Tokens Themselves Are Assets: Three Types of Tokenized Stocks – Which One Is Right for You?

Author: Prathik Desai

Compiled by: Saoirse, Foresight News

If you’re living overseas and want to buy shares of SpaceX or Nvidia, it’s not an easy task. You need a brokerage that supports account opening for residents of your home country, a compliant cross-border fund transfer channel, and often you also have to meet the requirements to qualify as an accredited investor. The vast majority of ordinary people can’t directly trade US stocks.

Blockchain offers an alternative: today, you can position yourself in US companies through tokenized stocks. But “tokenized stocks” is just an umbrella term—it actually covers three completely different products.

The first is native equity that is registered on-chain by the stock issuer; the second is a backed token issued and held by an offshore entity, supported 1:1 by real shares; the third is a perpetual futures contract with absolutely no underlying stock backing. Across these three categories, the ownership rights, voting rights, and price appreciation rights that holders enjoy are dramatically different.

At present, Nvidia has all three types of tokenized products at the same time. The first two token types together are backed by more than 650,000 real shares. Meanwhile, perpetual contracts that have no stock backing at all have trading volumes that are 4 to 5 times those of the other two spot-token categories.

Last week, Vaidik laid out some industry background: since 1973, the vast majority of stocks—whether tokenized or not—have relied on the same share custody-and-escrow structure to operate. He also explained a key fact: most people who nominally “hold stocks” do not truly own the corresponding shares. See: Who Really Holds Your US Stocks? 83% of All Market Stocks Are Nominally Owned by This Institution

In this article, I will break down the ownership architecture of different on-chain stock tokens, and also analyze the underlying logic of why the market is still willing to trade these tokens even when investors are completely detached from actual equity.

What Is Stock Tokenization

Tokenized stocks are the digital mapping of a company’s shares on the blockchain. These tokens have programmable properties, allowing them to be freely transferred between different wallets and traded 24/7 without interruption, and they can also be integrated with various decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. Economic attributes of stocks—such as stock price, dividends, and corporate distributions—are built into the token mechanism.

The market size of tokenized stocks has changed dramatically. Over the past year, the sector’s total market cap surged nearly 5x from $327 million to $1.5 billion.

What’s most worth watching in this tokenization wave is that traditional giants are rushing in to experiment. DTCC, the clearing, settlement, and custody institution for the vast majority of US stocks and global securities trading, announced last month that it will launch a tokenized securities pilot program in October 2026. The New York Stock Exchange also revealed earlier this year that it is building an around-the-clock tokenized stock trading platform. These long-established institutions that have spent decades deeply building securities infrastructure are re-examining the existing trading system.

At present, multiple stock tokenization solutions have emerged in the industry. Different on-chain products make different trade-offs across ownership, redemption mechanisms, DeFi composability, and price appreciation rights. Below, we’ll break them down one by one.

Trade-Offs in the Rights of Tokenized Products

Model 1: Full real equity—holders enjoy all ownership rights

Superstate, an SEC-registered transfer agent, directly registers equity on the Solana blockchain. The holder’s name is entered into the company’s official shareholder registry, giving them full voting rights, eligibility for dividends, and legal status as a shareholder.

In May 2026, Galaxy used this model to tokenize equity and achieved on-chain proxy voting through Broadridge. As early as December 2025, the compliant equity tokens issued by Superstate were listed on Kamino, becoming the first registered equity that can be used as collateral in a DeFi protocol.

Model 2: Transfer full ownership in exchange for DeFi composability

xStocks launched by Backed issues tracking certificates through a Jersey special purpose vehicle (SPV), covering more than 160 types of stocks, backed 1:1 by real shares at the underlying level. Ondo, meanwhile, issues full-reward notes through an SPV in the British Virgin Islands, supporting more than 200 tokenized stocks. After being live for only 8 months, the total value locked for its product already exceeded $1 billion. Both types of products allow investors to benefit from stock price appreciation and dividends, but dividends are not distributed as cash. Instead, dividends are automatically issued as new tokens to your token balance.

The biggest advantage of this model is high composability. xStocks can be used as lending collateral on Kamino and Morpho. Less than 24 hours before the publication of this article, Ondo opened 24/7 minting and redemption channels for its mainstream tokenized stocks, enabling year-round primary-market operations.

But the risks are also prominent: you only hold a claim on the SPV—you do not directly own the underlying shares. The PreStocks collapse is a cautionary example. In May 2026, the transfer of its underlying shares was ruled invalid. Only $23 million worth of real stocks supported tokens with a valuation as high as $1.3 trillion; in the end, the product collapsed completely. Although Backed and Ondo reduce risk through segregated custody and reserve proof, the risk hasn’t disappeared—it has simply shifted from the corporate entity to the SPV wrapper layer.

Model 3: Completely give up equity ownership—pure price-trading tools

Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 framework allows anyone to build a perpetual contract market, requiring only a price oracle and a liquidity pool to run. The leading project, TradeXYZ, accounts for more than 90% of the open interest under the HIP-3 framework. It launched perpetuals for Nvidia, Tesla, Google, Amazon, and the Nasdaq 100 index. Ostium, deployed on Arbitrum, has also launched similar products.

The platform charges a funding rate every hour to balance long and short positions, thereby anchoring the perpetual contract price to the spot price of the stock.

There’s a real-world reason why perpetual contract trading volume far exceeds that of spot tokens: building a spot token market requires the entire supporting system, including an SPV, broker, custodian, and reserve proof. In contrast, to launch perpetual contracts, you only need to connect to a price data source. TradeXYZ even launched its perpetual contracts for SpaceX before it filed its S-1 prospectus, with open interest immediately reaching $50 million. Spot tokens backed by an SPV cannot achieve this speed, because real institutions cannot quickly purchase enough of the corresponding underlying shares in sufficient quantities.

The Core Value of Tokens: You Don’t Need to Rely on Real Shares

Most retail investors never exercise their voting rights. Research from the Harvard Law School Forum shows that, on average, only 12% of retail accounts participate in shareholder meeting voting in any given company. For global traders looking to gain exposure to blue-chip stocks such as Nvidia, Google, SpaceX, and Tesla, giving up a voting right they will never use is completely immaterial.

Tokens themselves have independent asset value and don’t need to be perfectly identical to native stocks. The three types of tokenized products correspond to three types of investment needs: long-term institutional capital seeking full shareholder rights; on-chain users who value DeFi collateral and liquidity; and short-term speculators who prefer high leverage and around-the-clock trading. Tokenization is not a replacement for traditional stocks—it is a new type of financial instrument tailored in layers to fit different needs.