You Can Buy 880 Tokenized Stocks Onchain. You Can Redeem 31 of Them at the Issuer.

A tokenized stock makes an appealing promise: the share, without the brokerage. Buy Apple or Nvidia onchain, hold it in a wallet, move it any hour of any day. About US$2.8 billion now sits in that promise, and the catalog runs past 800 names. Ask a narrower question than “can I buy it” — ask what the token lets you do— and the market divides on a line the shared price hides. For almost every one of these tokens, you can sell on a venue, but you cannot redeem at the issuer for the thing it tracks.

The distinction turns on redemption, and it is not the same as liquidity. Every token discussed here trades on an exchange, and a holder can exit into cash or stablecoin at the market price at any hour. Redemption is a different right: the ability to hand the token back to the issuer and receive the underlying — or its net asset value in cash — on demand, rather than depending on a buyer being there. It is the mechanism that, in a conventional fund, keeps the wrapper tethered to what it holds. Across the tokenized-stock market, that mechanism is mostly not available to the person holding the token.

What sits behind the token differs by platform, and the differences are the story. On Robinhood, a stock token is exposure through a special-purpose vehicle that holds the shares; the holder owns an interest in that vehicle rather than the share itself — a distinction underlined when OpenAI publicly stated that Robinhood’s tokens of its stock were not OpenAI equity and that it had not partnered on them. Binance’s bStocks are, by their own terms, certificates that track a stock’s performance and “do not allow holders to directly own a share” — issued by a Binance affiliate, backed one-to-one, convertible one-to-one within Binance, but not a claim you present to a stock issuer. Backed’s xStocks can be redeemed directly for net asset value — but only by investors who clear Backed’s onboarding and meet a US$5,000 minimum, not by a retail user on the exchange where the token trades.

The 31 that work differently

One issuer’s tokens behave the way the “own a share onchain” pitch implies. Dinari’s tokens — 31 of the 880 — let an ordinary, eligible holder burn the token in-app and have a real custodied share sold on their behalf, with the proceeds returned in a stablecoin the same trading day. Dinari can do this because it carries the registrations the model requires: a US broker-dealer and a securities transfer agent, with the underlying shares held at a regulated custodian. It is the one issuer in this set with a redemption path open to US persons, and the count — 31 against 849 — is the measure of how uncommon that arrangement is today.

The point is not that Dinari is safe and the others are not; every token here is backed by real shares or a real interest in them, and the certificate and SPV models are legitimate designs with their own regulators and disclosures. The point is what the holder is actually holding. A redeemable claim ties itself to the underlying through a right the holder can exercise. A certificate or an SPV interest ties itself through a chain the holder sits outside — the issuer’s hedging, an exchange’s market-making, an arbitrageur’s incentive to close a gap. In normal conditions the two are indistinguishable, and the token tracks the stock to the cent. The difference is a question about what happens when conditions are not normal.

What we can and can't yet see

One boundary on this count, stated plainly: it measures redemption mechanism, and a third model is emerging that our equity coverage does not yet include. A small number of issuers are registering the token itself as the security — where the onchain token is the legal share on the register, not a wrapper around it. That design is early and thinly represented, and it is not among the 880 here; as it grows, the two-way split above becomes a three-way one. What the current data can say is precise and whole for the market it covers: of the tokenized stocks a holder can buy today, almost all are claims to trade, and a narrow slice are claims to redeem.

Why this matters now

The question is arriving faster than the answer. Tokenized equities have crossed US$2.8 billion and keep compounding; this month the US Securities and Exchange Commission cleared a path for conventional funds to hold a tokenized money-market fund, a sign the regulated perimeter around tokenized securities is being drawn in real time. As it is drawn, redemption is one of the things it will have to address — whether a token that tracks a share must, at some access tier, be redeemable for it, and for whom. The market has answered that question unevenly so far, with 31 tokens on one side of the line and 849 on the other.

So the number to watch is not the market’s size, which will keep rising, but the share of it a holder can redeem rather than only trade — today a narrow slice, concentrated in a single issuer. Whether that share widens as more issuers take on the registrations redemption requires, or stays a niche while the tradeable-certificate model scales, will decide what “owning a stock onchain” comes to mean. For now it means, most of the time, owning something you can sell but not cash in.