Company A will accept funds to buy some stock like MSFT, then they will mint a token i.e. xMSFT that you'll own in a blockchain ledger. You can trade this for whatever you want but the company promises to buy any token xMSFT at MSFT price whenever you want[1]. So the tokenized asset remains pegged as long as there's trust in the institution.

Also, the company will grow a balance sheet out of the funds created by the owners of the tokens and they frequently will give you some sort of yield on your position.

[1] Open Market hours and usually accompanied by a fee.

The mechanism is usually that you can exchange tokenized stocks for real stocks for some fee. That causes prices to be similar.

Another similar instrument is perpetuals, which are kept close to the price of the underlying by having people who hold long positions pay people who pay short positions, or vice versa, when the price deviates. (This is called funding.)

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2026/01/19/nyse-to-launch-2...

Sounds like the “blockchain” part of this is marketing, since it’s on a private blockchain controlled by the exchange. The real selling point is 24/7 trading.

Value comes from the underlying. Of course you are carrying some intermediary risk but that's also inherent with stock brokers as well. Similar to a stablecoin backed by treasuries. Voting isn't the only value of holding stock, although some platforms have proposed passing through to token holders voting and dividend distributions as well.

One of the primary benefits for traders is 24/7 liquidity and the ability to plug the token into other products onchain, like lending markets.

> The value is only from what other people are willing to pay for it?

Somehow every time I try to make this argument about stock buybacks, some people vigorously defend them as not just somehow a glorified Ponzi scheme.