The public fight between AMC Entertainment Chief Executive Adam Aron and Robinhood over tokenized AMC shares spilled on Friday into a dispute among the companies that build the instruments, over which of three incompatible designs should become the standard.

The models differ in what the holder actually owns. Robinhood’s stock tokens are debt securities issued by an unregulated Jersey entity, sold only to non-US persons, that pay economic exposure and confer no claim on the referenced company. Ondo, xStocks and Dinari hold the underlying shares through regulated intermediaries and pass the economics through, with Dinari the only one of the three selling to US investors. Securitize and Superstate put a company’s own registered shares onchain, with the issuer and its transfer agent inside the transaction. The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance mapped the three categories in a statement on Jan. 28, and the model determines which securities laws apply and what a holder can claim in a bankruptcy.

Tokenized stocks hold $2.91 billion, up 14.4% in 30 days across 2.67 million holders, rwa.xyz data shows. Ondo leads with $869.6 million, followed by bStocks at $659.4 million, xStocks at $633.7 million, Securitize at $274.1 million, Bitget at $170.5 million, Robinhood at $133.2 million, Figure at $84.7 million, Superstate at $46.4 million and Dinari at $11.2 million.

Robinhood’s book is a sixth the size of Ondo’s and its trading business is the largest of the group. Robinhood Chain turned over $1.56 billion of DEX volume in 24 hours, more than double the level a week earlier, according to DefiLlama, and passed Solana in tokenized stock volume in late July on the strength of memecoin pairs.

Snake Juice And Stablecoins

Gabriel Otte, co-founder of Dinari, which sells 1:1 custodial tokenized stocks to US investors through an SEC-registered broker-dealer, opened the argument at 12:18 p.m. ET Friday under Robinhood Chief Executive Vlad Tenev’s defense of the product, “We stand behind Stock Tokens.”

“Many took shortcuts to make ‘tokenized stocks’ that are synthetic and indisputably worse for the end investor than stocks,” Otte wrote. “It’s time for the industry to follow @DinariGlobal’s lead and adopt the custodial model that protects investor rights.”

Six minutes later he named both companies and set aside the securities-law question Aron had raised. “To be clear, it’s not about legality, it’s just that synthetic tokens like @RobinhoodApp stock tokens and @Ondo are just indisputably worse for the end investors than even common stocks,” he wrote.

Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap, whose AMM is the largest DEX on Robinhood Chain and the venue where the memecoin pools have been pricing the stock tokens, answered at 6:08 p.m. ET. “They’re not worse if you want programmability, or to trade at night/weekend/holidays, live outside the US, don’t have a bank account, want to use them in DeFi apps/hold them in a crypto wallets,” he wrote. “End of the day, tokenized stocks are pretty similar to early stablecoins – are they exactly the same as dollars? No. But they are meeting a user demand in a way that nothing else is.”

Otte replied that the same demand could be met “without it being synthetic and being an inferior product with price dislocation.”

Dinari amplified the version of the objection put by Anna Wroblewska, its chief business officer, the same morning: “The main problem here isn’t tokenization. It’s the marketing of a discretionary debt instrument, which functions essentially as an onchain CFD, as an investment in the US stock market.”

Carlos Domingo, chief executive of Securitize, took Aron’s side on Thursday night. “I would also not want people creating offshore derivatives of our stock that trade all over the place,” he wrote. “This is why we tokenized our own stock natively and in the US, in a fully compliant way.”

Linked Securities At The SEC

The Corp Fin statement gives each model a different legal shape. Issuer-sponsored tokens are the security itself, with the issuer or its agent keeping the master securityholder file onchain. Third-party custodial tokens represent “the holder’s indirect interest in the underlying security via the security entitlement.” The third category, which the staff calls linked securities, covers a token “issued by the third party itself that provides synthetic exposure to a referenced security, but it is not an obligation of the issuer of the referenced security and confers no rights or benefits from the issuer of the referenced security.”

Robinhood’s own developer documentation describes stock tokens as “tokenised debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited” that grant no “legal or beneficial rights in, or against the issuer of, those underlying securities.” Dividends run through an onchain multiplier rather than a payment. Only one firm, BBVI, can create or redeem them.

Dinari’s dShares are held with FINRA-member broker-dealer Alpaca Securities in segregated custodial accounts, pay cash dividends in stablecoins and can be burned for redemption at market value. Ondo and Broadridge added proxy voting to more than 250 Ondo tokenized stocks and ETFs in April, through Ondo Global Markets, which is not available in the US.

The staff also flagged the counterparty question the AMC episode raised: holders “may be exposed to risks with respect to the third party, such as bankruptcy, to which a holder of the underlying security would not necessarily be exposed.”

Issuers In The Room

Securitize runs five regulated affiliates: a broker-dealer that operates an SEC-regulated alternative trading system, an SEC-registered transfer agent, an exempt reporting adviser, a fund administrator and an EU investment firm authorized under the DLT Pilot Regime, according to the company. That stack is what lets it act as the record-keeper for a tokenized security rather than a counterparty to it, and it is how BlackRock’s BUIDL and funds from Apollo, Hamilton Lane, KKR and VanEck came onchain. Securitize says it has tokenized more than $4 billion of assets.

The company took its own shares public on the NYSE as SECZ on July 2 after merging with Cantor Equity Partners II, and tokenized them on day one. SECZ is the largest single tokenized equity tracked by rwa.xyz.

Superstate runs the same idea for companies that are already listed. Its Opening Bell program appoints Superstate as a company’s digital transfer agent and issues the company’s registered shares directly onto Ethereum and Solana. “Tokenized shares are not derivatives, wrappers, or new share classes,” the product page states; the tokens are recorded in the investor’s name and carry the same economic and governance rights as the shares on the exchange.

Galaxy Digital and Forward Industries have shares onchain through it, and Forward Industries accounts for nearly all of Superstate’s $46.4 million on rwa.xyz. Founder and Chief Executive Robert Leshner, who also founded Compound, called SharpLink the first public company to tokenize its shares on Ethereum through the program in September 2025.

Best Execution Versus Slippage

Brian Huang, co-founder of onchain portfolio manager Glider and a former XTX Markets equities trader, argued on The Defiant’s livestream Friday that the venue matters more than the wrapper. “AMMs do not guarantee best execution for consumers,” he said. “In the US, we have protections around what’s called the national best bid offer or best execution rules, where whether you’re trading on Robinhood, Coinbase or any of the major apps or brokers in the US, you are guaranteed to get best execution. Now, that is not true via AMMs.”

Huang called the rights objections false. “You do get the voting rights through particular issuers,” he said. “Ondo has worked on this with Broadridge.” He said Ondo’s request-for-quote design, in which a market maker sources the share off-chain and the token is minted against it, is the structure the market will converge on, and that the dislocations end when 24/7 creation and redemption exists on both sides. “You will not see these dislocations a year from now.”

He made the same case at RWA Summit on Wednesday, calling the arguments from Dinari, Securitize and the NYSE “propaganda.” The Defiant reported his exchange with Adams over AMMs and correlated pairs on Aug. 18.

Programmable Demand, No Supply

Binji Pande, a founding member of Ethereum R&D lab Ethlabs, argued on the same stream that the blowouts are a supply problem rather than a design flaw. “We kind of figured out how to program demand before we figured out how to program supply, and you kind of need both,” he said. He did not defend the price gaps, calling a six-dollar tokenized AMC print “bad market structure” and saying it was not good “for any market.”

Pande’s framing after tokenized AMC and Hims & Hers broke against their reference prices over the Aug. 29 weekend was that issuers have lost control over how their assets are used, the same way publishers lost control over how information traveled. A memecoin called BONER had by then cornered about half the tokenized Hims & Hers float. On Wednesday he predicted the pattern spreads to penny stocks.

Huang’s objection to the memecoin pairings is mechanical. “When you put in a meme coin with the stock, they’re not really correlated assets. You’re exposing people to a lot of impermanent loss in those situations.”

Transfer Agents Want A Line

The firms that keep shareholder records have asked the SEC to draw the distinction in rules. Continental Stock Transfer & Trust told the agency’s crypto task force on July 21 that third-party tokens “do not establish a legal relationship between the token holder and the issuer” and can “confuse investors, impair issuer governance, create disclosure and market-integrity risks, and bypass the shareholder-record and corporate-action infrastructure.” It asked the SEC to exclude them from regulatory relief absent safeguards. Computershare asked a week later for neutral treatment across all book-entry forms instead.

Ariel Givner, a corporate and intellectual property lawyer in fintech and the founder of Givner Law, posted the investor-side version of the argument on Friday morning, drawing 109,000 views. “You bought economic exposure from an offshore affiliate that slapped someone else’s ticker on a derivative,” she wrote. “That is NOT tokenization.”

AMC has filed nothing with the SEC on the dispute. Robinhood’s chief legal officer Dan Gallagher, an SEC commissioner from 2011 to 2015, told Aron to “send your lawyers and we’ll educate them,” as The Defiant reported on Friday.

ONDO traded at $0.3689, up 5.1% over 24 hours and 5.2% over seven days, according to CoinGecko.

Figures via rwa.xyz, DefiLlama and CoinGecko on Sept. 5.