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Explainer 2 min read

Can you vote with a tokenized stock?

No. None of the four issuers we track passes a shareholder vote to token holders. Three state that in their own terms; Dinari does not address it either way. The wrapper is the reason, and the blockchain has nothing to do with it.

No. Holding a tokenized stock does not give you a vote at the company's annual meeting, and none of the four issuers this site tracks offers one.

This surprises people, because the token is described as tracking the share and the price does track the share. The reason the vote stays behind is worth spelling out.

The wrapper is what you own

You own something the issuer created that references the share, and the legal form of that something is what the issuer calls its wrapper. The wrapper decides your rights, and a vote is a right.

Robinhood states it issues its stock tokens as debt securities. A debt security is a claim on the issuer, which is a different thing from ownership of the underlying share, so no shareholder right attaches to it to be passed on.

Ondo Global Markets issues through a bankruptcy-remote special purpose vehicle and states its tokens give economic exposure similar to holding the share and reinvesting dividends, rather than title to the share or shareholder rights. The words "not title" are doing the work.

Backed, through xStocks, states its certificates are collateralized one to one by the share, and that the certificate carries the price rather than the share itself or a shareholder vote.

Why the vote is hard to pass through even when a real share exists

With the one-to-one backed products a real share does exist, held by a custodian. The vote belongs to whoever is on the register, and that is the custodian or its nominee.

This predates crypto entirely. Most people who own shares through an ordinary broker hold them in street name, where the broker holds the share and the register shows a nominee. Those brokers built decades of plumbing to forward proxy materials and collect voting instructions back. The tokenized issuers have not built that plumbing, and in most cases their terms do not promise to.

There is a second obstacle. A token can move to anyone, at any hour, in a second, while a proxy vote has a record date and a paper trail. Matching a fluid on-chain holder set to a fixed record date is a hard problem, and nobody we track claims to have solved it.

The vote is absent for two reasons stacked on each other: the wrapper usually does not carry it, and the infrastructure to deliver it does not exist.

What you do get

Price exposure, and in most cases the economic effect of dividends, handled four different ways depending on the issuer. We wrote that up separately in do tokenized stocks pay dividends.

If a shareholder vote matters to you, no issuer we track suggests its token provides one. Direct registration and ordinary brokerage are where voting rights live. The glossary defines both.

Check it yourself

Every issuer page prints that issuer's own description of what its token is, with a link to their documentation. If an issuer starts offering voting, their terms are where it will appear first, and this page will be wrong before theirs is.

Every claim about an issuer above is that issuer's own description of its product.