Licensed to Shill: Tokenised Stocks, Stonks and the Case for Self-Custody |

Tokenised stocks have moved past the synthetic products of earlier cycles, and their main advantage over a brokerage account is that holders can move, lend and spend them, according to Alvin Kan, chief operating officer of Bitget Wallet, and Renna Ba, head of ecosystem at Morph.

Both speak from inside the same group. Bitget Wallet distributes tokenised equities from Ondo, xStocks and Reality, while Morph, a payments-focused chain, hosts Reality's tokens and is working to make BGB usable as collateral. Ba described the wallet as "the front door" for Reality on Morph, so their enthusiasm for vertically integrated ecosystems should be read with that in mind.

Kan was clear about what users actually hold. Most tokenised stocks today are "a claim on the stock," he said, backed one-to-one by shares a company holds, which is a meaningful change from the largely synthetic products of a few years ago. He attributed the shift to two factors. Stablecoins have become a trusted on-chain dollar, and block times and gas costs have fallen far enough for retail trading. The bigger factor, in his view, is that regulators and incumbents have moved from caution to participation. "There's a real sense of interest and a real sense that they are going to embrace this thing," he said of the bankers and regulators he meets at industry events.

Voting rights remain unresolved. Kan said few users he asked cared about them, though he added, "I don't think this is about whether retail users want it or not." The real question is whether the token is legally a share, which issuers and the SEC still need to settle. Ba expects any move on voting to spread across platforms quickly, since "it's very hard for one person to really monopolize one particular action."

User preferences have proved conventional. Kan said trading concentrates in the top ten to twenty tickers, led by Tesla, Nvidia and SPY, with leveraged ETFs and crypto-linked stocks such as Coinbase ranking higher than they would among traditional investors.

The pair defended stonks, the memecoins paired against tokenised stocks in place of stablecoins. Kan acknowledged that the format "doesn't really have fundamentals" but read the craze as evidence that attention has returned to real-world assets. Ba was more direct about the risk. In stock-paired pools, she said, "you're exposed to the stock price and you're exposed to the meme," and she placed the heaviest exposure on liquidity providers, who end up holding most of the tokens. Deeper DeFi use will take longer to build, she added, noting that loan-to-value limits for tokenised-stock collateral "are really low still."

The most persuasive part of the conversation came at the end. Kan said moving a single stock between brokers means filling "so many forms," and noted that he cannot send shares to someone on Interactive Brokers. Bitget Wallet now lets card users take cashback in Tesla or Nvidia tokens, and he said some users received their first stock that way. Ba wants Morph users who are paid in stablecoins to hold, lend and spend stocks without leaving the chain.

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Blockcast is hosted by Head of APAC at Ledger, Takatoshi Shibayama. Previous episodes of Blockcast can be found here, with guests like Daren Guo (Reap), Yat Siu (Animoca Brands), Kean Gilbert (Lido), Joey Isaacson (Nook), Kapil Dhiman (Quranium) Eric van Miltenburg (Ripple), Davide Menegaldo (Neon EVM), Anastasia Plotnikova (Fideum), Jeremy Tan (Singapore parliament candidate), Hassan Ahmed (Coinbase) and more on our recent shows.