Robin Hood AMC stock token soars to $18, CEO challenges deal

Robinhood's tokenized stocks business faces new scrutiny, amid controversy over unusual surge in AMC token prices

Robinhood's expansion into tokenized stocks is facing a new regulatory scrupy after the price of an AMC-related token briefly soared to more than six times the base share price. At the same time, AMC Entertainment CEO Adam Aron questioned the product's legitimacy.

The controversy coincides with two interruptions in Robinhood Chain's data submission to Ethereum, adding new questions to the fast-growing area surrounding round-the-clock trading chain stock markets.

AMC tokens soared to $18, while stock prices remained below $3.

The clearest signs of tension between traditional stocks and the tokenized market came after U.S. stock trading closed on Thursday. On Robinhood Chain, AMC-related tokens traded to a high of $18.04, then quickly fell back and waived the premium.

shows that the AMC token had been closely tracking the price movement of the underlying stock before it suddenly surged early Friday morning. The rise peaked at nearly $18 and was accompanied by a sharp increase in trading volume, before the token price fell back to around $2.67 and eventually stabilized.

According to The Defiant, within the hour when the token hit $18.04, the deepest AMC/USDG liquidity pool recorded $10.2 million in transaction volume. At the time, reference AMC's stock price, which had previously closed on the New York Stock Exchange, was $2.54. As more tokens enter circulation, this spread gradually narrows. The Defiant's on-chain analysis found that the supply of outstanding AMC tokens increased from approximately 157,844 to approximately 1.5 million in 18 hours, and the intervention of arbitrage activities helped the token price return to the stock price it tracks.

AMC shares do not show extreme volatility as tokens

On Friday, AMC listed shares traded more regularly, highlighting the possible disconnect when contemporary monetized products are traded outside normal Eastern U.S. market hours.

According to the daily chart provided, AMC shares closed around $2.65 on Friday, an increase of about 4.3%. During the trading session, stock prices fluctuated between $2.59 and $2.80 and remained above the 50-day exponential moving average around $2.40.

This contrast is very sharp. Although the actual stock price remained below $3, its Robinhood associated tokens briefly traded for more than $18, and then returned to roughly the same price level as AMC shares.

Robinhood stated in its filing notes that the stock tokens are tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited. They provide economic exposure to underlying U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), but do not give token holders legal or beneficial ownership rights in the relevant companies themselves. In addition, these tokens are not registered under U.S. securities laws and cannot be made available to U.S. people.

AMC CEO challenges Robinhood's stock token model

Aaron asked Robinhood to stop trading AMC-related tokens and said theater operators have asked securities lawyers to review the possibility of forcibly suspending the business.

Robinhood refused the request. Chief Legal Officer Dan Gallagher responded by asking Aaron to send his lawyer to negotiate, while CEO Vlad Tenev said the company firmly supports stock tokens. As of Friday, AMC had not filed securities disclosure documents in relation to the dispute.

The disagreement raises broader questions about tokenized equity: A blockchain-based tool can quote a listed company's stock but does not give the company control over token issuance or secondary market transactions.

Robinhood Chain experienced a 14-minute Ethereum data submission gap, not a complete outage

There were initially reports that the Robinhood Chain network had a 14-minute outage, which also attracted attention. Subsequent on-chain analysis found that the chain was actually still producing blocks.

The actual situation is that Robinhood Chain's mechanism for submitting transaction data to Ethereum was suspended twice on September 4-the first lasted for 8 minutes and 36 seconds, and the second lasted for 5 minutes and 24 seconds. The two interruptions totaled exactly 14 minutes.

This distinction is critical: the evidence does not indicate that Robinhood Chain itself stopped processing transactions, but rather shows a temporary interruption in the mechanism used to publish transaction data back to Ethereum.

For Robinhood, the incident came at a critical moment as his tokenized stock experiment shifted from technical novelties to larger-scale market testing. The brief jump of AMC tokens from about $2.50 to $18 demonstrates both its appeal and reveals the outstanding risks of having equity-linked instruments trade around the clock, especially when traditional markets where underlying stock prices are established are closed.