Wall Street’s Tokenized Stock Rush Is Getting Messy

At Geneva’s Onchain Leaders Gathering, BeInCrypto moderated a discussion on the infrastructure needed to bring capital markets onchain. Experts from Zama, G-20 Group, Blobb.io, and Rex Change argued that tokenization now faces a harder test of making onchain markets liquid, private, compliant, and genuinely useful for institutions. 

Nasdaq and LSEG are pushing stocks onto blockchain rails. A recent viral fight on social media over AMC tokens shows why the infrastructure underneath them now matters more than the token itself.

Wall Street’s Tokenization Race Accelerated This Week.

Nasdaq agreed to invest $100 million in Kraken parent Payward to develop infrastructure for tokenized equities. Days earlier, London Stock Exchange Group partnered with Payward on tokenized UK shares and a planned 24-hour trading venue.

Yet the harder question is already emerging: What exactly happens when stocks move onchain?

This was the central talking point of “The New Financial Stack,” a panel moderated by BeInCrypto at the Onchain Leaders Gathering in Geneva on September 8.

Florent Gabriel of Blobb.io, Jonathan Mathai of G-20 Group, Antoine Hello of Zama, and François Meurier of Rex Change discussed the barriers institutions still face across infrastructure, liquidity, confidentiality, and market access.

“True enterprise adoption happens when we move beyond isolated proofs-of-concept,” said Antoine Hello, Director of Financial Institutions at Zama, which develops confidential blockchain infrastructure for financial institutions. 

Ahead of the event, Hello argued that institutions need public blockchain infrastructure capable of handling real volume while protecting sensitive financial information.

François Meurier framed the challenge more directly.

“Not in theory but how it works in practice. We do this every day,” said Meurier, Founder and Managing Director of Rex Change, a Geneva-based regulated crypto exchange and OTC service.

A Parallel Stock Market Is Already Forming

The market is no longer tiny enough to ignore. RWA.xyz tracked $2.91 billion in distributed tokenized stocks and $13.31 billion in monthly transfer volume as of September 10. More than 3.17 million addresses held these assets.

However, growth is uneven. Holder numbers jumped 174% over 30 days, while monthly transfer volume dropped almost 53%. That gap matters if institutions expect deep, reliable markets rather than simply more tokens.

Tokenizing a Stock Does Not Solve the Stock Market

AMC has already exposed another problem: ownership.

CEO Adam Aron attacked Robinhood after it offered tokenized exposure to AMC without the company’s approval. The products track the stock, but holders do not own AMC shares or receive normal shareholder rights. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has defended the structure, arguing that companies cannot control every third-party financial product referencing their shares.

The World Federation of Exchanges has gone further, calling some third-party tokenized equities “mimics” and warning that they could weaken investor protections and market integrity.

That tension also surfaced elsewhere in Geneva.

“We’re very much in production now,” said Diana-Cezara Toader, Head of Digital Assets at UBS Asset Management, during a separate panel on moving tokenization from pilots into live markets. She pointed to liquidity, common infrastructure and regulation as remaining barriers to wider adoption.

Francesco Ranieri Fabracci reduced the problem to one sentence.

“To tokenize something, you need to make the token useful,” said Fabracci, Head of Tokenization Expansion at Tether, where he works on Hadron, the company’s platform for bringing real-world assets onchain.

Nasdaq and LSEG suggest Wall Street is ready to test that idea at scale.

Now the infrastructure has to prove that an onchain stock can deliver the liquidity, privacy and investor rights that made the original stock useful in the first place.