There’s an economic exposure, but none of the shareholder rights.
Written by: Boaz Sobrado
Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
“These ‘OpenAI tokens’ are not OpenAI equity.” On July 1, 2025, OpenAI’s newsroom account posted a clear-cut statement: “We have not partnered with Robinhood, we are not involved in this, and we do not endorse it.”
It’s not surprising that this warning appeared. The day before, on the stage in Cannes, Robinhood officially launched more than 200 tokenized U.S. stock tokens for European users and even gave away “stock tokens” linked to two of the most sought-after private companies—SpaceX and OpenAI. The problem is that neither of the two companies signed off on it. Within 48 hours, OpenAI reminded fans to “be careful.” A week later, Robinhood’s major regulator in Europe, Lithuania’s Bank of Lithuania, also stepped in, saying it was waiting for clarification on how these tokens are structured.
The real problem is structural. Holding a SpaceX token issued by Robinhood doesn’t mean holding SpaceX stock. What you actually own is a claim on a special purpose vehicle (SPV) fund, and that vehicle holds SpaceX preferred stock. The OpenAI token is even more absurd—it traces back to convertible notes, not stocks at all. In either case, the buyer ultimately receives only a number that fluctuates up and down with the company’s valuation, and almost nothing else—no voting rights, no name on the shareholder registry, and no true ownership.
People who build these products are actually very candid about it.
“Your name won’t appear on the shareholder register”
Chan Ahn is specifically someone who does this kind of tokenization. He is the founder and CEO of Tessera. On the *On The Margin* podcast, he doesn’t mince words: “Private markets are where the real wealth effect exists. But they’ve always been limited to the top 0.1% through cumbersome paperwork, high minimum investment amounts, and geographic restrictions.” His company sells and tracks tokens of SpaceX, and also predicts markets like Kalshi—private companies. When asked if you can buy one, he says, “There’s no KYC process. That’s intentional, not negligence.”
But he likewise admits plainly what tokens are not: “You are not a true private stockholder, so you don’t have voting rights. Your name won’t appear on the shareholder register, and so on. But you do get economic exposure to the underlying company—and that’s what matters.”
In other words, you’re buying price exposure, not ownership.
Contract claims, not ownership
Kula co-founder Chris Turner puts the distinction even more clearly: “What it truly does is simply reference the asset, or give you a contractual exposure to the asset’s upside in economic terms. But you don’t own the asset. The asset owner owns the asset.”
He further distinguished two modes. One is the now common “tokenized contract claims” model in today’s market; the other is true “tokenization of ownership”—“You own the token, and the token itself is the asset, so you own the asset. That’s different.” Turner admits that true ownership tokenization “is actually starting to happen,” but most ordinary investors are still encountering the former: a contractual right that moves with the price.
Regulators’ stance is almost entirely consistent. Natasha Cazenave, Executive Director of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), warned in September 2025 that tokenization tools “usually do not grant shareholder rights,” creating “a specific risk of investor misunderstanding.” The commissioner Hester Peirce, who leads the SEC’s crypto task force in the US, put it even more directly in a July 2025 statement: “Tokenized securities are still securities.” She added that blockchain “has no magical ability to change the nature of the underlying asset.”
In one sentence: putting claims on-chain doesn’t turn them into equity.
Issuer-led bets
Some people believe the real solution is to have someone else do it.
Edwin Mata is CEO and co-founder of Brickken. The Barcelona company was founded by him in 2020; before that, he was an M&A lawyer. He argues: stop having brokers or third parties wrap other people’s shares into offshore vehicles—instead, let companies themselves create their own tools as regulated securities on-chain, within their own jurisdictions.
Mata compares Brickken to Shopify in the financial world: “We’re a tokenization-as-a-service company, allowing any business to instantly digitize financial instruments, with no code and no need to deal with any technical details.” Companies can use it to tokenize equity, debt, bonds, commodities, gold, and real estate—and all done within their own jurisdictions.
The company claims it has tokenized more than $660 million in assets across 40 countries (self-reported and unaudited). Mata emphasizes that tokenization isn’t some new invention—it’s an upgraded version of securitization. “Tokenization comes from securitization, and basically it’s upgrading the original thing.”
The scenario he likes most is actually quite down to earth—debt instruments such as short-term accounts receivable, invoices, and factoring. “Because it has high liquidity and large volume.” It’s far from the lively spectacle of free SpaceX tokens, but much closer to the “infrastructure-level” applications regulators would like to see.
“Embed it into the entire economy”
No matter whether Brickken becomes the winner, the whole market is moving in this direction.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund BUIDL launched in March 2024, for the first time making major institutions take this seriously. Robinhood’s own blockchain, built on Arbitrum technology, also went live on the mainnet on July 1, 2026. According to data from RWA.xyz, excluding stablecoins, the transferable on-chain value of real-world assets has grown from about $8 billion in 2024 to the current $26 billion to $32 billion.
Bruno Caratori, co-founder and COO of crypto index manager Hashdex, points out that the real obstacle is often not technology, but understanding: “People find it hard to invest in something they don’t understand. They need to be able to explain to themselves clearly why this particular asset or asset class will appreciate over time.”
Mata looks further ahead. What he expects is a “capital markets agent”—AI that can automatically help issuers create tokenized products based on market value and demand. He says: “It won’t just remain a pure niche area of blockchain anymore—it will be embedded into the entire economy.”
But none of this discussion can avoid the most core question: do tokenized shares actually bring ownership, or are they merely about price?
At this point, builders and regulators have surprisingly reached rare agreement. As Chris Turner puts it, once the token itself is the asset rather than a claim on the asset, “you own the asset. That’s different.”
At present, the vast majority of so-called “tokenized stocks” in the market still fall into the latter category.
Buyers need to think clearly about what exactly they’re buying.