Robinhood’s push into tokenized stocks is facing fresh scrutiny after an AMC-linked token briefly surged to more than six times the underlying share price while AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron challenged the product’s legality.
The dispute coincided with two gaps in Robinhood Chain’s data submissions to Ethereum, adding another question around the fast-growing market for stocks that trade on-chain around the clock.
AMC Token Surges to $18 While the Stock Stays Below $3
The sharpest sign of the tension between traditional shares and tokenized markets appeared after U.S. stock trading ended Thursday. The AMC-linked token on Robinhood Chain briefly traded as high as $18.04 before rapidly surrendering the premium.
AMC Robinhood Token 15-Minute Price Spike. Source: GeckoTerminal
The supplied 15-minute chart shows the AMC token trading close to the underlying stock before suddenly surging early Friday. The move peaked near $18 and was accompanied by a sharp increase in volume, before the token fell back toward $3 and eventually stabilized near $2.67.
The Defiant reported that the deepest AMC/USDG liquidity pool recorded $10.2 million in volume during the hour in which the token reached $18.04. At the time, the reference AMC share price from the previous New York Stock Exchange close was $2.54.
That gap narrowed as additional tokens entered circulation. The Defiant's onchain analysis found outstanding AMC token supply increased from about 157,844 to roughly 1.5 million tokens over 18 hours, helping arbitrage activity bring the token closer to the share price it tracks.
AMC Shares Show None of the Token's Extreme Volatility
AMC's listed shares had a much more conventional session Friday, highlighting the disconnect that can occur when a tokenized product trades outside normal U.S. market hours.
AMC Entertainment Daily Stock Price. Source: TradingView
AMC shares closed Friday near $2.65, up about 4.3%, according to the supplied daily chart. The stock traded between $2.59 and $2.80 during the session and remained above its 50-day exponential moving average near $2.40.
The contrast is striking. While the actual stock stayed below $3, its Robinhood-linked token briefly changed hands at more than $18 before returning to roughly the same price as AMC shares.
Robinhood says Stock Tokens are tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited. They provide economic exposure to underlying U.S. stocks and ETFs but do not give token holders legal or beneficial ownership rights in the companies themselves. The tokens are also not registered under U.S. securities laws and cannot be offered to U.S. persons, according to Robinhood's documentation.
AMC CEO Challenges Robinhood's Stock-Token Model
Aron demanded that Robinhood stop trading tokens linked to AMC and said the theater operator had asked securities lawyers to examine whether it could force a halt.
Robinhood rejected that demand. Chief legal officer Dan Gallagher told Aron to send his lawyers, while CEO Vlad Tenev said the company stood behind Stock Tokens. AMC had not filed a securities disclosure about the dispute as of Friday.
The disagreement raises a broader issue for tokenized equities: a blockchain-based instrument can reference a public company's shares without giving the company control over the token's issuance or secondary-market trading.
Robinhood Chain Had a 14-Minute Ethereum Data Gap, Not a Full Outage
Robinhood Chain also drew attention after initial reports described a 14-minute network outage. Subsequent onchain analysis found the chain continued producing blocks.
Instead, transaction-data submissions from Robinhood Chain to Ethereum paused twice on Sept. 4 — once for 8 minutes, 36 seconds and again for 5 minutes, 24 seconds. The two gaps totaled exactly 14 minutes.
That distinction matters: the evidence does not show that Robinhood Chain itself stopped processing transactions. It does show a temporary interruption in the mechanism used to post transaction data back to Ethereum.
For Robinhood, the episode arrives as its tokenized-stock experiment moves from a technical novelty toward a larger market test. The AMC token's brief jump from roughly $2.50 to $18 shows both the appeal and the unresolved risks of letting stock-linked instruments trade continuously, especially when the traditional market that establishes the underlying share price is closed.
