by Gabor Gurbacs, CEO OpenAssets
The headline number is real. Binance Research put tokenized stocks up 422% since early 2025, the fastest-growing slice of a real-world-asset market that has more than tripled over the same period. The trajectory is not hard to read. Treasuries were the warm-up; equities and the funds built on them are where tokenization goes next. The asset class fund managers actually live in, and the one large enough to carry the market from a $30 billion niche into the trillions. So the direction is not in question. What's in question is what most of that 422% actually is.
A large share of it is synthetic: tokens that mirror a stock or fund's price without conveying ownership of it. No share. No unit. No vote. A price feed, not a security. When tokenized SpaceX shares traded this year, they moved with the company's valuation while conveying no ownership in it. That distinction is the whole story, and it is where the equities phase gets hard.
Why Treasuries were the easy asset
A tokenized Treasury is close to a wrapper around a single, well-behaved instrument. You hold it, it pays, you redeem it. One issuer. Few corporate actions. The question of who owns it rarely gets complicated. That simplicity is exactly why Treasuries went first. Equities and ETFs drag the entire apparatus onchain with them. Dividends. Splits. Tender offers. Proxy votes. Corporate actions that have to reach the right holder on the right date. And underneath all of it, the one record everything else depends on: the authoritative account of who owns which share or unit. Strip that away and a tokenized security is just a number that moves.
An ETF is the clearest case
Consider what makes an ETF trustworthy. Its price tracks net asset value only because authorized participants can create and redeem units against the underlying basket. A token that mirrors an ETF's price without that right isn't an ETF; it's a tracker of a tracker. And that same machinery is why the wrapper scaled: the ETF took the better part of two decades to reach its first trillion dollars and now sits near $22 trillion. It compounded because the plumbing underneath it held, and tokenized equities inherit that dependency.
The bottleneck is bookkeeping, not trading
Tokenizing the price of a security is easy, which is why so many have done it. Tokenising the ownership of one, in a form that an issuer, a regulator, and a court would all recognise, is the actual work. It lives in the part of the market that rarely makes headlines: the transfer agent, the issuer-of-record, the recordkeeping layer that maps tokens to legal owners and keeps that map correct through every corporate action. The established players are already organizing around this. Securitize, moving into tokenized equities, built the ownership record in rather than routing around it. DTCC – the entity behind nearly every U.S. stock trade – received SEC authorization to tokenize Russell 1000 names, major ETFs, and Treasuries, and built the service specifically to preserve existing ownership rights and legal protections. In both cases, the record came first.
Why this has to be a shared layer
Tokenized equities and funds will not trade in one place. They will move across venues, custodians, and chains. If every platform keeps its own private ledger of ownership, a tokenized share or unit means one thing here and something else there, and the record stops being trustworthy the moment it crosses a boundary. The ownership layer only works if it behaves consistently wherever the token travels. Which makes it a standards problem, not a single-company product.
What the 422% is really measuring
Right now, that number mostly measures appetite. It tells you investors want equity and fund exposure with onchain mechanics: 24/7, fractional, fast. That demand is genuine, and it is not going away.But appetite is not infrastructure. Global equities are a market worth more than $120 trillion, and moving any real share of it on-chain will be won by whoever can prove the token is the security: that what trades on-chain carries the ownership, the rights, and the record behind it.The price was always going to be easy to put onchain. Ownership is the product. The next phase of tokenization belongs to the firms building that layer.
Gabor Gurbacs is a Wall Street–trained strategist and technology entrepreneur with deep expertise in digital assets and tokenized markets. He previously led digital asset strategy at VanEck, helped pioneer industry-standard crypto indices, and advised institutions and regulators globally on market structure. Today, he leads OpenAssets as CEO in building the next generation of financial infrastructure.
