Both wrap something and trade as one instrument, so the comparison comes up. The structural difference sits in the arbitrage machinery rather than anywhere near the blockchain.
What an ETF has
An ETF holds a basket of assets and publishes what that basket is worth. When the fund's market price drifts away from that value, a set of authorised participants can create or redeem large blocks of shares directly with the fund, in exchange for the underlying assets. That trade is profitable exactly when the gap exists, so the gap closes.
That mechanism keeps an ETF's price near the value of what it holds without anyone managing the price. It is a legal and operational arrangement rather than a property of the wrapper.
What most tokenized stocks do not have
For the tokens we track, there is generally no route by which an ordinary holder converts a token into the underlying share, and in several cases no underlying share is allocated to a specific token at all.
Dinari's dShares come closest to an exception among the issuers here, because they are mint and redeem instruments rather than only secondary-market ones. That is also why we frequently have holder counts for them but no price: there is often no continuously quoted pool to read.
Where that redemption route is absent or restricted, nothing pulls the token price toward the share price except the willingness of people to trade on the difference, and that requires enough liquidity to be worth doing.
A persistent gap between a token and its share can therefore be the ordinary state of an instrument that has no spring pulling it back.
Three more differences worth knowing
What you are exposed to. An ETF holder's exposure is to the fund and its assets. A tokenized stock holder's exposure includes the issuer, in a form set by the issuer's wrapper: a debt security is a claim on the issuer, a tracker certificate is collateralized by the share, an SPV structure sits in between. We went through those in what happens if the issuer fails.
When it trades. An ETF trades when its exchange is open. A token trades whenever somebody is willing to, which includes weekends.
Whether you can audit it. An ETF publishes holdings on a schedule, and you trust the publication. A token's supply, holders and corporate actions are on a public ledger you can read yourself with no account. When Robinhood processed an ORCL distribution, the transaction was public immediately.
That last difference is why this site can work as a directory of checkable facts rather than a summary of somebody's disclosures.
One thing that trips people up
Some of the tickers on this site are ETFs, as shares. SOXX and XLK are exchange-traded funds, and there are tokenized versions of them. So you can hold a token that wraps a certificate that references a fund that holds a basket of shares.
Three layers, each with its own counterparty and its own mechanics. Every stock page states the kind, so an ETF is labelled as one.
Where to look
The board lists every stock and ETF we track, the issuers page has each wrapper in the issuer's own words, and the glossary defines wrapper, custodian, tracker certificate and dShare.
Nothing here is a comparison of which instrument is better.