Propose an edit: Vlad Tenev

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Vladimir "Vlad" Tenev, born February 13, 1987 in Varna, Bulgaria, is the cofounder and CEO of Robinhood Markets. He met cofounder Baiju Bhatt as a Stanford undergraduate and the two launched Robinhood in 2013 around zero commission stock trading. He runs a regulated brokerage, not a trench product, yet [[Crypto Twitter]] treats him as a main character because his listing and product decisions move retail liquidity at a scale few figures can match.

## Crypto at Robinhood

Tenev became a household name in January 2021 when Robinhood restricted buying in GameStop and other meme stocks during the retail squeeze, a decision the company blamed on clearing house collateral requirements and that brought congressional hearings and lasting resentment from retail traders, including [[Keith Gill]] followers who migrated into crypto. The crypto arm soon carried the firm: in the second quarter of 2021, 62 percent of Robinhood's crypto revenue came from [[Dogecoin]], per a crypto.news profile. He also cofounded Harmonic, an AI math startup that raised a 100 million dollar Series B in July 2025.

## Robinhood Chain and tokenized stocks

On the April 29, 2026 earnings call Tenev declared a "tokenization supercycle" underway, per Fortune. On July 1, 2026 he unveiled [[Robinhood Chain]] at a London livestream billed as The World is Flat: an Ethereum layer 2 on Arbitrum's Orbit stack with roughly 100 millisecond blocks, ether for gas, and tokenized versions of more than 190 US stocks offering one to one economic exposure around the clock, initially for EU and EEA users only, per Forbes. By late July CoinDesk reported real world assets on the chain had jumped fivefold, with tokens like GameStop, Nvidia, and SpaceX each clearing hundreds of thousands of dollars in daily volume. On August 18, 2026 he publicly urged US regulators to clear a path for tokenized equities at home.

## Cash Cat and the trenches

Robinhood was nearly named CashCat, a detail from an old New Yorker profile that Tenev had confirmed and that the trenches resurrected in 2026 when [[Cash Cat]], a memecoin built on that lore, became the flagship coin of Robinhood Chain. When Robinhood listed $CASHCAT in its own app on August 6, 2026, the first chain native memecoin to cross into the brokerage, Tenev's company became, in trench terms, a listing venue whose choices can reprice an entire ecosystem overnight.

## References

- https://crypto.news/who-is-vlad-tenev-robinhood-ceo/
- https://www.forbes.com/profile/vlad-tenev/
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninabambysheva/2026/07/01/robinhood-launches-its-own-blockchain-new-stock-tokens-and-defi-products/
- https://fortune.com/2026/04/29/robinhood-ceo-says-a-tokenization-supercycle-is-underway-firm-looks-past-earnings-miss/
- https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/07/25/robinhood-chain-s-real-world-assets-jump-fivefold-as-tokenized-stocks-start-trading-in-bigger-size
- https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/08/18/robinhood-ceo-urges-u-s-to-clear-path-for-tokenized-stocks-as-overseas-markets-advance
- https://cryptobriefing.com/robinhood-tokenization-supercycle-tenev/
- https://x.com/vladtenev

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