Tokenisation is moving steadily into mainstream finance, with stocks, funds, Treasuries and other real-world assets increasingly being brought onchain. But as the technology matures, the more important question is becoming less about whether an asset can be tokenised and more about what the investor actually owns when they buy the token. Five industry experts consider where ownership, economic exposure and investor rights should sit — and where the biggest gaps remain.
Daniel Coheur, Co-founder, T-REX Network
For Daniel Coheur, the distinction is straightforward: a tokenised equity should give an investor the same rights as holding the security offchain.
“An investor should be entitled to exactly what they would own holding the security off-chain: the economic exposure, the legal ownership, and the rights that come with it, including votes and dividends,” he says.
“If a token cannot deliver that, it is not a tokenised equity. It is a wrapper tracking a price.”
Coheur sees the principal consumer-protection problem in products described as tokenised stocks when the investor is actually holding a claim against an intermediary rather than ownership of the underlying share.
“A lot of what gets called tokenised stock is really an IOU issued by an intermediary. The holder owns a claim on that company, not the underlying share, and most buyers do not know the difference until something goes wrong and they find out what they were actually holding.”
His preferred solution is to place ownership, compliance and transfer rules at the asset level, so that the rights travel with the token rather than being provided through a separate wrapper.
Collin Sellers, VP of Solutions, Nuva Labs
Collin Sellers takes a broader view, arguing that tokenisation does not necessarily mean every asset should convey the same collection of rights. Some tokens may represent ownership while others legitimately provide economic exposure to an underlying asset or strategy.
“What matters is that the link between the token, the underlying asset, and the rights attached to it is clear from the outset,” he says.
The difficulty arises when a token appears to represent an asset directly but the authoritative ownership record remains elsewhere, perhaps with a custodian, transfer agent or law firm. That distinction may only become apparent when voting, dividends, corporate actions or redemption enter the picture.
“That is where I see one of the biggest consumer-protection gaps today: the mismatch between what people think they hold and what they actually hold.”
Sellers believes greater transparency is needed around what sits behind a token and where an investor’s legal recourse ultimately lies. Longer term, however, he sees digitally native assets as the bigger prize, where “the digital token is the asset rather than a wrapper or representation of it.”
Al Qureshi, CEO and Co-founder, Black Lake Digital Markets
Al Qureshi starts with what tokenisation can add to traditional equities: fractionalisation, 24/7 access, greater fungibility across trading venues and improved reporting.
When it comes to which interests should be conveyed to investors, his answer is simple: “All of it!”
Fractionalisation is particularly important because it can open access to assets while conveying an economic interest to the holder. Fungibility and around-the-clock trading can meanwhile connect assets with deeper pools of global liquidity.
But Qureshi also identifies a tension between conventional ideas of ownership and the possibilities created by fractionalisation.
“Ownership, however, at the highest level, is inconsistent with fractionalizing assets and could expose a real issue with traceability in voting.”
For him, tokenisation therefore creates opportunities that go beyond simply reproducing an existing share certificate on a blockchain, including new approaches to verification and asset transfer.
Christian Ruz, Business Strategy Director, Hype
Christian Ruz focuses on another problem with moving ownership onchain: protecting that ownership once it gets there.
“What happens if someone’s wallet is hacked and they lose their tokenized house?” he asks. Equally important is what happens when a token represents ownership while the underlying asset legally remains in somebody else’s name.
“Those gaps and risks exist in today’s tokenization framework and these are the challenges we need to solve if we want the tokenization to be globally adopted.”
For Ruz, replacing established legal ownership with something weaker is unlikely to be acceptable to consumers. Neither is a system in which ownership of a significant real-world asset can disappear because a wallet or protocol is compromised.
“In my opinion, real ownership with safeguarding rails is the key,” he says.
Kadan Stadelmann, CTO and Co-founder, Compance.AI
Kadan Stadelmann believes another technology is beginning to complicate the ownership debate: artificial intelligence.
“The debate around tokenisation today revolves around the rights of a token holder, particularly when the instrument is a wrapper rather than the underlying security itself,” he says.
But Stadelmann argues that agentic systems could change how tokens themselves operate, including the way legal and compliance requirements are applied.
“AI can embed continuous legal and compliance reasoning into tokens,” he says.
That could help clarify and enforce rights, but Stadelmann cautions that it could also make questions of ownership more complex, particularly as the number and variety of tokenised assets increase.
Ownership has to be understood
The five perspectives differ on whether every tokenised asset should reproduce the complete rights associated with traditional ownership. What runs through them, however, is a more fundamental issue: an investor needs to know what the token in their wallet actually represents.
Economic exposure, legal title, voting rights, dividends and recourse against an issuer or intermediary are not interchangeable. Tokenisation can change how an asset is issued, divided, traded and transferred, but as these products move towards a wider market, the distinction between owning an asset and owning a token linked to it will become increasingly difficult to leave in the small print.
