Tokenized stock transfers have climbed to $29.5 billion as new products extend market access, but Tessera PE founder Chan Ahn says investors could receive anything from direct share ownership to a contractual claim carrying no shareholder rights.

Tessera PE founder Chan Ahn told crypto.news that similar marketing terms often conceal substantial differences in what token holders own, how they receive dividends, and whether they can vote on company matters.

Ahn said he had not previously published an analysis of Securitize and based his comments about its model on publicly available information. He also separated Securitize’s reported NYSE listing, the tokenization of its own stock, and its ability to support offerings for other issuers, saying each involves a different legal question.

Tokenized stocks can give investors three different claims

Under Ahn’s reading of a January SEC staff statement, tokenized securities generally take one of three forms: issuer-sponsored securities, custodial products, or synthetic contracts.

In an issuer-sponsored structure, the company supports the tokenization and presents the token as the security itself rather than as a separate wrapper. If the structure works as described, Ahn said the holder’s voting, dividend, and information rights should be the same as those attached to a conventional share because both formats represent the same instrument.

Still, two operating details determine whether a token holder owns the security directly. Investors need to know whether their names appear on the shareholder register or whether a nominee sits between them and the company. The platform must also explain how the on-chain position reconciles with the settlement of shares traded on a public exchange.

“The answers decide whether you hold the security or a claim on somebody who does,” Ahn said.

A custodial token creates a different relationship because the underlying shares remain off-chain with an intermediary. According to Ahn, the investor may instead receive a security entitlement under Article 8 of the Uniform Commercial Code, similar to the indirect ownership structure used when a person holds stock through a broker.

Voting materials, dividends, and company communications reach the token holder only through arrangements made by the intermediary. Ahn said one structure he reviewed used Broadridge to process proxy materials and issuer communications, matching infrastructure already used by conventional brokerages.

Custodian failure also creates a separate risk. While a registered shareholder has a direct relationship with the company, a custodial-token holder may have to pursue a claim through the intermediary’s insolvency process.

Synthetic tokens sit further away from the company. Buyers own a contract with the product issuer rather than a share or an entitlement backed by shares. Ahn said the SEC staff warned that some products in this category could qualify as security-based swaps, potentially limiting access to eligible contract participants.

“So the honest answer to ‘what does an investor own’ is: read which of the three you are being offered, because the marketing language is close to identical across all of them and the legal substance is not.”

Voting, dividends and access to company information provide a quick way to test a product’s structure, Ahn added. Investors should ask which entity owes them each right and what happens if that entity fails.

Tessera’s own products do not represent equity. Ahn said the company issues tokenized loan participation rights that provide economic exposure but carry no ownership, voting, dividend, or information rights in the underlying business.

Company rules can still block token transfers

Even when a token can move between blockchain addresses, Ahn said issuer approvals, securities laws, and contractual lock-ups can prevent the related ownership or economic interest from changing hands.

Closely held companies commonly impose board-approval requirements, rights of first refusal, and limits written into shareholder agreements. Private companies may maintain their own shareholder registers rather than employ an outside transfer agent, allowing them to reject transfers that do not meet their conditions.

“A token cannot move what the register will not record,” Ahn said.

Federal securities rules add another layer through Rule 144 holding periods, affiliate volume limits, notice conditions, and investor eligibility requirements. Underwriter lock-ups can reach beyond direct sales of shares by restricting transactions that transfer the economics of ownership.

Citing SpaceX’s final prospectus, Ahn said shareholders were barred from certain hedging or other arrangements without prior written consent from Goldman Sachs acting for the underwriters. The clause, subject to stated exceptions, reportedly covered direct or indirect transfers of the economic consequences of ownership, whether settled in shares or cash.

Such language means a token offering exposure to locked shares may raise a contractual issue even if the token is not legally classified as the underlying stock. According to Ahn, providers offering economic exposure to positions still under lock-up should be able to explain how the product complies with those agreements.

Permissioned blockchain systems can enforce some limits through approved wallets, identity checks, and jurisdiction screening. When the token is the security, its transfer controls may enforce restrictions imposed by the issuer. For a wrapper, however, the same controls may enforce only the provider’s terms, which do not necessarily match the company’s requirements.

The issue has become more relevant as tokenized shares move into decentralized markets. Coinbase recently added six tokenized stocks on Base after its first four products generated $227.7 million in decentralized exchange volume in about 30 days.

The additions included tokens linked to Amazon, Microsoft, Strategy, SanDisk, Tesla, and privately held SpaceX. Coinbase’s structure uses an Abu Dhabi Global Market entity to issue tokens against underlying shares or eligible equity interests held in custody, but holders do not appear directly on the companies’ shareholder registers.

U.S. persons cannot access the products because they have not been registered under the Securities Act of 1933 or state securities laws. Coinbase offers them under Regulation S, which covers qualifying securities transactions conducted outside the United States.

Tokenized stocks do not create dependable liquidity

Trading access alone does not produce a liquid market, especially when a token tracks a private company without listed shares, options, or available stock to borrow.

Ahn said market makers quote prices when they can offset risk elsewhere. With pre-IPO assets, they often lack a closely matched instrument for hedging, forcing them to retain the risk on their own books and charge for it through larger bid-ask spreads.

Valuation creates a harder problem. Publicly listed tokenized stocks can follow prices formed continuously during exchange hours, giving trading platforms an external reference. A private company has no comparable public market, leaving platforms to rely on the latest primary funding round.

Private-round valuations emerge from negotiations among a limited group that already owns or plans to buy the asset. Using that figure for secondary trading can make a negotiated private valuation appear like a market-established price.

“An AMM with no external reference is not discovering a price; it is reflecting the flows of whoever happens to be trading it that day.”

Disclosure poses the largest obstacle because a private company generally has no duty to provide regular information to holders of an instrument it did not issue or approve. A token may trade continuously while the company behind its value releases financial information only when it chooses.

According to Ahn, a stronger structure would include a written valuation policy, an identified independent valuer, and a fixed schedule for updating the asset’s value. Disclosure duties should appear in the instrument’s legal terms, while platforms should label quoted prices as indicative when they do not represent executable market prices.

On-chain activity has already grown despite such differences. An August report found that monthly stock transfers rose 415% to $29.5 billion, while tokenized equities distributed on-chain were valued at about $2.54 billion. RWA.xyz also counted around 1.3 million active addresses and 2.36 million tokenized stockholders, although wallet figures do not equal the number of individual users.

Collateral use adds another risk because price gaps can trigger liquidations. Chainlink recently introduced feeds for four stocks issued by Coinbase, allowing lending platforms to assess tokens linked to Nvidia, Meta, Apple, and Alphabet.

Coinbase’s product documents warn that thin liquidity and different trading hours can cause token prices to separate from the underlying shares when U.S. exchanges are closed. Lending platforms also set their own collateral limits and liquidation terms.

Tokenized private credit can spread hard-to-value risks

Moving from equity into private credit does not remove the valuation and disclosure problems, according to Ahn, particularly when the debt finances AI infrastructure whose equipment may lose value quickly.

Pointing to a CoreWeave Form 8-K, Ahn said the company entered a $2.6 billion delayed-draw term loan facility on Aug. 7, 2026, through a ring-fenced subsidiary, with JPMorgan acting as administrative agent. The filing said the money would finance spending needed to perform customer contracts, including purchases of graphics processing unit servers and related infrastructure.

Borrowings under the facility can continue through December 2026, while the debt matures on Sep. 1, 2031. Ahn noted that the parent company unconditionally guarantees the facility and that substantially all assets of the borrowing subsidiary secure it.

CoreWeave’s filing also listed certain adverse events affecting material customer contracts among the events of default. In Ahn’s view, the provision makes those customer agreements central to the credit structure rather than merely sources of revenue.

The central valuation question concerns what the financed accelerators will be worth several years from now. Tokenizing the loan exposure would not establish a market price for that equipment, Ahn said, but it could distribute the same uncertainty among more investors who may have less ability to examine the underlying contracts and collateral.

Ahn also cited a Chicago Fed study showing that the average bank’s outstanding exposure to AI-adjacent industries was about 0.8% of total assets. Committed exposure, however, was closer to 25% of Tier 1 capital, compared with outstanding commercial and industrial exposure averaging 9%.

Among large banks, commitments to AI-adjacent industries reached about $450 billion in late 2025, according to the study, while approximately $150 billion had been drawn.

The SEC has proposed a 60-day rulemaking process to modernize transfer-agent systems for blockchain records as offshore demand for tokenized stocks grows.

Bitget Research Chief Analyst Ryan Lee told crypto.news that the SEC’s proposal addresses a part of tokenized stock markets that has received less attention than trading venues: the official record showing who legally owns each share.

Most tokenized stock products available outside the United States give investors price exposure through a synthetic or custodial structure, Lee said. Under such arrangements, a platform or custodian holds the underlying security, while the investor owns a token carrying a claim against that intermediary.

“The key difference is how ownership is recorded, not the token itself,” Lee said.

In the traditional US market, registered transfer agents maintain issuer records, process ownership changes, and help manage corporate actions. Connecting a token to an authoritative transfer-agent register could allow legal ownership to appear on the same official record used for conventional shares, according to Lee.

SEC tokenized stock proposal modernizes the ownership system

The SEC proposal, published on Sep. 1, would update federal rules and forms governing registered transfer agents. Existing transfer-agent rules have not received a substantial update since the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to the agency.

Under the plan, transfer agents could use electronic communications and blockchain technology when handling securities offerings and share transfers. Proposed changes also cover registration, reporting, recordkeeping, and safeguards for securities and funds.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins said the proposal would update the rules to account for current transfer-agent operations, including the use of blockchain technology. Public comments will remain open for 60 days after the proposal appears in the Federal Register.

Lee cautioned that the rulemaking deals with the systems supporting securities ownership, not the legal status of tokenized shares themselves. Adoption would not automatically establish a token as the underlying security or give its holder voting, dividend, and other shareholder rights.

“It modernizes the plumbing an authoritative tokenized register would eventually need,” Lee said, calling the proposal meaningful while stressing that substantive securities-law questions remain unresolved.

For American investors, the distinction determines whether an onchain product amounts to registered stock ownership or merely financial exposure tied to a listed company. Issuance terms, custody arrangements, and applicable securities laws would still govern investor rights even if a transfer agent stores records on a blockchain.

Offshore volume shows demand is concentrated in active stocks

Bitget recorded $1.16 billion in tokenized-stock trading volume between June 2 and July 19, according to figures provided by the exchange. Non-crypto assets have accounted for about 20% of its total trading volume, indicating that offshore users already trade stock-linked products without a dedicated US tokenization framework.

Citing research from DeFiLlama, Lee said Bitget’s activity centered on semiconductor and technology companies rather than being distributed evenly across more than 500 listed stocks.

The study found that Bitget had a median bid-ask spread of 0.83 basis points, the lowest among five tokenized-equity markets included in the comparison. It also recorded the deepest available liquidity at the top of its order book, according to the research.

Lee described the figures as evidence of demand for efficient trading in selected high-momentum names. However, volume alone does not establish whether users hold the products as long-term investments or repeatedly trade them.

Moving from price access to direct ownership would require clear rules governing legal title and shareholder rights, Lee said. A July tokenized stock study found that the number of holders across five platforms had risen 92% in 30 days to 752,000.

Robinhood accounted for 328,000 holders but only $44 million in assets, producing an average position of about $134. Ondo held $857 million in tokenized equities, while xStocks followed with $487 million, showing that holder counts and capital concentration can present different pictures of adoption.

Shared records could make tokenized shares interchangeable

Legal fungibility between a US-regulated tokenized share and an offshore counterpart would require both products to refer to the same authoritative ownership record, according to Lee. Without such a link, transferring a product between jurisdictions could create a separate instrument rather than move the original security.

Regulators would first need to recognize that a token representing a US-registered security remains the same security when held through an offshore platform. Lee identified cross-border recognition as the hardest condition because jurisdictions have not settled how an offshore holder could own a claim on the same registered share.

Market operators would also need a common or interoperable settlement and registry layer. A transfer would then update one accepted record instead of requiring two independent ledgers to be reconciled after each transaction.

Corporate actions add an operational requirement. Platforms and transfer agents would have to apply dividends, shareholder votes, transfer limits, and regulatory reporting consistently so that an asset does not gain or lose rights when it crosses from one venue to another.

Current products handle such rights in different ways. An August report on xStocks explained how Backed Assets collects voting instructions from token holders and passes them through its custodial structure. Backed remains the beneficial owner of the underlying shares, while token holders receive contractual instruction rights rather than direct registration as shareholders.

Access also varies by jurisdiction. In July, Kraken added selected xStocks as collateral for futures and margin positions, but the service remained limited to eligible users outside the United States. The launch covered ten products, including tokenized versions of Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, and the Invesco QQQ Trust.

Coinbase and Base have pursued another structure. Base founder Jesse Pollak said in July that the companies were preparing tokenized equities backed one-for-one by underlying shares, according to an earlier report on the plan. Coinbase had said its planned non-US products would represent equity ownership and include dividends and shareholder rights, though the companies had not disclosed the proposed custody or registry process.

Transfer-agent control could become a competitive advantage

Control over shareholder records may become more valuable as exchanges compete on fees, liquidity and trading hours, Lee said. Every venue ultimately needs to settle transactions against an accepted ownership register, giving transfer agents a central place in the market structure.

Lee pointed to Bullish’s planned Equiniti acquisition as evidence that companies are directing capital toward registry infrastructure. Announced in May, the $4.2 billion transaction would add a regulated transfer agent to Bullish’s tokenization, trading and market-infrastructure operations.

Equiniti maintains shareholder records for more than 2,500 companies and 20 million shareholders while processing about $500 billion in annual payments. The transaction includes $1.85 billion of assumed debt and roughly $2.35 billion in Bullish stock, according to the deal announcement.

Licensing demands, established issuer relationships and the trust placed in recordkeepers create high entry barriers for transfer-agent services, Lee said. Although the structure could concentrate activity among a limited number of providers, he argued that regulated and interoperable registers could reduce the fragmentation that prevents tokenized shares from becoming fungible.

Under Lee’s preferred model, several authoritative registers would operate under clear oversight and communicate with one another, while exchanges compete through liquidity and execution. The Bullish transaction is expected to close in early 2027, subject to regulatory approvals, with Equiniti’s management retaining responsibility for daily operations, compliance duties and client relationships.

Bitcoin (BTC) returned to $79,000 on Friday after key US inflation data broadly conformed to expectations.

Key points:

• US core CPI inflation data gained 0.3% month-on-month, surpassing expectations of 0.2%.
• Implied probabilities of an interest-rate hike by the Federal Reserve at the Sep. 16 meeting rose to 85%.
• US bond yields will cause Bitcoin pain amid Fed policy tightening, QCP analysis warns.

Bitcoin jumps 3% as “nervous” market digests CPI numbers

Data from TradingView showed renewed BTC price volatility ensuing after the August release of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which came in at 3.4% year-on-year.

BTC/USD one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

After initially dropping to $76,000, BTC/USD quickly reversed upward, gaining more than 3% on the day.

The move echoed US equities, which also turned green after a weak start to the session. This was catalyzed by CPI conforming to expectations only a day after the Producer Price Index (PPI) overshot. The S&P 500 was up 1% at the time of writing, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index gained 1.1%.

S&P 500 one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

US bond yields also saw snap volatility. On the back of the CPI print, the 30-year yield whipsawed, first reaching its highest levels since June 2004 before falling to 5.309%.

“This is a nervous market,” trading resource The Kobeissi Letter summarized in a response on X.

US 30-year bond yield one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

As WTI crude oil continued to circle $100 per barrel, the impact of the expanding US-Iran war and associated oil-supply squeeze was noticeable in the CPI numbers.

“The index for gasoline rose 3.9 percent in August, accounting for over one third of the monthly all items increase. The index for energy increased 2.1 percent over the month,” an official news release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) confirmed.

The release also reported that core CPI increased by 0.3% in August, 0.1% more than anticipated.

US CPI 12-month % change. Source: BLS

In response, traders doubled down on bets that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates by 0.25% at its Sept. 16 meeting. The latest data from CME Group’s FedWatch Tool showed odds of such an outcome rising to 85% on Friday, increasing from 60% a week ago.

Fed target-rate probability comparison for September FOMC meeting (screenshot). Source: CME Group

Fed officials are known to be split on the correct path for policy, with governor Christopher Waller last week indicating that he would be inclined to hold rates in their current 3.50-3.75% range should inflation data show at least “some signs of disinflation.”

“What’s the cost of waiting one meeting? Hiking 25 basis points, one meeting right now, is not going to bring the CPI down to 2%,” he told Reuters.

Analysis: Yield surge to become Bitcoin headwind

Discussing the implications of high bond yields going forward, trading company QCP Capital warned that Bitcoin bulls had little to look forward to. This is despite BTC/USD surging 25% in August after the US Treasury announced that it would step up debt buyback interventions.

Related: Bitcoin buyers wary of July sub-$58K floor amid onchain data ‘anomaly’

“The rise in US yields this year has been driven increasingly by tighter policy expectations and a risk premium common to both stocks and bonds, rather than by growth,” it wrote in its latest analysis. 

“This is the worst mix for Bitcoin: a competing 5% risk-free rate without the nominal-growth impulse that usually accompanies yield moves. It directly undercuts the narrative that carried Bitcoin from $63,000 to $82,000 in the second half of August, which leaned on the idea of a Treasury liquidity put providing structural support.”

QCP argued that Bitcoin would ultimately benefit from these developments, but only once buyback operations have had time to inject sufficient liquidity into markets.