In 1917 they traded shares in companies that never agreed to it. On Robinhood Chain they still do.
Robinhood has issued more than 190 stock tokens tracking real companies. By Robinhood's own description they give economic exposure to a share without granting any legal or beneficial rights in, or against, the company being tracked.
No public statement means we have found none, not that the company consents. Updated 2026-09-05. Corrections welcome on X.
For most of the nineteenth century the New York Stock Exchange was a closed room. Membership was limited, expensive and handed down. If you were not a member you did not trade there. That was the point of it.
So the trading happened outside. On the pavement of Broad Street, in whatever weather the day gave them. The men out there dealt in the companies the exchange would not list, which in practice meant most of the country. Railroads first. Then oil, mining, copper, textiles, and later the automobile and aircraft firms nobody yet took seriously.
The press called them curbstone brokers. The market itself was just called the Curb, because that is where it was.
Here is the part that matters now. Much of what traded on the Curb was unlisted, and a company being traded did not have to agree to it. There was no application, no consent, no relationship. Brokers made a market in a company's shares because there was demand, and the company found out the same way everyone else did.
Some firms hated it. They wrote letters. They complained that a market they had not sanctioned was setting a price on their name and that the public would not know the difference.
The Curb kept trading.
The problem with an outdoor market is noise. Hundreds of men bidding at once on a narrow street between tall buildings, traffic on top of it, and no way to hear a voice from more than a few feet away.
The clerks solved it by going upstairs. Firms rented offices in the buildings along the street. Clerks leaned out of the upper windows and passed orders down by hand.
What developed was a working sign language. Fingers against the palm for the price. Arm position for buy or sell. Clerks wore bright clothing so their own broker could pick them out of the row of windows. None of it was written down anywhere official. When the hand came down the signal was gone.
In 1921 the Curb moved indoors, into a building on Greenwich Street. The hand signals went with it. The name kept changing. New York Curb Exchange, then in 1953 the American Stock Exchange, and eventually part of the group that owns the New York Stock Exchange itself.
The outsiders' market ended up owned by the people who had kept them out.
The word picked up a second meaning somewhere along the way, and the second meaning is close to the opposite of the first.
Trading curbs are restrictions. Circuit breakers, halts, the rules that stop the market when it moves too fast. When they trigger, traders say curbs are in. Nobody is trading, whether they want to or not.
The same four letters now cover the market that let everybody in and the mechanism that shuts everybody out.
Robinhood Chain now carries tokens tracking more than 190 companies and funds. The tokens are issued by a Robinhood entity, not by the companies. Holders get economic exposure and no shareholder rights. Most of the companies have said nothing at all.
Two have. In July 2025 OpenAI stated publicly that it had not partnered with Robinhood and did not endorse the token tracking its equity. In September 2026 AMC's chief executive called the tokenized version of his company's shares a quasi-fake market and asked Robinhood to stop. Robinhood declined.
An unlisted market, a price set on a company's name without its involvement, and the company objecting after the fact. That happened on Broad Street a century ago and it is happening again on a chain that is a few months old.
The Unlisted is the board. It is the only thing this project actually builds.
Curb Market is about that history and that parallel. $CURB trades on Robinhood Chain. Curbstone Brokers is the collection that goes with it, named after the men who stood in the street. There is no second token.
Curbstone Brokers is a collection of 2,000, one for each man who might have stood out there on a busy morning. Every piece is a hand signal, the private language the clerks used between the street and the upper windows. Details are announced on X.
Curb Market is an independent project. It is not affiliated with NYSE American, Intercontinental Exchange, Robinhood Markets, or any company named on the board.