Robinhood launched derivatives trading in OpenAI and SpaceX shares. How did the market react?

Robinhood launched trading in tokenized shares of OpenAI and SpaceX, opening access to such assets to a broad EU audience for the first time. The market's reaction to the opportunity to invest in the securities of the most expensive non-public startups was strong: Robinhood shares hit an all-time high, and the Arbitrum cryptocurrency - the basis of the tokens - went up sharply.

Robinhood began offering users digital copies of more than 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs, including non-public OpenAI and SpaceX. After that, Robinhood shares jumped in New York by almost 13% in the main trading and reached a new all-time high of $93.6 per share. At the post-market quotations of the trading floor grew by another 3%.

To celebrate the launch, Robinhood is giving €5 worth of OpenAI and SpaceX tokens to every EU user who joins the auction before July 7. In total, the campaign has $1 million in OpenAI tokens and $500k in SpaceX tokens. As noted CNBC, Robinhood is the first time Robinhood has offered tokenized shares of non-public companies - also thanks to looser regulation in the EU. Unlike in the U.S., where such investments require accredited investor status, anyone who meets the platform's basic requirements can trade tokens in the EU, noted Robinhood's head of crypto, Johan Kerbrath.

Tokenized shares traded on Robinhood are issued as tokens based on the Ethereum-based layer 2 network, Arbitrum. The new feature is integrated into Robinhood's cryptocurrency app for the EU, turning it into a "universal cryptocurrency-based investment platform," wrote Coindesk, citing a company statement. The day before the announcement, Arbitrum soared 17% in value on rumors of a partnership with Robinhood, notes Cointelegraph.

Robinhood is also building its own network for tokenized assets. It will support 24/7 trading, allow users to store their digital assets without intermediaries, and allow tokenized assets to move freely from one blockchain network to another (for example, from Ethereum to Arbitrum, Solana, or Robinhood's own future network). No launch date has been announced, but according to data from Coindesk sources, it could happen in late 2025 or early 2026.

OpenAI was valued at $300 billion in a March 2025 funding round. Thanks to the hype around artificial intelligence, the value of developer ChatGPT has soared 300 times in the past 6 years. According to private equity trading platform Forge, OpenAI's valuation has risen to $325 billion by June 2025. In CB Insights' list of the most valuable startups, OpenAI shares second place with China's ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. 

SpaceX tops that list - with a valuation of $350 billion from an internal tender offer in December 2024. That's 10 times what the company was worth six years ago. Now the reusable space rocket maker founded by Elon Musk is valued even higher - according to bidding data on the Forge platform, SpaceX's current capitalization is $426.5 billion. 

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor