Tokenized Equity Volume Went From $16bn to $590bn, and Nobody Agrees What the Tokens Are

Writing in CoinDesk's Crypto Long & Short, Joshua DeVos of the publication's indices team sets out a number that reframes how large this market has become: perpetual futures volume tied to tokenized equities has gone from $16bn to more than $590bn in the space of a year. A perpetual future is a derivative with no expiry that tracks a reference price and settles funding payments between longs and shorts, so that volume figure is a measure of speculative turnover rather than of shares actually held.

The headline hides the structure

DeVos's argument is that the growth rate is the least informative thing in the dataset. What matters is what sits underneath each token, and that varies enormously between products trading under identical tickers. Two tokens can both be labelled with the same three or four letters and grant their holders entirely different legal claims.

This is not a theoretical concern. Across the products now live, the structures in circulation include tokens fully backed one-for-one by shares held at a custodian, tokens backed by a special purpose vehicle that holds the shares and issues a claim against itself, tokens referencing a share price synthetically with collateral rather than equity behind them, and derivatives that never touch the underlying at all. Each of those gives the holder a different answer to the questions that actually matter in a stress event: who holds the share, who owes me, and what happens if the issuer fails.

Why a ticker is not a specification

In listed equity markets, the ticker is effectively a specification. A share of a company bought on any regulated venue confers the same economic and voting rights as a share bought on any other, because there is one issuer and one register. Tokenized equities break that assumption. The issuer of the token is not the company. It is an intermediary, and the terms it writes determine everything from whether dividends pass through to whether the holder has any recourse to the share itself.

That is why the structural question is prior to the trading question. A trader comparing two tokens on price alone is implicitly assuming the two instruments are fungible, and in this market they frequently are not.

What the perp volume is telling you

The other thing worth reading out of the $590bn figure is where the demand is landing. Perpetual futures growth on this scale suggests a large share of the activity around tokenized equities is directional exposure rather than ownership. That is a familiar pattern in crypto markets, where derivatives volume routinely dwarfs spot, but it complicates the standard pitch for tokenized stocks, which is about access and settlement rather than leverage.

What to check before you assume fungibility

The practical checklist that follows from DeVos's framing is short. Identify the issuer, not the underlying company. Establish whether shares exist and where they are custodied. Read whether corporate actions, dividends and splits, are contractually passed through. Establish what the redemption right is, if any, and who can exercise it. Two products that fail different items on that list should not be treated as the same asset regardless of the ticker on the screen.

None of this argues against the category. It argues that the category is not one asset class yet, and that the aggregate volume figures now being cited flatten distinctions that would matter a great deal on a bad day.