OpenAI issued a press release on Wednesday clarifying that OpenAI tokens distributed to European Union customers by the buying and selling platform Robinhood don’t signify fairness within the firm.
“We aren’t concerned on this and don’t endorse it,” representatives of the corporate wrote on social media. “Any switch of OpenAI fairness requires our approval — we didn’t approve any switch. Please watch out.”
Robinhood distributed $5 price of OpenAI and SpaceX tokens to shoppers within the EU area on Monday as a part of the corporate’s push into tokenized inventory buying and selling, which included launching a layer-2 blockchain community to settle tokenized fairness trades.
In a press release to Cointelegraph, representatives for Robinhood stated the token giveaways had been restricted to “eligible European prospects.”
“These tokens give retail buyers oblique publicity to non-public markets, opening up entry, and are enabled by Robinhood’s possession stake in a particular function car.”
SpaceX and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk took the chance to criticize OpenAI’s company construction. “Your ‘fairness’ is pretend,” Musk stated in a X submit.
Musk left OpenAI’s board in 2018 and has since been outspoken about what he sees as a departure from the nonprofit, mission-driven mannequin towards a profit-first mannequin. He has filed lawsuits accusing OpenAI of breaching its constitution and diverting charitable property for personal achieve.
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Robinhood publicizes tokenized real-world asset buying and selling
Robinhood first tipped plans to introduce tokenized inventory buying and selling for European prospects in Might 2025. No date or timeline has been given for a US rollout.
Talking at Consensus 2025 in Toronto, Canada, senior vp and normal supervisor of Robinhood Crypto Johann Kerbrat stated that the mixing of tokenized real-world property on the platform promotes monetary inclusion.
The corporate’s foray into tokenized equities comes amid a broader effort by crypto exchanges to combine tokenized shares, authorities securities, company bonds and different conventional property into their platforms, blurring the road between conventional and digital finance.
Robinhood argues that tokenization opens up beforehand inaccessible asset lessons like personal fairness, personal credit score, and industrial actual property investing to most of the people via the magic of asset fractionalization.
Non-public fairness and personal credit score are usually reserved for accredited buyers which have $1 million or extra in investible property or meet the annual earnings and licensing necessities of accreditation underneath EU and US rules, making them prohibitive to common retail buyers.
The corporate introduced the rollout of its layer-2 blockchain community and tokenized real-world asset buying and selling through the firm’s occasion in Cannes, France on Monday.
“Crypto is rather more than a speculative asset, it has the potential to grow to be the spine of the worldwide monetary system,” CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev stated.
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