Vlad Tenev

CEO and Co-Founder @RobinhoodApp 📈📱Executive Chairman and Co-Founder @HarmonicMath 👁️‍🗨️👨‍🏫

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

The course is set.

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

Thousands of kids across Indiana became investors today.

$250 into each of their Trump Accounts, courtesy of @altcap and the Brad Gerstner Family Foundation.

Thanks for leading the way, Brad.

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

@altcap @TrumpAccounts @LincGerstner @JackGerstner_ @SecScottBessent @frankjbisignano @WhiteHouse 🫡

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

Fresh DRIP

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

We’re going somewhere new.

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

The infrastructure behind AI matters as much as the models themselves and RVI investors now have a stake in Crusoe as it builds that foundation.

[Robinhood @RobinhoodApp]

Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI) has invested $25M in @CrusoeAI part of their Series F!

Learn more: https://t.co/JIDCc87Omi

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

dividend benefits are here for our onchain dividend hounds 🔥

[Johann Kerbrat @JohannKerbrat]

Dividend benefits for Stock Tokens are getting an upgrade.
Dividend benefits are now applied automatically on the ex-dividend date instead of weeks later on payment day.

That means more immediate stock-equivalent economics from day one, no dividend dilution after the ex-date, and tighter pricing.

Already live across most Stock Tokens, with more to come 🔥

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

Tokenization is coming to America.

Thanks to the SEC’s leadership, Americans can start to reap the benefits of tokenization: instant settlement, 24/7 trading, fractionalization by default and more. It’s a good day for US innovation.

[Robinhood @RobinhoodApp]

Robinhood supports the @SECGov innovation exemption.

Americans deserve access to crypto technology and all of the financial innovations it makes possible, including instant settlement, 24/7 trading, and fractionalization by default.

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

AI will prove your code is correct

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

It's an increasingly common take that AI hacking means cybersecurity is doomed.

I disagree. I think cybersecurity is naturally defense-favoring once people get their shit together. And anyone who continues to hold cryptocurrency (including me, ~90% of my net worth) is implicitly making that bet.

Here's why I am making that bet.

First, the oversimplified punchy one-line statement:

If AI can prove Navier-Stokes and FLT, then AI can prove the statement "this program is secure" as a mathematical theorem. Even if the program is very complicated.

Now, the nuance:

(See also: https://t.co/6YPWgVT7rO )

The word "secure" is hiding all kinds of skeletons in the closet in terms of what it actually means. What does it mean for Signal (the encrypted messenger) to be "secure"?

The most basic definition you might think of is: no one who doesn't hold the recipient's secret key can read the contents of the message.

But:

* Did you remember to include _other_ critical forms of security? Can the adversary forge messages? Can the attacker prevent messages from reaching the recipient? Can they cause your client to crash by sending malformed messages?
* Have you made sure that your model of the adversary includes attackers that interfere with the protocol actively and not just passively? And attackers that interfere by replaying messages to you or the recipient that either of you sent over the wire at any point earlier?
* What if the adversary hacked (or _is_) the Signal server?
* How did you learn which public key belongs to the recipient in the first place? What if that process was tampered with?
* What if your device gets hacked at some point in the past or future - is your message still safe then?
* What if your key leaks because of a bug in your operating system? Or because you got a bugged version of the Signal client? Or what if the database is corrupted?
* Or the libraries, interpreter or compiler of the programming language you wrote it in?
* What if your key leaks because tiny perturbations in perceptible signals generated by the hardware leak mathematical relationships that can extract the key a few hundredths of a bit at a time?
* Are you hiding the *size* of the payload? Does that matter?
* You're definitely not hiding the identity of the sender and the recipient, and the exact time each message was sent (think: not just time-of-day, but also time deltas between one message and the next). Is that not enough to deduce a lot of important facts about what relationships you have, and what *kinds* of conversations you are having?

So ... even definitions can be over a thousand lines of code, and need deep careful thought to figure them out.

Working on making definitions more human-readable is of extreme importance - it's perhaps the only "high-level language" that matters right now.

But even still, even despite all of the above, for security-critical components, the definition is a much smaller attack surface than the implementation. Verifying that the definition is adequate is a much more tractable task than scanning over the code directly - and can become even more tractable with better tooling.

Definitions are also _additive_: if two groups have two different definitions A and B, then, well, you can just prove that the program satisfies both A and B. Code is not additive in this way: if a program is A + B, a bug in A _or_ B can sink the whole thing. Definitions are additive. And if you can't satisfy A and B at the same time, you've isolated the most important philosophical issue for your project to spend its next few weeks grappling with.

Sometimes, definitions are not much smaller than the implementation - UI components might be one example. But for many of the most critical components - message-passing protocols, sandboxes, cryptography like SNARKs and FHE - the asymmetry is real.

Historically, a large class of failures with this approach have come from people only verifying a small portion of their code, that they self-declared to be the security-critical portion, and ignoring the rest - and it turns out that something in the rest of the code is security-critical too.

This was reasonable back when verification was difficult and scarce. The solution today: sorry, you have to verify over literally your entire program, including database, networking, any caching layers, everything. Modern AI can do it.

So it's not about "the good guys find all the vulnerabilities before the bad guys do" - that could maybe work too, after all a finite program only has a finite number of vulns, but it's riskier - it's specifically an asymmetric strategy of making code that is much more resilient in the first place.

This is the kind of direction that Ethereum is going in for the next few years. There is no future for blockchains - especially blockchains with scalability and privacy - without doing this. We need to make software actually secure. And we have already made a lot of progress.

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

It's been far too long since our last product event ... you won't want to miss this

[Robinhood @RobinhoodApp]

Do you read us? Tune in September 29-30.

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

The builder response to Robinhood Chain has been immediate. New teams are shipping every week, and the ecosystem is only getting denser from here. If you're building onchain, we want to hear from you.

[Johann Kerbrat @JohannKerbrat]

Incredible to see the surge in new dev teams building on Robinhood Chain.

The ecosystem is expanding by the day. If you’re building on the chain, we want to hear from you.

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

In-kind redemption and voting are coming for Robinhood Stock Tokens

[Johann Kerbrat @JohannKerbrat]

With Stock Tokens TVL reaching over $170M and nearly $50B in DEX volume on the Robinhood Chain, we are getting more questions about what they are and how they work.

All Robinhood Stock Tokens are backed 1:1 with real shares in secure custody. And Stock Tokens receive the economic equivalent of dividends and corporate actions returns reinvested into their holdings.

In other words, when a new Stock Token is minted, we buy a real share of the company at the same time.

What about in-kind redemption and voting rights? Not yet, but they’re coming. Step one is to scale adoption of Stock Tokens. We’re actively working on redemptions for shares 1:1 with voting for eligible Stock Token holders on the roadmap. We know how to do this well: we run a shareholder engagement platform, Say by Robinhood, which allows shareholders to participate in actions like voting.

What about the technology? We built Stock Tokens to be composable, which allows developers to build new innovative offerings like we have seen the past few weeks, with many that we have yet to discover.

What am I the most excited about? Billions of people in the world don't have access to U.S. investment assets. With Stock Tokens, that era is ending. Any eligible customer with a phone and an internet connection can now get exposure to the most exciting market in the world.

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

Should companies be able to approve or veto the tokenization of their stocks? https://t.co/87RpKjnRRo

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

Stock Tokens are not available in the US or to US persons and are subject to restrictions in other jurisdictions, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. A full list of restrictions is available here: https://t.co/7zZysY6hbB

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

Stock Tokens on Robinhood Chain had a week.

[Token Relations @TokenRelations]

📊 Last week, tokenized stock DEX trading volume reached $4.3B, up 127.8% from the prior week, and had its first $1B day on September 4.

@RobinhoodApp has the biggest share, holding 66.3% of last week's volume with $2.87B.

@BNBCHAIN comes next, accounting for 23.5% with $1.01B.

@solana comes in third, making up 6.3% at $272M.

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

Going on stage at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in 5 minutes. Tune in! 📺

https://t.co/Dez5xVhCGH

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

Prediction markets need serious market infrastructure behind them.

Excited to partner with @OG_com and @cryptocom.

[Crypto.com @cryptocom]

A big next chapter for @OG_com.

@OG_com is now a standalone business at a $5B valuation, giving it dedicated capital and an independent operating model to accelerate its growth.

As part of that next chapter, @RobinhoodApp has selected @OG_com as an infrastructure and clearing provider for its Prediction Markets offering, while also taking equity stakes in https://t.co/WzYg6IreWE and https://t.co/hcDm4vdblb.

Learn more: https://t.co/PsVrd9EaYV

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

@scottmelker 🙌

[Vlad Tenev @vladtenev]

@kris @RobinhoodApp 🤝