- Coinbase has begun offering tokenised versions of Apple, Nvidia, Meta and Alphabet on Base, the it built.
- The tokens are issued under a framework the company obtained in Abu Dhabi. That is not a UK permission.
- The launch is now confirmed live: the tokens are branded B20, the underlying shares are held by a custodian called Alpaca, and access is limited to eligible users outside the US.
Four of the largest companies on the US market now have tokenised versions running on a blockchain that Coinbase owns. The exchange has started with Apple, Nvidia, Meta and Alphabet, issued under a framework it secured in Abu Dhabi. Trading is restricted to eligible customers outside the United States, and whether Britain sits on that list is the part nobody has spelled out.
A token that tracks a share is not the same thing as owning the share. What you hold is a claim on shares that a custodian is holding somewhere else, which means your money depends on that arrangement working as well as on the share price doing what you hoped. Buy Apple through a UK broker and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme covers you up to £85,000 if the firm fails and your assets go missing. Nothing in a product like this carries that.
A permission granted in Abu Dhabi is a permission in Abu Dhabi. It does not make a product authorised for UK retail investors, and that is the first thing to establish before going looking for it.
What has actually been launched
The tokens are live on Base, the Ethereum network Coinbase developed, under the name B20, and they are issued under the framework the company holds in Abu Dhabi. Base settles to Ethereum and is designed for cheap, fast transactions, which is why an exchange building a trading product of its own would use it rather than a slower chain.
Three details fill in most of what was missing at launch. The shares behind the tokens are held by Alpaca, a regulated custodian. Prices come from Chainlink feeds, an being the service that takes information from outside a blockchain, here the share price, and publishes it so other software can read it. And the tokens can be withdrawn to a self-custodial wallet, which means they can be used inside applications on Base rather than only traded on Coinbase itself. Trading runs around the clock for eligible users.
When this story first ran, the only account of it was CoinDesk’s and there was no company announcement to read alongside it. The launch has since been reported live by several outlets with the detail above. What still is not public is the country-by-country eligibility list, and that is the document that decides whether any of this is reachable from Britain.
What you would be holding
Ordinary share ownership is recorded on registers kept by brokers, nominee companies and registrars. It is unglamorous plumbing, and it is also what gives you a legal claim on the company and a route to compensation when a firm collapses.
A tokenised share replaces the visible part of that with an entry on a blockchain. An issuer holds the real shares, usually through a regulated custodian, and issues tokens representing a claim against them. The token’s price tracks the share, and it can move between wallets at any hour without a broker in the middle.
What generally does not come with it is the rest of being a shareholder: voting, a direct legal relationship with Apple, and dividends arriving the way a broker would pay them. Naming Alpaca answers the custody question, which was the largest of the open ones. It does not answer how voting and dividends are handled, or what happens to token holders if the issuing entity fails, and neither has been published in the detail that would let anyone confirm it.
Where it is issued decides who can use it
Abu Dhabi has spent several years building a financial free zone with its own rules for digital assets, and firms have been queuing up for permissions there because those permissions are clear and comparatively quick to get. That is a real regulatory framework. It is also a framework that applies in Abu Dhabi.
For a British reader, the relevant regulator is the FCA, and cryptoasset promotions have been inside its financial promotions regime since October 2023. Coinbase has confirmed the product is limited to eligible customers outside the US, which settles one half of the question and leaves the other half open: eligible where. Our inference, and it is an inference rather than a finding: if Coinbase does not say plainly that UK residents are eligible, assume they are not.
Tax is the other loose end. HMRC has guidance on cryptoassets and guidance on shares, and a token whose value tracks a share sits awkwardly between the two. If you are weighing this up, that is a conversation with an accountant, not something to settle from an article. Our UK crypto tax guide covers where the existing rules land. You can also read our Coinbase review for how the exchange handles UK customers more generally.
The idea keeps coming back
Tokenised stocks are not new, and their history is short in a specific way. Binance launched stock tokens in April 2021 and withdrew them within about three months under pressure from European regulators. FTX offered tokenised equities through a Swiss subsidiary, and they went the way of everything else when the exchange collapsed in November 2022. Synthetic stock products on Terra disappeared with that network in 2022.
Since 2025 the idea has returned, with several venues offering tokenised US equities to customers outside the US. What has changed each time is not the technology. It is where the issuance sits and how comfortable the local regulator is with it. Coinbase’s framing, that this is part of bringing equities onto blockchains, is an interested party’s framing, and it is worth reading as such.
There is a separate route to the same destination, which is regulators letting conventional share trading run for more hours. We wrote about the American moves in that direction, and Britain’s absence from them, in our policy coverage. A tokenised claim on Apple and a longer trading day for Apple itself are attempts at the same problem from opposite ends.
What to watch
Whether a country-level eligibility list appears, and whether the UK is on it. The custody question has been answered, so the remaining gap is the terms governing what token holders would be entitled to if the issuer or the custody arrangement failed.
Then the weekend question, which the DeFi angle sharpens. Tokens held in a self-custodial wallet can be posted into lending apps on Base, and those apps price collateral off the same Chainlink feed. When the New York market is shut, that feed has no live share price to report for two days out of seven, and spreads on earlier attempts at this widened noticeably in exactly those windows. How B20 behaves over its first few weekends will say more about it than the launch did.