For nearly four centuries, an investor’s equity ownership in a company was recorded on sheets of paper. This dependence on paper changed towards the end of the 1990s with the widespread use of the internet and the market’s acceptance of electronic records for verifying and trading the ownership of stocks.

Today, yet another advancement in the issuance of a company’s shares is on the horizon via tokenization.

So, what are tokenized stocks and how are they issued? Tokenized stocks are digital securities, or crypto tokens, issued on a blockchain, and like the previously used certificates, they represent equity shares in companies that have gone public on a traditional financial exchange like the NYSE or any other stock market around the world.

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Technological Advancements Evolve Stock Certificates

Tokenized securities issued to represent a share in a public company are not only certificates verifying ownership. As crypto also acts as a store of value, tokenized stocks act as market tickers as well.

Tokenized stocks possess the rising or falling value of their underlying stock, so if TESLA stock doubles in value, its tokenized equity doubles in value as well. This means the stock token that verifies asset ownership also possesses the value of its underlying asset, equity shares in a company.  

For many, this technological advancement might sound like a pipe dream, but Dutch East India traders writing certificates by hand could have never imagined how markets are trading today. It's only a matter of time before the advancements in Web 3.0 translate into yet another advancement for the trading of stocks.

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Trading Stocks Using Blockchain Technology

Combining Web 3.0 and the ability to tokenize equity has been made possible through distributed ledger technology (DLT), and blockchains are the most commonly used and well known DLTs today.

Blockchains are quickly becoming the next technology disrupting global industries, each of which depends on the assurance of security and the immutability of records, all guarantees that blockchain technology can provide.

A whole new sector of trading has sprouted from the trustless and programmatic nature of blockchain technology: decentralized finance (DeFi). DeFi is growing day-by-day, and it already accounts for over $100B in total value locked within financial platforms operating on blockchains.

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Tokenization Eliminates the Middleman When Trading Stocks  

Since smart contract facilitate transactions of tokenized securities made on a blockchain, trusting a broker or banker to play the intermediary is no longer required. The “if-then” nature of a contract written in code makes transactions 100% immutable and transparent to all users, and this means the system cannot be manipulated to anyone’s advantage.

Tokenized stocks traded in a decentralized marketplace puts an end to manipulations that have occurred both behind closed doors and in broad daylight, most recently highlighted by Wall Street’s Gamestop saga, where online brokers placed limits on trades in order to curb the effects of retail investors’ interest in GME.

Furthermore, by cutting out intermediaries such as brokerage firms that would normally act as middlemen between investors and exchanges, investors have more control and are empowered to further grow their wealth themselves. Without the intermediary, the fee that would normally go to a broker for executing trades is instead shared by users within the DeFi community.

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