AMC Demands Robinhood Halt Its Stock Token

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Happy Friday. This is Converge, The Defiant's weekly recap of tokenization, stablecoins, and real-world assets, by Chris Storaker.

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Inside Benji: Franklin Templeton's blockchain money fund
Tether sued over a $42.4 million freeze that preceded the warrant
Hyperliquid–Kraken talks; Coinbase files for US single-stock perps
Revolut's OCC nod; Nomura's DeFi fixed income; Securitize–Socios

Converge reaches 20,000+ tokenization leaders and decision makers every week. Sponsor an issue →

TOKENIZATION / EQUITIES

AMC Demands Robinhood Halt Its Stock Token

AMC chief executive Adam Aron demanded early Friday that Robinhood stop trading the stock tokens referencing his company's shares, and Dan Gallagher, Robinhood's chief legal officer and a former SEC commissioner, refused within hours: "Send your lawyers and we'll educate them."

AMC claims it did not consent to the token, but no rule requires his consent: Robinhood's stock tokens are debt securities issued from Jersey by an entity its own disclosures describe as unregistered and unsupervised, sold only to non-US persons, minted by a single authorized participant, and tied to AMC by no registration, listing agreement or transfer-agent relationship through which the company could withdraw.

Robinhood's own page says the tokens "provide economic exposure to underlying securities but do not grant investors any legal or beneficial rights in, or against the issuer of, those underlying securities."

Overnight, the stock token reached $18.04 against a $2.54 NYSE close on Uniswap, then fell back as the authorized participant minted into the premium, taking supply from 157,844 tokens to 1.5 million in 18 hours. At least 23 memecoins spelling AMC launched against it; the largest turned over $141.4 million by late morning, more than AMC's own shares did on the NYSE.

Related: The SEC proposed an overhaul of its transfer-agent rules on Sept. 1 to cover blockchain-based share records, adding risk-management, business-continuity and compliance requirements for the registered agents that keep official ownership registers.

The proposal codifies a May 2025 staff view that a transfer agent's master securityholder file can live on a distributed ledger, with wallet addresses and balances onchain and names and tax identifiers off it. It names blockchain data integrity and the security of tokenized securities as risks agents must manage, and Commissioner Hester Peirce asked whether wallet addresses might replace names and physical addresses as identifiers. Comments run 60 days from Federal Register publication. The proposal covers the model in which the token is the issuer's own record, used today by Franklin's Benji on Stellar, Securitize with Computershare, DTCC's digital twins.

Our take

Tokenized shares now comes in multiple forms. In one, the issuer's transfer agent keeps the register and the token is the share; this week that model got a proposed rulebook. In the other, a third party sells an offshore claim that tracks the share, and the issuer finds out from X; this week that model got a cease-and-desist.

Robinhood's legal position looks solid, because its disclosures already say what Aron is angry about. Its commercial position is the exposed one: the product's appeal rests on resembling AMC stock, and AMC has said publicly that it is nothing of the kind. What to watch: whether AMC files anything (nothing at the SEC yet).

STABLECOINS / BANKING

21 Banks Commit to a Joint Dollar Stablecoin

Twenty-one banks and asset managers said Tuesday they will incorporate a jointly owned company in the second half of 2026 to issue a US dollar stablecoin, targeting a market launch in the first half of 2027 and later expansion into other G7 currencies, starting with the euro.

Eight of the ten banks that said in October 2025 they were exploring the idea remain; Santander, Bank of America, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, MUFG, TD and UBS — while Barclays and BNP Paribas dropped out and 13 joined, among them Wells Fargo, PNC, Capital One, Lloyds, BBVA, Fidelity and WisdomTree. After 11 months, the release gives a date and a roster. It names no company, chief executive, ownership split, blockchain, custodian or reserve manager, and carries no quotes. Circle shares fell 6.35% on the day.

Six of the 21 already back a competing bank-led design. Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, Santander and TD are also among the 17 institutions behind The Clearing House's tokenized-deposit network, announced in June with the same first-half-2027 target. JPMorgan, the furthest along with its JPMD deposit token, is in neither.

Five other bank-rails projects have launched since late June. Ten European banks built RL1 as an equal-vote cooperative. Wells Fargo announced tokenized deposits on its own ledger. Circle named 11 founding validators for Arc, banks and payment networks among them. Thirty-nine state bankers associations formed BankChain for community banks. And the 140-company Open USD consortium routes reserve yield to its distributors. Every tier of banking now has a rails project; the money-center banks have two.

Our take

Banks backing tokenized deposits and stablecoin consortia is both a FOMO-led ‘paying to see’, but also the realization is that these are assets are not perfect substitutes. A tokenized deposit is a bank liability that stays inside the permissioned banking perimeter; a GENIUS stablecoin is a straightforward bearer-instrument backed by segregated reserves.

None of the six knows which one wins, so each pays for both a year before either can launch. Circle's 6.35% drop shows where investors expect the pressure to fall. At the same time, it took these banks 11 months just to produce a target date; and this group has 21 members and no chief executive, so yeah — a wouldn’t hold my breadth for it overtaking USDC or USDT anytime soon.

THIS WEEK'S INTERVIEW

Inside Benji: How a $1.5 Trillion Asset Manager Built Its Money Fund Onchain

Roger Bayston, Head of Digital Assets at Franklin Templeton, on how Benji began as a transfer-agency problem: a money fund holder reinvesting daily generates 200-plus records a year, tens of millions of holders make that database enormous, and the pitch that took years of SEC meetings was, in his words, "we are a centralized issuer of an asset… we're just using the distributed ledger technology as a record keeping system." That is the model the SEC proposed rules for this week.

On stablecoins, he says Franklin's own CFO "does not want to hold stable coins because it's a dead asset. It can't earn anything," and issuers will need "some sort of workable way to be able to offer yield" to stay competitive, the product 21 banks committed to on Tuesday.

OTHER STORIES WORTH YOUR TIME

Tether Froze $42.4 Million Three Months Before a Seizure Warrant, Lawsuit Says

Two Thai businessmen sued Tether in Manhattan federal court over 42,417,785.62 USDT blacklisted across 10 Ethereum addresses. Onchain records put every freeze inside a single two-and-a-half-minute batch on Oct. 30, 2025; the seizure warrant the complaint cites is dated Feb. 19, 2026. The plaintiffs bought on the secondary market and say they have no contract with Tether, whose terms reserve the right to freeze "in its sole discretion"; the complaint alleges Tether acted on an informal request from a Homeland Security Investigations agent before any warrant existed. Tether called the suit "baseless" and says its law-enforcement cooperation has frozen more than $4.4 billion across 2,300 cases. The case will decide whether an issuer may freeze funds on an informal law-enforcement request before a warrant exists.

Bloomberg: Hyperliquid in Advanced Talks With Kraken's Parent on US Perps

Hyperliquid Labs is in advanced talks with Payward to route US traders through Bitnomial, the CFTC-designated contract market Kraken agreed to buy in April, Bloomberg reported Aug. 31; neither company commented and any deal needs regulatory sign-off. A "Kraken HIP-3 test DEX" spotted on Hyperliquid's testnet proves nothing on its own, since anyone can name a test deployment. Two weeks after Trump said the CFTC was working to onshore the venue, the reported structure puts a regulated intermediary in front of the protocol.

Coinbase Files SEC Notices to Bring Single-Stock Perpetuals to the US

A Form 1-N for Coinbase Derivatives and a Form BD-N for Coinbase Financial Markets, both dated Sept. 1, are what chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad called a first step, with CFTC product approval next. US users already trade Coinbase's thematic index perps around the clock at up to 20 times leverage, settled in USDC; single-stock contracts on Apple, Nvidia, Tesla and the rest have run offshore since March. The filings name neither the stocks nor the eligible customers. A week after its tokenized stocks launched offshore-only, Coinbase is seeking US equity exposure through derivatives.

Revolut Says the OCC Conditionally Approved Its US National Bank

The conditional approval for Revolut Bank US, N.A. moves the fintech past the application it filed in March, with FDIC, Federal Reserve and final OCC clearances still required before a planned 2027 opening. The bank would offer loans, credit cards and insured deposits directly, alongside stablecoin and crypto access, replacing the Lead Bank and Cross River arrangements behind Revolut's US products today.

Nomura's Laser Digital Moves Into DeFi Fixed Income

Laser Digital will act as risk governor for institutional lending markets built with Keyring Network, with the first readied for Euler Finance, which holds $368.8 million in TVL and $555.4 million in outstanding borrows per DefiLlama. Keyring supplies zero-knowledge permissioning, risk parameterization and liquidation design; the companies disclosed no committed capital, fee terms, launch date or counterparties. So far it is a framework; Laser backed ZIGChain's emerging-market private credit push a month ago.

Securitize Will Issue Socios' Tokenized Sports-Team Equity

Securitize will handle issuance, onboarding and ownership records for tokenized minority stakes in professional sports teams, the first project planned through its EU DLT Pilot Regime venue authorized by Spain's CNMV in November. The regime admits shares only from issuers below €500 million in market value, which already excludes Juventus, the one Socios partner club with its own listing, and neither company named an issuing entity or a structure for fitting under the caps. Fan tokens, the existing product, are a $146.1 million category.

Even more this week:

Wyoming put its stablecoin reserves onchain with under $1 million outstanding — the Frontier Stable Token adopted Chainlink Proof of Reserve on Sept. 2 with 967,948 tokens in supply, about 0.2% of the 508.7 million base case the commission projected to legislators.
Securitize's HINC became collateral on Solana's Loopscale — eligible investors can borrow USDG against a Neuberger Berman fund of high-yield bonds and CLO tranches, collateral that reprices daily with credit spreads.
Backpack added Micron and SanDisk shares as margin collateral — with 24/7 perpetuals on MU, SNDK, SPY and QQQ, and key collateral and liquidation terms left unspecified.
Sberbank plans to take bitcoin, ether and Tether as loan collateral — contingent on Russia's new crypto rules taking full effect and the Bank of Russia permitting public circulation.
CME launched a crypto index that excludes bitcoin and ether — a 10-asset, free-float-weighted benchmark with real-time pricing and London, New York and Asia-Pacific settlement variants.