Tokens Themselves Are Assets: Three Tokenized Stocks, Which One Is Right for You?
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Tokens Themselves Are Assets: Three Tokenized Stocks, Which One Is Right for You?
Tokenization is not a substitute for traditional stocks, but rather a new type of financial instrument layered to accommodate different needs.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Prathik Desai
Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News
If you are overseas and want to buy stocks in SpaceX or Nvidia, it is not easy. You need a brokerage that supports account opening for residents of your country, compliant cross-border transfer channels, and often must meet qualified investor eligibility requirements. The vast majority of ordinary people cannot directly trade US stocks.
Blockchain offers an alternative: today you can gain exposure to US stock companies through tokenized stocks, but "tokenized stocks" is just a general term; it actually encompasses three completely different products.
The first is native equity registered on-chain by the stock issuer; the second is backed tokens held by an offshore entity, corresponding 1:1 to real stocks; the third is perpetual futures contracts with no underlying stock support whatsoever. For these three types of products, the ownership, voting rights, and price return rights enjoyed by holders differ vastly.
Currently, all three types of token products exist for Nvidia simultaneously; the first two types of tokens combined have over 650,000 real shares as underlying support. Yet perpetual contracts with absolutely no stock backing have trading volumes 4 to 5 times that of the other two spot token types.
Last week, Vaidik outlined some industry background: since 1973, the vast majority of stocks (whether tokenized or not) have operated on the same custody architecture. He also explained a core fact — the vast majority of people who nominally "hold stocks" do not actually own the corresponding shares. See details in "Who Really Holds Your US Stocks? 83% of the Market's Stocks Nominally Belong to This Institution"
In this article, I will break down the ownership structures of different on-chain stock tokens, and also analyze: even if investors are completely detached from real equity, the underlying logic of why the market is still willing to trade these tokens.
What is Stock Tokenization
Tokenized stocks are digital mappings of corporate shares on the blockchain. These tokens possess programmable attributes, can be freely transferred between different wallets, traded 24/7 without interruption, and can access various decentralized finance protocols; economic attributes of stocks such as stock price, dividends, and corporate distributions are embedded within the token mechanism.
The market size of tokenized stocks is no longer what it used to be: over the past year, the sector's total market capitalization surged nearly 5 times from $327 million to $1.5 billion.
The most noteworthy point of this tokenization wave is that traditional giants are entering the fray to experiment. DTCC, the clearing, settlement, and custody institution for the vast majority of US stocks and global securities transactions globally, announced last month that it will launch a tokenized securities pilot project in October 2026; the New York Stock Exchange also revealed earlier this year that it is building a 24/7 tokenized stock trading platform. These veteran institutions, deeply entrenched in securities infrastructure for decades, are all re-examining the existing trading system.
Currently, various stock tokenization solutions have emerged in the industry, with different on-chain products making trade-offs in ownership, redemption mechanisms, DeFi composability, and price return rights. Below we will break them down one by one.
Rights Trade-offs of Tokenized Products
Model One: Complete Real Equity, Holders Enjoy Full Ownership
SEC-registered transfer agent Superstate registers equity directly on the Solana public chain; holder names are recorded in the company's official shareholder register, fully owning voting rights, dividend eligibility, and legal shareholder status.
In May 2026, Galaxy adopted this model to complete equity tokenization and achieved on-chain proxy voting through Broadridge; as early as December 2025, compliant equity tokens issued by Superstate landed on Kamino, becoming the first registered equity that could be used as collateral in DeFi protocols.
Model Two: Cede Full Ownership in Exchange for DeFi Composability
xStocks launched by Backed issues tracking certificates through a Jersey Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), covering over 160 types of stocks, with underlying 1:1 matching to real shares; Ondo issues total return notes relying on a British Virgin Islands SPV, supporting over 200 types of tokenized stocks, and total value locked surpassed $1 billion just 8 months after launch. Both types of products allow investors to enjoy stock price appreciation returns and dividends, but dividends are not distributed directly in cash, but are automatically minted into your token balance.
The biggest advantage of this model lies in high composability: xStocks can be used as lending collateral on Kamino and Morpho; less than 24 hours before this article was published, Ondo opened 24/7 minting and redemption channels for its mainstream tokenized stocks, achieving year-round operation in the primary market.
But the risks are equally prominent: you only hold a claim against the SPV and do not directly own the underlying stocks. The PreStocks collapse event serves as a warning: in May 2026, its underlying share transfers were ruled invalid, with only $23 million of real stocks supporting tokens valued as high as $1.3 trillion, leading to a complete product collapse. Although Backed and Ondo reduce risks through segregated custody and proof of reserves, the risk has not disappeared, it has merely shifted from the corporate entity to the SPV wrapper layer.
Model Three: Completely Abandon Equity Ownership, Pure Price Speculation Tool
Hyperliquid's HIP-3 framework allows anyone to build a perpetual contract market, requiring only a price oracle and a liquidity pool to operate. Head project TradeXYZ occupies over 90% of open interest in the HIP-3 framework, launching Nvidia, Tesla, Google, Amazon, and Nasdaq 100 Index perpetuals; Ostium deployed on Arbitrum has also launched similar products.
The platform collects funding fees every hour to balance long and short positions, thereby anchoring the perpetual contract price to the stock spot price.
There are realistic reasons why perpetual contract trading volume far exceeds spot tokens: building a stock spot token market requires a complete system of supporting SPVs, brokerages, custodians, and proof of reserves; whereas launching perpetual contracts only requires accessing price data sources. TradeXYZ even launched its perpetual contracts before SpaceX filed its S-1 prospectus, with open interest reaching $50 million directly. Spot tokens relying on SPVs simply cannot achieve this speed, because physical institutions cannot quickly purchase sufficient corresponding underlying stocks.
Core Value of Tokens: No Need to Rely on Real Shares
The vast majority of retail investors never exercise voting rights. Survey data from the Harvard Law School Forum shows that on average, only 12% of retail accounts in a company will participate in shareholder meeting voting. For global traders wanting to position in blue-chip stocks like Nvidia, Google, SpaceX, Tesla, etc., giving up a voting right they will never use is completely irrelevant.
Tokens themselves possess independent asset value and do not need to be completely equivalent to native stocks. The three types of tokenized products correspond to three types of investment demands: institutional long-term capital pursuing complete shareholder rights, on-chain users valuing DeFi collateral and liquidity, and short-term speculators preferring high leverage and 24/7 trading. Tokenization is not a substitute for traditional stocks, but a new type of financial tool layered to adapt to different demands.
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