Tokenised stocks just became the fourth-largest asset on-chain. 2.25 million people hold them. Almost none of them own a share. The growth is real. In a single month, holders rose 179%, trading volume rose 364%, and the category passed $2.5 billion. The average position is $1,138. This is ordinary people buying what they believe are shares. Here is what they actually get. Buy a tokenised Tesla, and you do not own Tesla stock. You own a token issued by a platform. That platform holds, or says it holds, shares through a broker or a custodian. Tesla's share register has never heard of you. Which means: 👉 You have no vote 👉 You have no direct legal claim on the company 👉 Dividends reach you only if the platform's terms say they do 👉 If the platform fails, you do not own shares to reclaim. You are a creditor in someone else's insolvency, standing in a queue You didn't buy a claim on a company. You bought a claim on a company that has a claim on a company. Now look at the price. The token trades at the price of Tesla. Not at the price of Tesla minus the risk of the firm standing in the middle. Everyone can see the first number. Almost nobody is calculating the second. This is not a blockchain problem. It is the oldest structure in finance wearing new clothes. Every time a market has inserted an intermediary between an owner and an asset and then treated the resulting paper as equivalent to the asset, it has worked beautifully. Right up to the moment the intermediary is the problem, and everyone finds out what they were holding all along. It doesn't have to be built this way. A handful of companies have put their real shares on-chain, where the token genuinely is the share and your name is on the register. That version works. It's a small fraction of the market, because it requires the company itself to agree, and almost none have. 2.25 million people think they bought a share. What they bought is a promise from a company most of them can't name. Those are the same thing right up until they aren't.