International law firm Simmons & Simmons has advised Robinhood on the establishment of its pioneering programme for the issuance of tokenised securities.
Launched in July, the programme enables the issuance of digitally native securities, backed on a 1:1 basis by conventional form U.S. listed equities or exchange-traded products. The digital securities are issued by a Jersey entity and governed by Swiss law. The collateral backing the securities is monitored daily and verified periodically by a third party verification agent.
The programme forms part of Robinhood’s strategy of bringing real world assets ‘on chain’. The securities are issued and traded on Robinhood Chain, a new Arbitrum Layer-2 scaling solution built on Ethereum. The programme was approved by the Jersey Financial Services Commission for the purposes of its tokenised real-world assets framework. The Liechtenstein Financial Markets Authority approved the prospectus for the purposes of the EU Prospectus Regulation.
Simmons & Simmons advised on the legal and regulatory aspects of the arrangement, drawing on its expertise in cross-border capital markets transactions, financial services regulation, and digital assets.
The Simmons & Simmons team was led by partners Jochen Kindermann (Financial Services, Frankfurt), Oliver Ward (Structured Finance and Derivatives, London) and George Morris (Digital Business, London). Douglas Robinson (Disputes & Investigations, London) supported the project from an AML and sanctions perspective.
Commenting on the project, Oliver Ward said: “We were delighted to support Robinhood on this landmark transaction. The project demonstrates how financial products can be issued and traded on-chain, and showcases our strengths in advising on innovative tokenisation arrangements, structured finance transactions, and financial markets regulation.”
Simmons worked alongside Walkers, MLL Legal, Steptoe and Ellex, who advised on Jersey, Swiss, U.S. and Lithuanian law respectively.
