PricepadWhat is a stock?
A stock is a slice of ownership in a company. Buy one share of Tesla and you own a genuinely tiny piece of Tesla — a claim on its future profits, and usually a vote at shareholder meetings.
Companies sell shares to raise money. Once those shares exist, people trade them with each other, and the price moves for one reason only: what someone else is currently willing to pay. Good earnings, a new product, an interest-rate decision, a rumour — they all matter only insofar as they change what buyers will pay and what sellers will accept.
Why prices move at all
There is no official price-setter. A stock's "price" is just the record of the most recent trade between two willing parties. If more people want in than out, buyers compete and the price rises. If everyone heads for the exit at once, sellers undercut each other and it falls.
What is a tokenized stock?
Robinhood Chain is a blockchain Robinhood built. On it, real equities are issued as Stock Tokens — ordinary ERC-20 tokens that track the price of a real share and trade 24 hours a day, including weekends, which the actual stock market does not.
Each token's price is published on-chain through Chainlink data feeds, and events like stock splits are handled by a multiplier baked into the contract, so the token keeps tracking the underlying correctly.
The important catch
A Stock Token gives you economic exposure — you gain if the share price rises, you lose if it falls. It does not make you a shareholder. No voting rights, no legal claim on the company. They're issued as tokenized debt securities by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited, Robinhood describes them as high-risk, and they aren't available to U.S. persons.
In one line: a Stock Token follows the price of a share without being a share.
Bid, ask, and the spread
At any moment a market has two prices, not one:
- Bid — the highest price anyone is currently willing to pay you for the token.
- Ask — the lowest price anyone is currently willing to sell it to you for.
The gap between them is the spread. You buy at the ask and sell at the bid, which means the spread is a cost you pay the instant you enter — before any fee, and before the price has moved at all.
A tight market
Buy and immediately sell and you're down about a cent on $100. The market barely charges you to change your mind.
A wide market
Buy and immediately sell and roughly three-quarters of your money is gone — not to fees or a crash, purely to the gap. The token needs to nearly quintuple just to get you back to even.
That second example is not hypothetical. It's the widest spread quoted on Robinhood Chain at the time of writing, and nothing on a normal price ticker would warn you about it.
How the twenty are picked
Pricepad reads every Stock Token quote from Robinhood's public API — around 194 of them — and works out each one's spread as a percentage of its ask price. It then sorts them tightest-first and shows the top twenty.
- Live, not cached. Quotes refresh roughly every 30 seconds while the page is open.
- "Best" means most tradable, not most likely to go up. A tight spread says a market is liquid and cheap to enter — it says nothing about whether the company is any good.
- Nothing is modelled. Every price and percentage on the board comes from the live feed. Where real history isn't available, the site shows a spread bar rather than inventing a chart.
The quotes API doesn't allow direct browser access, so the site fetches it through its own /api/market endpoint and passes the result to the page.
What "launch a coin" actually does
You choose some of the twenty, give each a weight adding up to 100%, name your token, and press deploy. Your wallet then sends a real contract-creation transaction to Robinhood Chain, and a new ERC-20 exists at a real address you can open in a block explorer.
- The contract is a standard ERC-20 — name, symbol, supply, transfers, approvals.
- Your basket (for example SGOV 70% / MU 30%) is stored inside the contract as text.
- The entire supply is minted to your wallet at creation. You own all of it.
- It costs real ETH gas — roughly 620,000 gas, shown to you before you confirm.
Read this part twice. The basket is a label, not a holding. Your token does not own, track, or entitle anyone to the underlying shares, and its price does not follow them. It's a name and a note written on-chain. Selling one to somebody as though it were backed by those stocks would be misleading them.
What this site can't do
Pricepad is a viewer and a deployer. It is deliberately not a broker.
- It cannot place a trade. There is no buy button, because buying a Stock Token means routing an order through a real venue, and this site doesn't do that.
- It never holds your funds. Connecting a wallet only reads public data — your address and your balances.
- It isn't advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or avoid anything.
If you want to actually trade tokenized stocks, that happens through venues that hold liquidity for them — on-chain AMMs such as Uniswap on Robinhood Chain, or through a regulated broker for the underlying shares themselves.