- Securitize has launched versions of 12 US stocks on Solana, including Apple, Nvidia and Strategy, each said to be backed one-for-one by a real share.
- Dividends and voting rights are included, with settlement in USDC. Access runs through a regulated broker-dealer platform for eligible US and EU investors.
- We could not find a primary announcement from the company, so the detail below comes from The Block and Cointelegraph rather than from the source document.
Tokenised shares in Apple, Nvidia and a handful of other US companies now exist on the Solana , issued by Securitize. Twelve companies in the first batch. And if you’re reading this from the UK, you almost certainly can’t buy them.
This is the second serious attempt to put ordinary company shares on a blockchain, and the first one ended badly. In 2020 and 2021, Binance and FTX both offered “stock ” that tracked share prices without necessarily holding the shares behind them. Regulators in Germany, Italy and the UK pushed back, and the products were pulled within months.
The thing being launched now is a different animal: a token that represents an actual share held by a regulated entity, rather than a price feed with a company logo on it. Whether that difference survives contact with regulators is the whole story. But on the announcement as reported, it doesn’t reach UK retail buyers either way.
What a tokenised share actually is
A share in Apple normally lives in an account at a broker, who records that you own it. The record is private, the market is open for about six and a half hours a day, and settling a trade takes a day or so to finalise behind the scenes.
A tokenised share moves that ownership record onto a blockchain, a public ledger anyone can inspect. The real share still sits somewhere, held by a custodian. The token is a claim on it, and because the token lives on a public network, it can in principle move at any hour and settle in seconds rather than days.
Securitize’s version pays out dividends and passes through voting rights, according to Cointelegraph’s write-up, and settles in USDC, the dollar . Each token is described as backed one-for-one by a share held in reserve.
Why the 2021 comparison matters
None of the coverage we’ve seen makes this connection, and it’s the one that tells you what’s new here.
The Binance and FTX stock tokens were synthetic. You got exposure to a price, through an offshore exchange, with no clear claim on anything. When European regulators started asking who exactly held the underlying shares and under what rules, the products disappeared. Binance shut its version down in July 2021, three months after launching it.
Securitize is a registered transfer agent in the US and runs its distribution through a broker-dealer, which is the structural answer to the question that killed the last attempt. That’s a genuine difference. It’s also precisely why the access list is short.
Who can actually buy them
Eligible investors in the US and EU, through that broker-dealer platform. The word “eligible” is doing real work in the coverage and nobody has published the full criteria that we could find.
What’s clear enough is that a UK retail reader opening a normal app is not in the first wave. The FCA has its own regime for how investments are marketed and sold here, and a US broker-dealer registration doesn’t carry across. If you want US shares from the UK today, the ordinary route through a UK-regulated broker remains the one that’s open to you, and the tax treatment of crypto-settled holdings is a separate question that this product doesn’t simplify.
What hasn’t launched yet
“Round-the-clock trading” has appeared in a lot of headlines about this. It’s an ambition rather than a running feature. The venues that would make it real, reportedly including NYSE and an OKX-ICE arrangement, are planned rather than live. Until a venue is actually quoting these tokens outside market hours, the 24/7 part is a roadmap item.
There’s also a demand question that sits awkwardly next to the launch. Data from RedStone has shown tokenised stock supply growing quickly over the past year while actual usage, meaning tokens being moved, lent or used in other applications rather than simply sat on, has stayed under 3%. Plenty of these things get issued. Not many get used.
Securitize’s own listed shares rose more than 10% on the news, which tells you how the market read it, though a one-day move on an announcement is not evidence that the product works.
What to watch
Whether a trading venue goes live. That’s the difference between a tokenised share being a genuinely new instrument and being a slower, narrower version of a brokerage account.
Whether any UK or EU access expands, and on what terms. And whether on-chain usage moves off that 3% figure, because if tokenised shares end up being bought and held exactly like ordinary shares, the blockchain part has solved a problem nobody had.