Securitize is launching the compliant, onchain trading experience for natively tokenized public stocks in Q1 2026. As clarified in the update, this is not a synthetic price tracker or an IOU against a custodian. As explained by Securitize, these are real, regulated shares: issued onchain, “recorded directly on the issuer’s cap table, and tradable through a Web3 swap-style experience.”
For investors, it sort of feels like DeFi. Under the hood or behind the scenes, it meets “standards of investor protection, market integrity, and regulatory compliance.”
At Securitize, they are committed to working with DeFi builders and regulators to bring “onchain innovation to the public markets.”
For most investors, the stock market feels like a “finished product.”
Users basically open a brokerage account, place a trade, and they are told that they own a share of a public company.
Securitize further noted that behind the scenes, however, sits infrastructure built decades “before the internet; where investors rarely hold shares in their own name, settlement takes at least a day, and multiple intermediaries sit between investors and issuers.”
Recently, a first wave of “tokenized stocks” tried to modernize this experience.
However, most of these products “offer exposure, not ownership.”
They rely on derivatives, SPVs, or “offshore structures that attempt to mirror stock prices, often introducing fragmentation, counterparty risk, and pricing inconsistencies.”
In certain cases, they are “not even compliant, since they issue bearer assets that, while representing securities, are issued as permissionless assets without any KYC or AML controls.”
Now, according to the popular website rwa.xyz, they now have four different versions of “tokenized” Tesla, none of them being “a token representing actual shares of Tesla and all of them being different instruments not fungible with each other.”
As clarified in the update, these types of instruments do “not place investors on the issuer’s cap table.”
They do “not carry shareholder voting rights.”
They tend to rely on legal constructs outside the issuer’s jurisdiction – and misrepresent “what they are, since they are not tokenized stocks but tokenized something else.”
If tokenization is going to matter at public-market scale, it must “deliver ownership, real securities and maintain investor protections.”
Stocks on Securitize reportedly represent “real public-company equity, compliantly issued and maintained onchain.”
When you acquire a stock on Securitize:
- Investors own regulated public-company equity
- Investors appear directly on the issuer’s cap table
- They receive full shareholder rights, including dividends and proxy voting
- Their shares exist as tokens under self-custody
- Assets cannot be lent or rehypothecated without your consent
- Tokens are transferable peer-to-peer across compliant, whitelisted wallets
This model works because Securitize acts “as the SEC-registered transfer agent, with the blockchain serving as the authoritative record of ownership. The token itself is the legally recognized share.”
Securitize first demonstrated this architecture in December 2024, when Exodus Movement, Inc. became “the first public company to issue its equity natively onchain.” This indicated that real public-company stock can “live onchain without compromising investor protection or compliance.”
This model requires issuer participation, which “means the initial universe of stocks will be selective.”
But as issuers and investors experience “the benefits of true onchain ownership, we expect this approach to expand rapidly.”
Until now, natively tokenized public stocks largely “remained static assets; issued onchain, held onchain, but traded, if at all, through traditional offchain processes.” This launch “changes that.”
Now, natively tokenized public stocks can be “bought and sold fully onchain, in real time, through a Web3-native experience, while complying with regulatory requirements that govern public-market trading.”
Some in the industry believed this was “not possible.”
But Securitize thought it was needed.
By bringing together regulatory engagement, infrastructure, and a commitment to investor protection, they claim to have made it possible.
Notably, they don’t intend to “keep this knowledge to themselves.”
Their stated goal now is to share how this works with “the broader ecosystem, so tokenization can grow responsibly across the industry.”