Robinhood Securities has received approval to act as an underwriter for initial public offerings, according to CEO Vlad Tenev. The announcement came via a post on X on Tuesday where Tenev stated the firm is “now approved to serve as an underwriter.” He did not specify which regulator granted the approval, though the process typically involves oversight from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
A natural next step for Robinhood
The move follows Robinhood’s launch of IPO Access in 2021, which allowed retail investors to buy shares at the offering price. Tenev framed the underwriter status as the logical progression of that service. He noted that the question in equity capital markets has shifted from “why allocate to retail at all?” to “how big can the allocation be?”
This development comes as SpaceX reportedly considers making as much as 30% of its record-setting offering available to retail investors. Demand for that listing is already running at close to four times the planned size, according to reports.
Crypto platforms race for SpaceX listings
Robinhood’s push into IPO underwriting coincides with a broader trend among crypto platforms to build alternative access to private market listings. Major exchanges like Bybit, Kraken, and Coinbase have begun offering tokenized pre-IPO products. For example, Bybit has its xStocks program, Kraken offers pre-IPO equity tokens, and Coinbase operates secondary markets for private company shares.
On the derivatives side, a report from Talos and Coin Metrics argues that onchain pre-IPO perpetuals are becoming a meaningful venue for price discovery. The report notes that liquidity in these markets is increasingly a hybrid of retail traders, crypto-native funds, and systematic market makers. For SpaceX contracts on Hyperliquid, volumes have reached billions of dollars with hundreds of millions in open interest.
Pre-IPO perpetuals as an additional signal
The report highlights a specific example with Cerebras Systems, where Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO futures tracked the stock’s eventual opening level within about 1%. Meanwhile, the underwriters priced the IPO itself far lower. Samar Sen, vice president of international markets at Talos, told Cointelegraph that underwriters and retail platforms like Robinhood are likely to monitor these signals for high-profile listings. He said they can serve as a supplementary input for assessing demand but not as a replacement for traditional book-building.
“For an underwriter, pre-IPO perpetuals are unlikely to determine retail versus institutional allocations on their own,” Sen said. “But they can provide an additional signal around investor demand ahead of listing.”
