conscience,… https://t.co/cfiu2c7Tvn

— Adam Aron (@CEOAdam) September 4, 2026

There were many reactions to the dispute.

The Four Pillars newsletter said this is the first time a listed-company executive personally objected to tokenized stock and that the objection “has grounds.”

The newsletter highlighted that the debate is a result of different legal structures that currently co-exist amongst tokenized stocks.The biggest difference among these structures is whether the investor becomes an actual shareholder or holds only a contractual right that tracks the economic performance of the underlying share.

Robinhood created a synthetic structure in which a special purpose vehicle based in Jersey holds the actual shares and then issues a derivative debt instrument. Therefore the investor gains economic exposure to the share price but does not hold shareholder rights. In contrast, an issuer-led model puts the registered shares onchain with the company’s consent, so the token represents the same legal rights as actual shares.

“If token demand becomes separated from actual share demand, a separate market can form outside the company’s control, and because retail investors cannot directly redeem the token for actual shares, the price gap can also widen,” added Four Pillars.

For example, the newsletter highlighted that on 3 September a meme coin named AMC ($MEME) was issued on Robinhood Chain using tokenized AMC stock as its pair asset. Speculative demand for the meme coin led to trading of the AMC token when U.S. stock markets were closed and this flowed through to the underlying actual shares.

“With low liquidity layered on top, the AMC token at one point soared to $18.04, surpassing six times the underlying before pulling back,” said Four Pillars. “After this move drew market attention, AMC’s underlying shares recorded a jump of as much as 21% to $3.07 in the next day’s pre-market.”

Therefore, Four Pillars believes that the number of companies objecting to tokenization of their shares without consent is likely to increase.

“Which structure will settle in as the market standard is not yet decided, but the AMC case remains one that brought to the fore the debate over how much to require in terms of issuer consent, shareholder rights, and linkage with the underlying shares,” said the newsletter.

Reactions

Marcin Kaźmierczak, co-founder of blockchain data oracle RedStone, said in an email to Markets Media that this dispute is not a tokenization problem, but a consent and registration issue.

Kaźmierczak said: “The version of tokenization that survives regulators will be the one where the issuer participates and the asset is compliant from day one, not a synthetic wrapper built to sit just outside U.S. securities law. Expect this fight to speed up the push for an actual U.S. framework rather than slow tokenization down.”

Anna Wroblewska, chief business officer at Dinari, which provides infrastructure for tokenized real-world assets and offers tokenized assets called dShares, agreed that the main problem of the dispute is not tokenization.

There’s a world of difference between an SPV or debt structure and a custodial model. The market calls both “tokenized stocks”

That’s the confusion, and that’s why the SEC drew a line between them in January.

— Anna B. Wroblewska (@annabelleacta) September 4, 2026

Wroblewska argued that synthetics have a place, but they are not the same thing as holding a stock, and have unique risks.

“And if someone gets sloppy and a synthetic blows up, holders lose and issuers get louder about headline risk,” she added. “That hurts everyone building onchain.”

The Robinhood and AMC stock token conversation today comes down to a key question: what does the holder actually own and are they made aware of that?

The SEC answered that in January. Its staff statement describes three ways to put a stock onchain.

1. Issuer-sponsored: the… pic.twitter.com/tgp7DkHe5v

— Dinari (@DinariGlobal) September 4, 2026

She said the solution is to ensure that the rails and disclosures are good enough that issuers will want yo put their shares onchain and so that customers feel confident about what they are buying.

Olivia Vande Woude, business development, tokenization at Ava Labs, highlighted that in January this year SEC staff described the Robinhood structure as a linked security, but did not ban that category.

https://t.co/c6aWZz8rSj

— Olivia Vande Woude (@cryptoreine) September 6, 2026

In contrast, an issuer sponsored model means that the token is the legal share.

“Getting there may be slow,” she added. “Thousands of companies would need to change transfer agent setups, & regulators would need to treat the onchain record as the official file. T+1 took years to coordinate across the industry; a blockchain-native register is a larger problem.”

Transfer agents

Tokenization platforms Securitize and Superstate both own SEC registered transfer agents, which record the ownership of shares, and crypto exchange Bullish has announced an acquisition of transfer agent Equiniti for $4.2bn.

Tom Farley, chief executive of Bullish, said:

Issuers HATE synthetic tokens. Since we announced @Equiniti acquisition we have been out talking to as many issuers as possible and are yet to find a single one who likes people marketing synthetics as “stock” of their company. One CFO of a well known company. told me last week… https://t.co/bRM7aWi2cB

— Tom Farley (@ThomasFarley) September 4, 2026

Farley said: “One CFO of a well known company told me last week they sent a cease and desist letter earlier that morning. But synthetics have at least proven demand for tokens. The next wave is issuer sponsored tokens. It is a big big wave.”

Carlos Domingo, founder and chief executive of Securitize, said tokenization was meant to improve markets, not make them worse.

This was bound to happen if I were the CEO of a publicly traded company (oh wait!) I would also not want people creating offshore derivatives of our stock that trade all over the place. This is why we tokenized our own stock natively and in the US, in a fully compliant way.… https://t.co/Urx6riYlcU

— Carlos Domingo (@carlosdomingo) September 4, 2026

@steinRWA said Robinhood has shown that stocks can become programmable financial assets, crypto has shown that those assets can become liquidity primitives for an entirely new meme economy but AMC has exposed the missing layer between those two worlds.

https://t.co/4R6xSZ8ZC6

— stein (@steinRWA) September 5, 2026

Galaxy, the digital asset investment manager, has tokenized its own stock and highlighted in a note that GLXY is an issuer sponsored tokenized security. As the issuer, Galaxy honors the token as Class A common stock, and it is tracked and maintained by the firm’s SEC-registered transfer agent, Superstate.

“This is the core of the dispute in the marketplace on this topic: third-party issued tokenized stocks scale better but have legal drawbacks, while issuer-sponsored tokenized stocks are less scalable to launch because each issuer needs to take action to enable it, but they carry much clearer shareholder rights,” added Galaxy.

Digital asset fund manager CoinShares agreed in its newsletter that  this dispute reaches beyond one cinema chain, because tokenized equities grew from $2.5bn at the start of this year to $13.4bn by 1 September 2026. Coinshares said: “The market has not settled whether a claim on a share price and the share itself should trade under the same name.”

AMC's objection to Robinhood's AMC-linked stock token put a basic question in public view: Does the token track the stock, or is it the share?

In this video, Securitize Head of Ecosystem @grahamfergs explains why that distinction matters. pic.twitter.com/5xi70dPrv7

— Securitize (@Securitize) September 8, 2026