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You can buy tokenized stocks in the United States right now, and the standard answer to that question is still no.
Both of those are true, and they have been true together since October 2025. If you had asked a year ago, no was correct. It described a market where tokenized equities were built for customers outside the US and where the American retail door had not opened. Then it opened, quietly, three times, without a single change to US securities law. The most recent was 23 July 2026.
What moved was not the law. It was the scope of what three individual firms are permitted to sell, and that scope lives in a private agreement between each firm and its regulator.
Tao is the Kodex persona who works the seam between crypto instinct and the older machinery underneath it. Closer to student than master. That is the right posture for a rulebook you have never had to read. "Before you ask what a token does, ask who is allowed to hand it to you," he says. That check comes first.
He does not open the chain explorer first. He goes looking for the firm.
Three US broker-dealers have been cleared to put tokenized securities in front of retail customers.
Texture Capital got there first, in October 2025, with a platform called SoloTex. Each token is minted against a real share held in custody at a clearing broker. tZERO Securities followed on 2 December 2025, approved to retail open-end investment companies including tokenized mutual funds. Oasis Pro Markets, now owned by Ondo Finance, was authorised on 23 July 2026 for the widest scope of the three.
Everywhere else, the answer is still no. The product is not illegal. The firm in front of you has not asked for permission to sell it, and until it does, its customers cannot buy.
You can watch that split happen in about ninety seconds. You open an app listing a tokenized version of a US stock and work through to where it asks which country you are in. You select United States. On some venues the instrument stays on screen and the order ticket opens. On others it disappears, or the ticket greys out, or a support page tells you the product is not offered to US persons. Nothing about the token changed between those two screens.
The token was never what the check was reading.
Availability here is a property of the venue, not of the market. Tao keeps returning to that sentence because it inverts the way a crypto-first reader is trained to think. On-chain, access is usually a property of the asset: if the token exists and your wallet can hold it, you can hold it. Equities do not work that way, and wrapping them in a token does not touch the part that decides whether you are allowed in.
Precision matters here, because two facts arrived on the same day and only one of them was new.
Ondo's announcement lists the covered instruments plainly: NMS equities, fund interests such as ETFs, mutual funds, and index funds, and securities issued through IPOs and traded in secondary markets. Settlement can happen in fiat or in supported stablecoins, including directly between blockchain wallets.
One detail is easy to skate past. Oasis Pro Markets already held an SEC-registered broker-dealer, with alternative trading system and transfer-agent registrations attached, and Ondo acquired that entity. So on 22 July the firm was a registered broker-dealer. On 23 July it was still a registered broker-dealer. Its registration status did not move. Its permitted activities did.
That distinction is the one Tao refuses to let a headline blur. "FINRA approves Ondo" reads like a firm being let into the market. What happened is smaller: a firm already inside it was allowed to sell one more thing. Ondo's own release carries the standard disclaimer underneath the news: membership and registration do not guarantee compliance with all rules, and no regulator has recommended or approved any investment.
Because a broker-dealer's permitted business is enumerated, and expanding it is an application.
FINRA members operate under a membership agreement. When a member wants to make a material change to its business operations, it files a Continuing Membership Application under FINRA Rule 1017. The definition of material sits one rule earlier, at Rule 1011(m), and the first example FINRA gives is removing or modifying a membership agreement restriction. The rest of the list runs to market making, underwriting or acting as a dealer for the first time, and adding activities that require higher minimum net capital.
That first example is the one that matters here. A restriction inside a membership agreement is not a law about tokenized stocks. It is a line in a private document saying what this firm may do, and modifying it is an administrative act with a form number.
The timing rules are equally unglamorous. The application goes in ahead of the change. For a material change in business operations, the firm may not act on it until the review concludes, unless FINRA agrees otherwise. Rule 1014 sets the standards the applicant has to satisfy to get there.
None of that is legislation. It is one firm, one form, and one reviewer deciding whether that firm is equipped to run a business line it has not run before.
Once you know the mechanism, the last ten months stop reading as a sequence of separate scoops. Ask what each firm was actually given, and the shape repeats.
| Firm | Authorised | What the scope covered | What it did not change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Texture Capital (SoloTex) | 14 October 2025 | Retail trading of tokenized US equities, tokens minted 1:1 against shares held at a clearing broker | No law changed. One firm's own permitted activities widened |
| tZERO Securities | 2 December 2025 | Acting as a retailer of open-end investment companies, including tokenized mutual funds | Other firms still needed their own approvals |
| Oasis Pro Markets (Ondo) | 23 July 2026 | NMS equities, ETFs, mutual funds, index funds, and IPO securities in secondary markets | The SEC registration already existed. Scope moved, status did not |
Nothing in that right-hand column moved. Three firms widened their own permissions and the market around them stayed where it was. A fourth approval would add a fourth row and change nothing else. That is why "is this legal now" is the wrong question to bring to a broker's onboarding flow.
There was a route that would have changed the answer for the whole market at once, and it stalled.
The SEC had been preparing an innovation exemption that would let crypto platforms offer tokenized equities under relief rather than firm-by-firm authorisation. Chair Paul Atkins had described the rollout as close. It was pulled from its May 2026 target, and no replacement timeline followed.
The stated obstacles are worth reading, because they are the same questions a buyer should be asking. A broad exemption would have permitted third-party tokens: a platform issuing a synthetic version of a public company's stock without that company's involvement or consent. Nasdaq, NYSE and Cboe pushed back on market-structure and surveillance grounds.
Sit with the corporate-actions problem for a moment, because it is less abstract than it sounds. A company declares a dividend with a record date, and whoever the share register says is the holder on that date gets paid. Now slice that exposure into tokens moving between wallets, on a chain the issuer has never heard of. The register still has to resolve who held what at that instant. Then route the cash back out. Voting is harder. Proxies run on deadlines, through intermediaries, against a list of holders, and a token the issuer never authorised has no place on that list.
Tao reads the asymmetry as the whole explanation. A market-wide exemption has to solve corporate actions for every issuer and every platform simultaneously. A single firm's scope amendment only has to satisfy one reviewer that one firm can handle one business line. The broad route carries the harder problem, so it moved slowly, and the narrow route kept clearing.
That is the contradiction you started with, fully assembled. The switch that would make the answer yes market-wide is still off. The doors that make it yes in specific places have opened one at a time since October 2025.
The second half of Ondo's announcement is not about permission at all. It is about delivery.
The release describes omnibus account structures reaching institutional investors, registered investment advisers and retirement accounts through the brokerage and advisory channels those customers already use. A tokenized security arriving that way does not announce itself. It shows up inside an account you already hold, on a statement you already read, formatted like the positions sitting next to it.
Tao's objection is not that this is dangerous. It is that the moment a product looks routine is the moment the question stops getting asked.
The question is still live, because the models underneath are not identical. SoloTex's tokens are a 1:1 claim on a share held in custody, carrying dividends and voting rights. Other tokenized-equity products sold outside the US are derivative contracts that deliver price exposure and no shareholder rights at all. Same category name, different legal object. Kodex works through that split in what you actually own, and it is worth reading before a first purchase rather than after.
The screen where you press buy will not raise any of this. So the questions have to come from your side.
Whose rulebook does this claim live under? Not which chain it settles on. The entity that owes you something is the one whose failure would hurt, and its licences decide what you can recover. Kodex worked through that in which rulebook an asset sits under. This is that thesis one layer up. The licence type decides what protects your position. The scope decides whether you can open one.
Does this firm's scope cover the specific thing it is selling you? A broker-dealer authorised to retail tokenized mutual funds is not thereby authorised to retail tokenized equities. Those are separate categories in the same rulebook, granted separately, and tZERO and Texture Capital hold different ones.
What is behind the token, and where does it sit? A 1:1 claim on a custodied share and a contract referencing a price behave very differently in a bankruptcy. The custody rail underneath is where the share waits while the token moves.
Two of those three are checkable in public. FINRA runs BrokerCheck, a free lookup built on the Central Registration Depository that the membership process feeds. A firm report lists the registrations a firm holds and the types of business it conducts. Registered firms have to update that record within thirty days of a change.
It will not hand you the membership agreement, and it will not print a line reading tokenized equities. What it gives you is the legal entity behind the interface, whether that entity is a registered broker-dealer at all, and what it says its business is. Held against a landing page offering 24/7 access to Apple, that is a thirty-second check with real teeth.
None of those questions are about blockchains, which is the part Tao had to unlearn. He asks them during onboarding rather than after the trade, while they are still cheap to ask. It is the same discipline that makes you read the column header before the number when someone quotes you the size of this market.
The answer to whether you can buy tokenized stocks will keep changing. It will change per firm, on a form, with no announcement you are likely to see. The question that survives all of it is smaller and better: has this one been allowed to sell me this?
Open the simulator, pick one of the 31 tokenized stocks on the $5,000 paper account, and answer Tao's question before you place anything: whose rulebook would this sit under, and what would survive if that firm failed? The position is simulated, so a wrong answer costs you nothing today. Asking first is the habit that transfers.
