Robinhood books a seat at the underwriting table while Hyperliquid already priced the IPO 🚀

Robinhood Securities said Tuesday it has secured approval to act as an IPO underwriter, moving the brokerage from a distribution role into the main underwriting group alongside Wall Street banks. Chief executive Vlad Tenev announced the milestone in an X post, writing that Robinhood Securities is "now approved to serve as an underwriter." He did not specify which regulator granted the approval, a process that typically involves oversight from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Tenev framed the move as the "natural next step" after launching IPO Access in 2021, adding that the question in equity capital markets had shifted from "why allocate to retail at all?" to "how big can the allocation be?"

The expansion lands as SpaceX reportedly considers making as much as 30% of its offering available to retail investors, with demand running at close to four times the planned size, and as crypto-native venues build parallel rails for accessing the same listings. Major exchanges have rolled out tokenized pre-IPO products, including Bybit's xStocks, Kraken's pre-IPO equity tokens and Coinbase's secondary markets. A Tuesday report from Talos and Coin Metrics argued that onchain pre-IPO perpetuals are emerging as a meaningful price-discovery venue, with SpaceX contracts on Hyperliquid generating billions in volume and hundreds of millions in open interest.

The Talos report pointed to Cerebras Systems, where Hyperliquid's pre-IPO futures tracked the stock's eventual opening level within about 1%, while underwriters priced the IPO itself far lower. Samar Sen, vice president of international markets at Talos, said pre-IPO perpetuals are "unlikely to determine retail versus institutional allocations on their own, but they can provide an additional signal around investor demand ahead of listing." The shift underscores how liquidity for high-profile private listings is increasingly a hybrid of retail traders, crypto-native funds and systematic market makers, even as traditional book-building remains the underwriting industry's core process.