How this works

Written for a smart person who has never used a crypto wallet. Eight short sections.

What a stock token is

A stock token is a digital coupon for one share of a company. Robinhood buys real shares and keeps them in custody. For each share it holds, it issues one token on a public ledger called Robinhood Chain. Anyone with the token can send it, hold it, or trade it. Anyone allowed to redeem can hand the token back and get the value of the share.

Think of a coat check. You hand over your coat and get a ticket. The ticket is not the coat. It is a claim on the coat. If people start trading the tickets among themselves, the tickets can change hands at any price, even while the coats stay on the rack.

Coats hang on a rack behind a counter. Out front, tickets change hands between people. the coats stay on the rack the tickets change hands at any price
Tokens are the tickets. The shares are the coats.

What a premium means

A premium means the token costs more than the share it stands for. If the share is worth 100 dollars and the token trades at 108 dollars, that is an 8% premium. Someone is paying 8 dollars extra for a ticket to a 100 dollar coat.

Premiums usually appear when the market is closed and demand shows up anyway. They usually shrink when the market opens and someone can mint new tokens by buying cheap shares and selling dear tokens.

What a discount means

A discount is the opposite. The token trades for less than the share. If the share is worth 100 dollars and the token trades at 94 dollars, that is a 6% discount. Sellers want out and no one is willing to pay full price.

Discounts close when someone buys the cheap token and redeems it for the full value of the share. That also needs the market to be open. Until then the discount can stay, or grow.

The pair: a meme token paired with a stock token

Tokens trade in pools. A pool is a pot that holds two things and lets people trade one for the other. The price is set by how much of each thing is in the pot. Some pools pair a stock token with a meme token, a coin whose value is mostly a bet on attention. We call the two of them a pair, and we name it meme first: AI paired with NVDA is "AI / NVDA".

In a pair like that, the meme token is priced in the stock token. When the stock token moves, the meme moves with it in dollars, whatever else is going on. And if a large share of all the stock tokens ends up inside that one pool, then the pool, not the stock market, decides the stock token's price most of the time. We call that share the supply in the pool. Past 30% we flag it. Past 50% the pool holds most of the supply.

Why weekends matter

The stock market opens on weekday mornings and closes in the afternoon. It is shut on weekends and holidays. The token does not care. It trades every hour of every day. But new tokens are only made when someone buys real shares and hands them to the custodian, which can only happen when the market is open. So on a Saturday the number of tokens is fixed. If a lot of people want to buy, no one can make more, and the price drifts from the last price of the share until Monday.

If you lend against the token

Some services let people borrow dollars by posting stock tokens as collateral. The service has to decide what the token is worth. If it uses the price of the real share, and the token is trading at a discount, the collateral is worth less than the service thinks. If it uses the pool price, and most of the supply sits in a meme pool, the price can move a long way on a small trade. Neither price is safe on its own. The gap between them is the risk, and that is the number this site shows.

What a second leg is

Every trade has two legs. Buying a token is the first leg. Turning it back into a real share, or into dollars at the real share's price, is the second leg. The first leg is easy and works at any hour. The second leg is hard. It only works when the market is open, when the custodian is redeeming, and when you are allowed to redeem. When people forget the second leg, they treat the token as if it were the share, and the price wanders. This site exists to keep the second leg in view.

What the numbers on the board mean

We do not sell anything. There is no token, no advertising, no button to trade or connect a wallet. If a number is missing or stale, we leave it blank and say why. The method page explains where every number comes from.