If you hold a tokenized stock, the company whose share it tracks is not the only company you are exposed to. You are also exposed to the issuer that made the token. What happens if that issuer fails depends on the legal wrapper it chose, and the four issuers we track chose three different structures.
This is the structural fact most easily missed about these instruments, because the price on the screen tracks the share either way.
Three structures, three positions
A debt security. Robinhood states it issues its stock tokens as debt securities, through Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited. A debt security is a claim on the issuer. That is a structural statement rather than a criticism: what stands behind your token is the issuer's obligation, so in an insolvency a claim on the issuer is what you would be holding, rather than a claim on a specific share sitting in a specific account with your name near it.
A bankruptcy-remote SPV. 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. The phrase "bankruptcy-remote" is the point of the structure: the intent is that assets in the vehicle are separated from the operating company's insolvency. Whether such a structure performs as intended is a question about specific documents in a specific jurisdiction, and we cannot answer it for you.
One-to-one backed, with a custodian. Backed, through xStocks, states its certificates are collateralized one to one by the share and held with a custodian. Dinari states a dShare is backed one to one by a share held at a US broker-dealer. In both cases the issuer's position is that a real share exists for each token. That opens a further set of questions: who is the custodian, what happens to the custodied share in the issuer's insolvency, and by what process a holder reaches it.
What we are not going to tell you
We will not rank these, and we will not tell you which is safest. Be wary of anyone who does. The honest answer depends on the insolvency law of Jersey, the British Virgin Islands or the United States, on documents that run to dozens of pages, and on facts that have never been tested, because none of these issuers has failed.
What we will say is that "a stock token is not a share" carries practical content, and this question is where it shows up. The share, where one exists, is held by somebody else. Your position is defined by a document, and that document is published.
The question to ask
"What exactly am I holding a claim on, and against whom." Every one of these products has a published answer to that.
Each issuer page prints that issuer's own description of its wrapper, with a link to their documentation. The wrapper is also printed on every row of every stock page, because it is a fact about the token and not a footnote. The glossary defines debt security, tracker certificate, dShare and custodian.
Read the issuer's own terms. Ours is a summary of what they publish, and a summary is not the document.
Every claim about an issuer above is that issuer's own description of its product, linked above.