Written by: Prathik Desai

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

If you are overseas and want to buy shares of SpaceX or Nvidia, it is not easy. You need a broker that supports account opening for residents of your country, compliant cross-border transfer channels, and often must meet the qualifications of accredited investors. The vast majority of ordinary people cannot directly trade US stocks.

Blockchain offers an alternative: today you can invest in US companies through tokenized stocks, but "tokenized stocks" is just a general term that actually includes three completely different products.

The first type is native equity registered on-chain by the stock issuer; the second type is backed tokens held by offshore entities corresponding 1:1 to real stocks; the third type is perpetual futures contracts that have no underlying stock support at all. In these three categories of products, the ownership, voting rights, and price benefits enjoyed by holders vary greatly.

Currently, Nvidia has all three types of token products in existence, with the first two categories collectively having over 650,000 shares of real stocks as underlying support. However, the perpetual contracts that are completely unbacked by stocks have trading volumes that are 4 to 5 times that of the other two types of spot tokens.

Last week, Vaidik reviewed some industry background: since 1973, the vast majority of stocks (whether tokenized or not) have operated under the same holding structure, and he explained a core fact - the vast majority of people who nominally "hold stocks" do not actually own the corresponding shares. See “Who Really Owns Your US Stocks? 83% of Stocks in the Entire Market Nominally Belong to This Institution” for details.

In this article, I will dissect the ownership structure of different on-chain stock tokens, while analyzing: even if investors completely detach from real equity, the market is still willing to trade these types of tokens' underlying logic.

What is Stock Tokenization

Tokenized stocks are digital representations of corporate shares on the blockchain. These tokens have programmable properties, can be freely transferred between different wallets, traded 24/7, and can connect to various decentralized finance protocols; the economic attributes of stocks such as price, dividends, and corporate profit-sharing are all embedded in the token mechanism.

The market size of tokenized stocks has dramatically changed: over the past year, the total market capitalization surged nearly 5 times from $327 million to $1.5 billion.

One noteworthy aspect of this wave of tokenization is that traditional giants are increasingly experimenting. Last month, DTCC, the global clearing, settlement, and custody institution for the majority of US stocks and global securities trading, announced it would launch a tokenized securities pilot program in October 2026; earlier this year, the New York Stock Exchange also revealed it is building an around-the-clock token stock trading platform. These long-established institutions that have been deeply involved in securities infrastructure for decades are reassessing the existing trading system.

Currently, various stock tokenization solutions have emerged in the industry, with different on-chain products making trade-offs regarding ownership, redemption mechanisms, DeFi composability, and price benefits. Let's break these down one by one.

Equity Trade-offs in Tokenized Products

Model 1: Complete Real Equity, Holders Enjoy All Ownership Rights

SEC registered transfer agent Superstate directly registers equity on the Solana public chain, and the holder's name will be recorded in the official shareholder register of the company, fully owning voting rights, dividend eligibility, and the legal status of a shareholder.

In May 2026, Galaxy completed equity tokenization using this model and achieved on-chain proxy voting through Broadridge; as early as December 2025, compliant equity tokens issued by Superstate entered Kamino, becoming the first registered equities that could be used as collateral in DeFi protocols.

Model 2: Transfer Complete Ownership to Obtain DeFi Composability

Backed launched xStocks, which issues tracking certificates through a special purpose vehicle (SPV) in Jersey that covers over 160 stocks, with a 1:1 match to real shares; Ondo issues full yield notes relying on a British Virgin Islands SPV, supporting over 200 tokenized stocks, with a total locked value exceeding $1 billion in just 8 months. Both types of products allow investors to enjoy profits from stock price increases and dividends, but dividends are not directly paid in cash; instead, they are automatically added to your token balance.

The biggest advantage of this model is high composability: xStocks can be used as collateral for lending on Kamino, Morpho; just 24 hours before this article is released, Ondo opened a round-the-clock minting and redemption channel for its mainstream tokenized stocks, achieving a non-stop primary market.

However, risks are also significant: you only hold a debt claim against the SPV and do not directly own the underlying stocks. The PreStocks collapse incident serves as a cautionary tale: in May 2026, the transfer of its underlying shares was deemed invalid, with only $23 million in real stocks supporting a token valued at up to $13 trillion, ultimately leading to the total collapse of the product. Although Backed and Ondo have reduced risks through isolated custody and reserved proofs, risks have not disappeared; they have merely shifted from the corporate entity to the SPV packaging layer.

Model 3: Completely Abandon Ownership Rights, 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. The leading project TradeXYZ occupies over 90% of the outstanding positions in the HIP-3 framework, launching perpetual contracts for Nvidia, Tesla, Google, Amazon, and the Nasdaq 100 index; Ostium, deployed on Arbitrum, has also launched similar products.

The platform collects funding rates every hour to balance long and short positions, thus anchoring perpetual contract prices to the prices of the underlying stocks.

The trading volume of perpetual contracts far exceeds that of spot tokens for practical reasons: setting up a stock spot token market requires a complete system including SPV, brokers, custodians, and proof of reserves; whereas launching perpetual contracts only requires connecting to price data sources. TradeXYZ even launched its perpetual contracts before SpaceX filed its S-1 prospectus, reaching an outstanding size of $50 million directly. Spot tokens relying on SPV simply cannot achieve this speed, as physical entities cannot quickly purchase sufficient underlying shares.

The Core Value of Tokens: No Need to Rely on Real Shares

The vast majority of 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 votes for a given company. For global traders looking to invest in blue-chip stocks such as Nvidia, Google, SpaceX, and Tesla, giving up a voting right they will never use is simply inconsequential.

Tokens themselves have independent asset value and do not need to completely equate to native stocks. The three types of tokenized products correspond to three investment needs: institutional long-term funds seeking complete shareholder rights, on-chain users valuing DeFi composability and liquidity, and short-term speculators preferring high leverage and around-the-clock trading. Tokenization is not a substitute for traditional stocks, but rather a new type of financial tool that adapts to different needs in layers.