Tokenized Stocks Just Reached U.S. Investors. Almost the Entire Market They're Joining Was Built Offshore — for Everyone but Them.

On August 4, a U.S. platform did something the tokenized-stock market had spent two years avoiding: it sold American stocks to American investors. Dinari began offering 724 tokenized U.S. stocks, including every company in the S&P 500, bought and sold with USDC from a self-custody wallet — the payoff of a broker-dealer registration its subsidiary secured in June 2025. The headlines called it a milestone. The more useful way to read it is as a measurement of how unusual it is.

OnChain Benchmark classifies each tokenized equity's regulatory standing independently — the registration behind the token, the auditor, the recency of its attestations — on one scale across the market. On that scale, the market Dinari just joined looks almost nothing like Dinari. Of the 813 tokenized equities we classify, 781 — about 96% — sit under a major foreign regulator, structured for investors outside the United States. Only 32 reach the top U.S. tier: an SEC-registered vehicle with a PCAOB-registered auditor. The race to put stocks onchain has been running almost entirely outside the one market it is now trying to enter.

A market built for somewhere else

The offshore tilt is not an artifact of who we happen to measure; it is how the market was designed. Most of the roughly two-billion-dollar tokenized-stock market follows a third-party synthetic model, led by Ondo and Kraken's xStocks, in which a non-U.S. entity issues a token backed by shares it holds — and those tokens are, by their own terms, unavailable to U.S. persons. The largest such program, Backed's xStocks, is explicitly restricted from U.S. residents. The structure exists precisely because issuing a U.S.-registered tokenized security to U.S. investors is hard — the barrier Dinari spent a year clearing.

The offshore names are the ones the market's activity runs on. In our classification, Backed accounts for 595 of the tokenized equities, Robinhood's European program another 113, the bStocks tokens 53, and Ondo's offshore line 20 — every one of them at the major-foreign-regulator tier. These are real regulatory regimes, and the tokens are widely held and actively traded. They were simply never built for an American brokerage account. That is the distinction the standing data makes visible and a market-cap headline hides.

One threshold, one issuer

At the top of the scale, the picture inverts. The tier that requires an SEC-registered vehicle with a PCAOB-registered auditor — the standing that lets a token be sold to a U.S. investor as a U.S.-regulated instrument — contains 32 of the 813, and Dinari holds 31 of them. It is not literally the only U.S. effort: Ondo has moved to launch an onshore U.S. line, and Dinari itself has partnered with tZERO to sell the rails to brokerages. But at breadth, today, the U.S.-regulated corner of the tokenized-stock market is essentially one issuer's footprint — a sliver against a market that grew up offshore.

None of this is a verdict on the offshore issuers. A major-foreign-regulator registration is a genuine regime, and the synthetic model has done the work of proving that a stock can trade onchain at all. The point is narrower and more useful for anyone deciding where this market is going: “tokenized stocks are coming to America” describes a threshold almost no issuer has crossed, not a market that has moved. The gap between the two is the whole story — and it is about to be contested.

Which way the market re-domiciles

For two years the offshore model was the only model, and the question of regulatory domicile was academic — the buyers were crypto-native, and one jurisdiction's token looked much like another's. A U.S.-registered path changes the terms. American brokerages, retirement accounts and corporate treasuries operate under mandates that specify exactly the kind of standing this data separates: an SEC-registered vehicle, a PCAOB auditor. The moment a U.S. distribution channel opens at scale, the tier a token sits in stops being a footnote and becomes a gating requirement.

So the interesting question the Dinari launch raises is not whether Americans can now hold tokenized stocks — a handful can. It is which direction the other 96% moves. The offshore programs can keep serving the non-U.S. demand that built them, or they can do what Dinari did and take on the U.S. registration the American market requires. The answer decides whether U.S.-regulated tokenized equity stays a one- or two-name lane, or becomes the destination the rest of the market re-domiciles toward.