Ink Carries 963 Tokenized Stocks, Five Times Robinhood Chain's Roster

Ink, the Ethereum layer 2 built by Kraken, carries 963 tokenized equities issued by Backed Finance, according to a count this desk ran against the Ink block explorer on 28 August 2026. Robinhood Chain, the other chain with a serious equity layer, carries 196. It is the largest verified roster of tokenized shares on any chain we count, and until now nobody had counted it.

A tokenized equity is a token whose issuer holds the real share and passes the economics through. On Ink they are xStocks, issued by Backed Finance, the Swiss firm Kraken agreed to acquire earlier this year. Backed deployed its token factories on Ink on 19 January 2026 and handed ownership on, per the explorer, which is why the roster reads as an issuer's build rather than a bridge.

Counted by issuer, not by name

An ERC-20 called Apple xStock costs nothing to deploy, so the count here keeps a token only if one of Backed's three factory contracts minted it. Two tokens carrying the xStocks name failed that test and are published separately rather than dropped. It is the same check a custodian runs, and any reader can repeat it from the factory addresses on the board.

The roster is wider than the marketing

Kraken's own xStocks page lists 57 symbols. The chain holds far more, and Broadridge put the framework at over 500 tokenized assets in its August announcement. Alongside the names anyone would expect sit SpaceX, which has no public shares at all, Circle, Galaxy Digital, and international listings including ANTA Sports and Beazley. Ink's roster is not a US large-cap shortlist, it is a global one.

Almost nobody holds them yet

Across the whole roster there are 3,785 holding addresses, and NVIDIA's xStock accounts for 613 of them. Eleven listings are held by 50 addresses or more. 876 of the 963 are held by exactly one.

A contract with one holder has been deployed rather than distributed. Read across nearly a thousand of them, that is an issuer laying rails in advance of the traffic, which is a considerably better position than the reverse. The listings exist, the custody is arranged and the contracts are live, so the day demand arrives there is nothing to build. Robinhood Chain's 196 got there the other way round, with tokens arriving roughly as the market asked for them, and a portion of that board sits quiet on any given day too.

The rail nobody else has

The more interesting number on Ink is not the roster. In August, Payward, Kraken's parent, and Broadridge, which processes most of the proxy voting in US equities, said eligible xStocks holders would be able to submit voting instructions on the shares behind their tokens. Those instructions are aggregated and recorded on Ink, crypto.news reported, with the wallet, timestamp and direction of each one public.

Nothing like that exists on another chain. Proxy voting in conventional markets is tallied privately and reported weeks later in a filing. Searching the Ink explorer for a contract carrying those votes turns up nothing yet, so the rail is announced rather than visible, and the first recorded meeting will be the thing to look for.

Why Ink joins the beat

This paper covers onchain finance and the venues where tokenized equities settle, and on that test Ink now earns a page. Its parent owns the issuer rather than renting one. Its roster is five times the size of the chain this desk was started to cover. It is the only chain named as the record layer for shareholder votes. Its equity layer is also, for now, almost entirely unowned, and a market is easier to understand from before it fills than after.

Ink's board is published from today at /ink/stocks, verified by issuer, alongside the Robinhood Chain board.

The Read

Ink has built the largest tokenized equity roster in the market and has not yet been asked to use it. The number that matters is not 963, it is the eleven listings held by more than 50 addresses, and whether that count rises across the roster rather than in NVIDIA alone. The first proxy vote recorded on the chain is the other one to watch, because it is the only thing here no competitor can copy.