SpaceX Tokenized Stock Revealed: Buyers Receive Economic Exposure, Not Equity

Written by: Boaz Sobrado

Compiled by AididiaoJP, Foresight News

“These ‘OpenAI tokens’ are not OpenAI equity.” On July 1, 2025, the OpenAI Newsroom account publicly clarified, “We have not partnered with Robinhood, are not involved in this matter, and do not endorse it.”

This warning was not surprising. The day before, Robinhood officially launched over 200 tokenized U.S. stocks for European users on stage in Cannes, also distributing free "stock tokens" tied to two of the most sought-after private companies—SpaceX and OpenAI. The problem? Neither company had given their consent. Within 48 hours, OpenAI warned its followers to "be cautious." A week later, Lithuania’s central bank, Robinhood’s primary regulator in Europe, stated it was awaiting clarification on how these tokens were structured.

The real issue lies in the structure. Holding a Robinhood token for SpaceX does not mean you own shares of SpaceX. Instead, you hold a claim on shares of a special purpose vehicle (SPV) that owns preferred stock in SpaceX. The OpenAI token is even more distant—it tracks convertible notes, not equity at all. In either case, buyers end up with nothing more than a digital asset whose value fluctuates with the company’s valuation—no voting rights, no name on the shareholder register, and no actual ownership.

The people who created these products are actually quite upfront about it.

Chan Ahn is the founder and CEO of Tessera, specializing in these types of tokens. On the podcast *On The Margin*, he openly stated: “The private market is where the real wealth effects exist—but it has always been restricted to the top 0.1% through cumbersome paperwork, high minimum investment thresholds, and geographic limitations.” His company sells tokens tied to private companies such as SpaceX and the prediction market Kalshi. Buying one, he says, “involves no KYC process—that’s intentional, not an oversight.”

But he also frankly acknowledged what the token is not: “You are not a true private shareholder, so you have no voting rights. Your name won’t appear on the shareholder register, and so on. But you do gain economic exposure to the underlying company—and that’s what matters.”

In other words, you are purchasing price exposure, not ownership.

Kula co-founder Chris Turner puts this distinction more clearly: “All it really does is reference the asset or give you contractual exposure to the economic upside of that specific asset. But you don’t own the asset; the asset owner does.”

He further distinguished between two models. One is the common “contractual claim” model seen in today’s market; the other is true “ownership tokenization”—“You own the token, and the token itself is the asset, so you own the asset. That’s different.” Turner acknowledged that true ownership tokenization “is already actually happening,” but what most retail investors currently encounter is still the former—a contractual right that tracks price.

Regulators’ positions are nearly identical. In September 2025, Natasha Cazenave, Executive Director of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), warned that tokenized instruments “typically do not grant shareholder rights,” thereby “creating specific risks of investor misunderstanding.” Commissioner Hester Peirce, who leads the SEC’s crypto task force, stated more directly in a July 2025 statement: “Tokenized securities are still securities.” She added that blockchain “has no magical ability to change the nature of the underlying asset.”

On-chain does not turn debt into equity.

Some believe the real solution is to have someone else do it.

Edwin Mata is the CEO and co-founder of Brickken. The Barcelona-based company, which he founded in 2020 after working as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, advocates for companies to issue their own regulated securities on-chain within their own jurisdiction, rather than having brokers or third parties package others' shares into offshore vehicles.

Mata compares Brickken to Shopify for finance: “We are a tokenization-as-a-service company that enables any business to instantly digitize financial instruments without writing code or handling any technical details.” Businesses can use it to tokenize equity, debt, bonds, commodities, gold, and real estate—all within their own jurisdiction.

The company claims to have tokenized over $660 million in assets across 40 countries (this is self-reported data, unaudited). Mata emphasized that tokenization is not a new invention, but rather an upgraded form of securitization. “Tokenization comes from securitization—it’s essentially an upgrade of the original concept.”

His own most favored use case is actually quite practical—short-term accounts receivable, invoices, and factoring as debt instruments. “Because they have high liquidity and large volume.” This is far removed from the hype of freely distributing SpaceX tokens, but much closer to the “infrastructure-level” applications regulators hope to see.

Whether or not Brickken becomes a winner, the entire market is moving in this direction.

BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, launched in March 2024, marking the first time major institutional players took this seriously. Robinhood’s own blockchain, built on Arbitrum technology, officially went live on mainnet on July 1, 2026. According to data from RWA.xyz, the tradable value of on-chain real-world assets—excluding stablecoins—has grown from approximately $8 billion in 2024 to between $26 billion and $32 billion today.

Bruno Caratori, co-founder and COO of cryptocurrency index management company Hashdex, noted that the real barrier is often not technology, but understanding: “People struggle to invest in things they don’t understand. They need to be able to explain to themselves why this particular asset or asset class will appreciate over time.”

Mata sees further. He envisions an "agent capital market"—where AI can automatically assist issuers in creating tokenized products based on market value and demand. He says, “It will no longer be just a niche application of blockchain, but will be embedded throughout the entire economy.”

But all of this discussion ultimately comes down to one core question: Do tokenized shares represent ownership, or merely price?

At this point, builders and regulators have rarely agreed. As Chris Turner said, once a token itself is an asset, rather than a claim on an asset, “you own the asset. That’s different.”

The vast majority of so-called "tokenized stocks" currently on the market still fall into the latter category.

Buyers need to think carefully about exactly what they are buying.