Tenev says Robinhood won underwriter approval as crypto markets front-run mega IPOs

Robinhood Securities said it had secured approval to act as an IPO underwriter, moving from a distribution role into the main underwriting group alongside Wall Street banks.

Chief executive Vlad Tenev said in a Tuesday X post that Robinhood Securities is “now approved to serve as an underwriter,” without specifying which regulator granted the approval, a process that typically involves oversight from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

Framing the move as the “natural next step” after launching IPO Access in 2021, Tenev said the question in equity capital markets had shifted from “why allocate to retail at all?” to “how big can the allocation be?”

Robinhood secures underwriter status. Source: Vlad Tenev

His comments land as SpaceX reportedly considers making as much as 30% of its record-setting offering available to retail investors and as demand already runs at close to four times the planned size.

Crypto rails race for SpaceX

Robinhood’s push to sell IPO shares directly to app-based traders comes as crypto platforms race to build parallel rails around the same listings.

Major exchanges have begun offering alternative access to private markets through tokenized pre-IPO products, including Bybit’s xStocks, Kraken’s pre-IPO equity tokens and Coinbase’s secondary markets.

On the derivatives side, a Tuesday report from Talos and Coin Metrics argues that onchain pre-IPO perpetuals are becoming a meaningful price discovery venue in their own right.

Liquidity is increasingly a hybrid of retail traders, crypto-native funds and systematic market makers, according to the report, with SpaceX contracts on Hyperliquid generating billions in volume and hundreds of millions in open interest.

Related: Crypto entrepreneur Chun Wang joins SpaceX mission to Mars

The report highlights Cerebras Systems, where Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO futures tracked the stock’s eventual opening level within about 1%, while underwriters priced the IPO itself far lower.

Samar Sen, vice president of international markets at Talos, told Cointelegraph that underwriters and retail platforms like Robinhood are increasingly likely to monitor these signals for high-profile listings as a supplementary input for assessing demand, though not as a replacement for traditional book-building.

For an underwriter, pre-IPO perpetuals are "unlikely to determine retail versus institutional allocations on their own, but they can provide an additional signal around investor demand ahead of listing," he said.

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