There is a new fever in the financial world. The idea is spreading that you should be able to own a piece of anything, any company, any property, any resource, any experience, no matter who you are or where you live. Robinhood’s European platform has put this notion on the map by offering digital tokens tied to private giants like SpaceX and OpenAI. At first glance, it feels like the future of democratized investing. Beneath the surface, however, lies a web of risk and regulatory concern that demands honest scrutiny.
For decades, the capital markets have drawn a sharp line between what is public and what is private. That line was drawn to protect the retail investor, to create a marketplace where transparency, reporting, and accountability are not optional but enforced by law. Public companies are required to open their books to the world, reporting their earnings, risks, and governance practices every quarter. They are subject to ongoing audits and are held to account by regulators, the press, and shareholders large and small. This is the cost of access to the world’s deepest pools of capital and the price of being able to sell a piece of your company to anyone at any time.
Private companies, in contrast, are opaque by design. They do not publish audited financials, rarely disclose their strategies or risks, and are controlled by founders and early backers whose interests may not always align with outsiders. When platforms start to offer tokens that track the price of private companies without those companies’ consent or involvement, what they are really selling is not true ownership, but synthetic exposure. The difference is not a technicality, but the difference between real equity and a derivative product that lives in a grey area of law and value.
The recent draft guidance from the US Securities and Exchange Commission signals a critical evolution in regulatory thinking. The SEC appears ready to create a new category for these private-company tokens, one that recognizes them as derivatives, not shares, and that would require greater disclosures, explicit risk warnings, and limitations on resale and leverage. There is also renewed interest in expanding regulated crowdfunding frameworks, allowing private companies to raise capital from the public while still imposing meaningful caps, restrictions, and reporting requirements. What is not on the table is the idea of unfettered trading of private-company shares on public platforms. The protections that come from transparency and disclosure are not optional; they are the foundation on which public trust in the market is built.
This distinction exists for a reason. Bringing a company into the public markets is a heavy lift. It requires a willingness to operate in full view of investors, analysts, regulators, and competitors. Public companies trade liquidity for scrutiny, and in doing so they become part of the most trusted, efficient capital allocation system in history. The companies that avoid this path may do so for good strategic reasons, but the answer is not to offer synthetic proxies that mimic public-market access without the public-market rules. The cost of inclusion must be paid in visibility and accountability.
The appetite for fractional ownership is real, and it is growing. Yet the only way to make that dream safe and sustainable is to bring more private companies into the sunlight of public markets. The answer is not to create new buckets of risk but to push for broader access to true, transparent ownership, anchored in law and oversight.
Fractional ownership is not a fintech invention. It is the DNA of every modern capital market. The public stock market was born from the need to spread risk and reward across a pool of investors. From the earliest Dutch trading voyages to the rise of America’s corporate giants, the promise of owning a piece of something too big for one person to buy or manage has driven economic growth for centuries.
When you buy a share of a public company, you are acquiring a small but real stake in everything that company owns and earns. The process is transparent, regulated, and accessible to anyone with the means to participate. That is the original promise of financial democracy, and it is one that has lifted millions into the world of investing.
Fractionalization did not stop at stocks. It extended to bonds, real estate, mutual funds, and more recently, to complex financial products and pooled vehicles. Every innovation has been about expanding access, distributing risk, and making ownership more liquid and inclusive. Today, we see that logic extending to assets once considered indivisible—private jets, luxury homes, rare art, and even professional talent.
Tokenization is not a revolution in ownership. It is a revolution in infrastructure. What blockchain and digital ledgers offer is a platform for tracking, transferring, and managing fractional stakes with an efficiency and programmability that paper certificates and legacy databases could never match.
A token can represent a share in a company, a right to use a property, an hour of flight time, or a slice of revenue from a wind farm. It can be programmed to pay dividends, enforce restrictions, or update ownership records in real time. It can be bought and sold in seconds, with a global pool of buyers and sellers, and with a level of precision that legacy systems simply cannot achieve.
Tokenization is also expanding what can be owned. The ability to fractionalize and digitize means that assets once locked away, such as infrastructure, commodities, or even executive time, can now be shared, traded, and valued by the market. This does not change the economic fundamentals. The token is only as valuable as the asset and the rights it confers. What has changed is the scale and flexibility with which those assets can be accessed.
At its core, tokenization is not a new idea. It is fractional ownership, upgraded for a digital world. The same economic forces that made public markets powerful now apply to new classes of assets and new communities of investors.
What is truly novel is the speed, flexibility, and intelligence of the new system. Programmable contracts allow for automated dividends, dynamic governance, and instant transfer of rights. Micro-liquidity enables the division and sale of assets in ways that were once impractical. The walls between asset classes—between real estate, equities, resources, and even labor—are coming down.
For the investor, this means an explosion of choice and access. For the asset owner, it means new ways to unlock value, raise capital, and manage risk. For the system as a whole, it promises a leap in efficiency, transparency, and inclusivity. But none of this works without the foundation of trust and oversight. The rules that protect public shareholders must travel with the asset, no matter what form it takes.