Robinhood Securities announced it has received approval to underwrite the IPO, moving from a distribution role to a primary underwriting group alongside Wall Street banks.
CEO Vlad Tenev said in an X post on Tuesday that Robinhood Securities “has been approved to serve as an underwriter,” but did not say which regulator gave approval, a process that typically includes oversight from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
Tenev characterized the move as a “natural next step” after launching IPO Access in 2021, and said the question in equity capital markets has changed from “Why allocate to retail in the first place?” “How big can I allocate?”
Robinhood will serve as an underwriter. Source: Vlad Tenev
His comments come as SpaceX is reportedly considering offering up to 30% of its record product to retail investors, with demand already reaching nearly four times what was planned.
SpaceX’s virtual currency rail competition
Robinhood’s move to sell IPO shares directly to app-based traders comes as crypto platforms race to create parallel rails for the same listing.
Major exchanges have begun offering alternative access to private markets through tokenized Pre-IPO products, such as Bybit’s xStocks, Kraken’s Pre-IPO stock tokens, and Coinbase’s secondary market.
On the derivatives side, a Tuesday report from Talos and Coin Metrics argues that on-chain pre-IPO perpetuals are becoming meaningful price discovery venues in their own right.
According to the report, liquidity is increasingly a hybrid of individual traders, crypto-native funds, and systematic market makers, with SpaceX’s hyperliquid contracts generating billions of dollars in trading volume and hundreds of millions of dollars in open interest.
The report focused on Cerebras Systems and found that while HyperLiquid’s pre-IPO futures tracked the stock’s final opening price level to within about 1%, the underwriters priced the IPO itself much lower.
Samar Sen, vice president of international markets at Talos, told Cointelegraph that underwriters and retail platforms like Robinhood are increasingly likely to monitor these signals for high-profile listings, but not as a replacement for traditional bookbuilding, but as ancillary inputs for assessing demand.
For underwriters, pre-IPO perpetual bonds are “unlikely to independently determine the retail versus institutional allocation, but can provide additional signals about investor demand prior to listing,” he said.
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