Tokenized equities have come into the spotlight this year, but can billions of dollars of real stock safely plug into the yield engine of decentralized finance (DeFi)?
Sentora, a merged entity combining IntoTheBlock’s crypto data analytics with Trident Digital’s institutional yield strategies, argues that tokenized equities plus stablecoin money markets could be the next major disruption across both cryptocurrencies and traditional finance — if a list of frictions can be solved.
Here’s a look at the four main obstacles the firm believes stand in the way.
Four key hurdles for tokenized equities
1. Finding a real use case for tokenization
Speakers hosting a recent Sentora webinar were blunt: First-generation tokenization mostly disappointed. Credit and real estate deals were often illiquid, concentrated in a single issuer and never truly embedded in DeFi as collateral. They claim that the real use case is tokenized equities posted into on‑chain money markets to borrow stablecoins and to generate yield on stocks that have appreciated massively, but pay no dividend, such as any of the Mag 7 stocks.
They argued that if a retail investor who put US$10,000 into NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) and is now sitting on US$100,000 can click to borrow US$20,000 to US$30,000 at 5 percent without selling, that is a qualitatively new product versus today’s roughly 10 percent margin loans from brokers constrained by Basel capital rules.
At scale, they suggested that even a 1 percent penetration of the roughly US$25 trillion in US retail equity holdings would exceed the entire current DeFi market and could lift base DeFi yields by a few hundred basis points.
2. How tokenized equities actually work as collateral
Turning that vision into something robust requires solving liquidation, oracle and market structure problems that don’t exist for purely crypto collateral. Sentora’s view is that it is a mistake to try to rebuild Nasdaq on‑chain with thin automated market makers and retail liquidity providers.
Instead, liquidations should use existing equity liquidity. When a loan backed by tokenized NVIDIA, for example, breaches its thresholds, a liquidator posts stablecoins, borrows the underlying stock from a securities lender, sells it on the Nasdaq and then unwinds the token wrapper once settlement catches up.
Because this process spans multiple days, early implementations will need conservative loan‑to‑value ratios, wider spreads and a tolerance for basis risk between on‑chain prices and off‑chain fills. Issuers like Ondo that can wrap and unwrap within hours help, as do traditional data providers such as Bloomberg and Reuters, which already stream millisecond‑level equities prices and can serve as the backbone for hybrid on/off‑chain oracles.
The complexity is high, but their Bitcoin and Ether carry trade strategies, where smart contracts constantly lever and delever to avoid liquidation, are the blueprint they want to port over to equities.
3. Moving real-world equity ownership on‑chain
Even if the mechanics work, Sentora believes that almost none of the trillions parked in brokerage accounts can currently be used. Today’s tokenized shares are typically newly issued products that investors buy specifically to use on‑chain; they will never unlock the scale they are targeting.
The real unlock is letting investors transfer existing fully paid shares from brokers such as Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) or Schwab (NYSE: SCHW) into platforms from Kraken or Robinhood Markets (NASDAQ:HOOD) and convert them into tokens as a tax‑free event, preserving beneficial ownership and avoiding capital gains.
The obstacle is issuer‑by‑issuer approval. Each company has to authorize a portion of its outstanding shares to exist on a distributed ledger. The speakers argued that the pitch to issuers is stronger than many tokenization providers have realized — shares locked as DeFi collateral reduce free float supply and may be price‑supportive, and adding borrow‑against‑your‑stock and synthetic dividend functionality can make a non‑dividend growth stock more attractive.
4. Regulation, stablecoins and the banking system
On the equity side, Sentora’s researchers argued that if users stay within the existing rule, where each share is held in the owner’s name and all rights travel with the token, there is “really no regulatory hurdle.”
In their view, trouble starts with wrappers that mimic economic exposure, but strip votes and dividends.
That distinction matters because US regulators have begun to specifically examine tokenized US equities and DeFi trading venues, with an eye to when these instruments begin to look like swaps or unregistered securities.
On the funding side, everything depends on stablecoins. Neobanks and fintech companies such as PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL), Revolut, Coinbase Global (NASDAQ:COIN), Kraken, Robinhood and others are racing to offer abstracted DeFi yield to mainstream users through tokenized deposits and on‑chain money markets.
At the same time, the GENIUS Act has pulled stablecoins into a bank‑like regulatory regime, tightening who can issue them and how reserves must be held, while large US banks lobby to slow or shape that evolution to protect deposit franchises. This tension is likely to define the pace at which tokenized equity collateral can scale.
Additional market caveats for 2026
Regime shift and rate risk
The rise of this sector occurred during a period of high cash yields, allowing tokenized treasuries and money market real-world assets (RWAs) to offer high percentage returns with low duration risk. As policy rates fall, tokenized T‑bill products become less compelling, which increases the pressure on tokenized equities to deliver truly differentiated upside in the form of leverage, tax efficiency or synthetic dividends rather than just being a new wrapper on low yields.
Platform and liquidity fragmentation
While DeFi is often thought of as a single venue, liquidity is scattered across Ethereum L2s, BNB Chain, Solana, app‑specific rollups and specialized RWA platforms. Early tokenized equity collateral markets are already experimenting on non‑Ethereum ecosystems, raising the risk that depth, pricing and oracle infrastructure fragment before a critical mass of standards and interoperability is in place.
Commodities and other RWA competition
Tokenized commodities such as gold, as well as short‑duration bond funds and private credit pools, are emerging as rival “default collateral” choices for institutions that want on‑chain yield without single‑name equity risk. Tokenized equities will be competing not only with Bitcoin and Ether, but with a growing number of seemingly safer RWA products with potentially clearer regulatory capital treatment for banks and insurers.
Centralization and concentration risk
Finally, the vision leans on a small number of critical intermediaries: custodians, tokenization agents, oracle providers and centralized exchanges that bridge DeFi and public equity markets.
In 2026, tokenization infrastructure is still concentrated in a handful of large players, and a restriction or policy shift at any of them could ripple through multiple protocols that treat tokenized equities as pristine collateral. Building credible resolution and risk‑sharing frameworks around those chokepoints is an unsolved but essential problem if tokenized equities are going to become the next major disruption rather than the next over‑promised narrative.
Latest tokenized equities developments
On Wednesday (February 11), Sentora introduced Stey, a new yield vault that allows investors to earn extra money from digital shares by placing them in a secure automated system that earns interest.
Stey is designed to work with Ondo’s tokenized offerings, like its tokenized treasuries and over 200 tokenized stocks. Partnering with Ondo, Sentora ensures digital shares in Stey vaults comply with regulations and are backed by physical securities in custody. Additionally, Sentora’s partnership with Chainlink ensures that those shares are priced accurately with real-time data, and Euler runs the lending strategies that generate the extra interest.
Sentora plans to expand beyond just these three, intending to add more types of digital assets from different partners and use different lending platforms to find the best interest rates for users.
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Securities Disclosure: I, Meagen Seatter, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
