dividends
Every story this desk has filed under dividends, most recent first.
A share pays its holder on a record date fixed by the issuer. A token pays whoever a smart contract says held it, after a custodian has been paid, after tax has been withheld, and usually in something other than the dividend itself.
A share does things while you hold it. It pays dividends, splits, gets taken over and votes. An explainer on how each of those events is supposed to travel from the share register to a token balance, and the places the signal gets lost.
Corporate actions are the hardest unglamorous problem in tokenized equities. The share does something, and a token contract has to be told about it in time. Here is the mechanism, and where it fails.
A share is not a static object. It pays, it converts, it gets bought out and sometimes it stops existing. Here is how each of those events travels from a company's board resolution to a token in a self-custodied wallet, and where the chain stops being able to help.
Who Counts as a Holder, and When: The Record Date Problem for Tokenized Stocks
Every dividend, vote and split turns on a snapshot of who owned the share at one instant. Onchain, that instant is a block height, and the two clocks do not agree.
What Happens to a Tokenized Stock When the Company Pays a Dividend
Splits, dividends, mergers and ticker changes are routine in equity markets and awkward onchain. Here is the plumbing that decides whether your token still tracks the share it claims to track.