Tokenized stocks are growing fast — the question is whether you own the share or just its price

Tokenized stocks, which give buyers exposure to shares such as Apple or Nvidia through a token, have grown to roughly $2 billion globally, up from less than $500 million at the end of the first quarter. Joris Delanoue, chief executive of onchain securities infrastructure firm Fairmint, told CoinDesk that the industry is building distribution far faster than it is building ownership records, and that the result could be a digital rerun of Wall Street’s 1960s paper crisis.

His central point is one a beginner can use immediately: a token is not equity, though equity can be a token. Some tokenized stock products place the holder on the issuer-authorised shareholder register. Others provide only economic exposure to an underlying share, with a special-purpose vehicle or another intermediary standing in between. In that second case, rights to vote, to receive dividends, or to claim against assets if an issuer or vehicle fails become uncertain, and they can depend on layers of paperwork the token itself does not describe.

The historical comparison is specific. In the late 1960s, booming US trading overwhelmed a market that still moved paper share certificates by hand. Back offices fell behind, securities went missing, settlement failures piled up, and the New York Stock Exchange closed on Wednesdays for part of 1968 so firms could catch up. The clean-up helped produce centralised securities depositories and the Depository Trust Company. Delanoue’s worry is that exchanges, special-purpose vehicles, token wrappers and proprietary ledgers each keeping their own records could fragment ownership the same way, because the industry has treated record keeping and administration as the boring part.

It is worth noting where the argument comes from. Fairmint is an SEC-registered transfer agent that puts the shareholder register itself onchain and says it has processed more than $1.6 billion of equity natively onchain since 2019, so it sells the kind of infrastructure it is arguing for. The demand he describes is real either way, particularly from investors outside the United States who want a piece of large American technology companies, and providers including xStocks, Robinhood and Dinari have moved to meet it. At around $2 billion, tokenized equities remain a rounding error beside a traditional equities market worth more than $100 trillion.

If you are looking at one of these products, the question to settle first is what you actually own. Read whether the documents say you hold the share or exposure to its price, find out who maintains the register or acts as transfer agent, and check what happens to your claim if the issuer or the vehicle in the middle fails. A token that tracks a stock and a token that is a stock can trade at the same price and behave very differently on the day something goes wrong. This is information, not advice.