What You Actually Own When Buying a Tokenized Asset
Tokenization is sold
as access: anyone, anywhere, one tap into assets that used to be gated. RWA
Labs Chief Business Officer Anton Golub says access is the easy part. The hard
parts, the two that decide whether tokenized real-world assets become real markets
or expensive disappointments, are what sits behind the token and who stands
ready to buy it back.
Start with the
question that trips up almost everyone who buys a tokenized stock: what do you
actually own?
“Usually when you
buy a stock on the stock market, you own the stock,” Golub told Finance
Magnates at iFX Expo in Cyprus. “Now in tokenization, many times when you
buy a token that represents (a stock), you’re not buying the stock, you’re
buying the wrapper.”
That distinction
sounds academic until a wrapper turns out to be empty. Asked about the
recent scramble around tokenized SpaceX exposure, when several platforms
launched a big campaign tied to a SpaceX IPO and pulled it days later, Golub is
blunt about what was underneath.
“There was nothing behind the
wrapper,” he says. “That’s why a lot of these platforms had to refund
the users because they bought into something that was not objectively
real.”
Golub’s point is not
that tokenization is a trick. It is that the token and the ownership are two
different things, and the gap between them is where the risk lives. What
actually sits behind a given wrapper is the fine print a broker or platform has
to read rather than the marketing.
Before the ownership
question comes a definitional one that, as Finance Magnates noted, comes up
constantly: people keep asking what a real-world asset actually is. Golub
prefers to define the category by what it excludes.
“Cryptocurrencies
are not real-world assets,” he says. Bitcoin and Ethereum are native
tokens of their own blockchains. Utility tokens and meme coins are creatures of
crypto too. None of them are real-world
assets.
A real-world asset is
anything that already exists in the world outside the chain. “A stock is a
real-world asset. A bond is a real-world asset. A futures contract,” Golub
says. Some of those are already digital: a stock today exists only in digital
form. But the category also covers the physical, oil, gold, commodities, real
estate.
From left: Anton Golub, Founding Member, RWA Labs, and Yam Yehoshua, Chief Editor, Finance Magnates.
The dividing line is
legal, not technical. “The reason why real-world assets are a special
category within the digital asset industry is because their legal framework and
their ownership exist outside of the blockchain,” Golub says.
Buy
tokenized real estate and there is still a notary, still an authority, still a
registry off the chain that records who owns the building. The entire
tokenization project, in his framing, is the work of mapping those off-chain
rights onto a chain without losing them in translation.
Tokenized Does Not Mean Liquid
The pitch for
tokenization is access: something that was hard to buy becomes easy to buy.
Golub’s warning is to think one step past the purchase, to the sale.
“Many times when
you tokenize an asset, it doesn’t mean you actually made it liquid,” he
says. “If I buy a tokenized real estate and I’m very happy with it… and
now I want to sell it, but there is nobody on the other side to buy when I’m
selling, the part that’s missing there is liquidity of the assets.”
The fix is not novel.
It is the same machinery the brokerage industry already runs on. The way to
resolve that problem, Golub says, is market makers. “The same way you have
in [the] CFD brokerage industry, you have market makers, liquidity providers.
The same way, you need to have market makers for tokenized real-world assets.
Otherwise… you give access, but then you have a problem of actually getting
out of that access.”
This is the line that
should matter most to anyone running a trading venue. Tokenization does not
remove the need for a liquidity layer; it relocates it. A platform that lists
tokenized assets without market makers behind them has built a shop window customers
can walk into but not out of.
The Fix: A Token
Has to Carry Real Ownership
Ask Golub what a
properly built tokenized market looks like and the shape that emerges is
familiar. Today, he notes, the only way to buy a stock of SpaceX is directly
through a traditional finance institution.
The tokenized version only works if
the law and the infrastructure make the token equivalent to the share. When we
compared that requirement to a stablecoin, a token that needs an actual asset
pegged behind it, Golub embraced the analogy: exactly right, in his words.
“You need to have
a token, and you need to have the actual ownership and redemption, let’s call
it like that, behind the token,” he says. Two worlds, traditional and
tokenized, but with equal rights for the end user and the same legal principles
underneath. “Otherwise
tokenization then doesn’t make sense.”
For a broker or
platform weighing whether to list a tokenized asset, that collapses into a
short diligence checklist Golub’s answers keep circling back to. Is there real
ownership or redemption behind the token, or only price exposure? Is there a
market maker committed to the other side of the trade? And does the token
holder end up with the same rights as the traditional holder?
Get those three
right and tokenization is an efficiency gain. Get them wrong and it is a refund
waiting to happen.
Where The Regulated Entities Are
Golub, who comes from
Dubai, is upfront that he is not a neutral judge when the conversation turns to
the UAE, but he makes a specific claim rather than a boosterish one. The
country, he says, “has
the most regulated crypto entities in the world,” with more than 100
regulated companies, custodians, brokers, exchanges and asset managers. A big
achievement, he adds, for a country that started on crypto regulation only
recently.
He is quick to widen
the lens: the United States is the biggest capital market in the world, and
Europe remains one of the largest, “maybe struggling with regulatory
frameworks.” How much can hang on a single license is clearest in the
Binance case.
Asked earlier in the
conversation about Binance’s
application for a license in Europe under the region’s new crypto framework,
Golub was careful to note he was not speaking on behalf of the exchange and
could only describe what is publicly announced.
He was direct about the stakes,
though: a rejection would be a big blow for Binance and for its European users,
who would then have to work out how they access its products and services.
More and more data points are pointing in the same direction: tokenization is no longer just a concept. It is becoming real financial infrastructure within the #RWA ecosystem.
What’s interesting is that we are no longer talking only about experiments or pilot projects.… https://t.co/ktrqAeugGP
— Reental | Real Estate Investing 3.0 📲 (@Reental_co) March 11, 2026
What Is Next
Two big trends, he
says, are coming before the end of the year.
The first is perpetual
futures coming onshore. Perpetuals are the most popular crypto product in the
world, and in the US there is now a big initiative to offer them under a
regulated framework and bring the offshore product home. “There’s a lot of
appetite” in the US to trade them, he says.
The second is
prediction markets, and here Golub is blunt about the lineage. “Prediction
markets are a great rebranding of binary options,” he says. Put to him
that the product is already spreading fast through the CFD space, with everyone
now offering it through white labels, he agreed without hesitation.
The open question is
regulatory: binary options are risky for end users, and the coming fight is how
to scale prediction markets in a compliant way that actually protects them.
There may not be one
answer. In many countries, betting and gambling laws already exist, and the
slice of the product that behaves like a wager may belong under those
frameworks, while the more financial applications sit under financial
regulation. Where each contract lands is the line the industry has not yet
drawn.
That is the
throughline across everything Golub covers. Tokenized assets, onshore
perpetuals, prediction markets: the technology to launch them exists today.
What is still being built is the legal and market structure that decides
whether any of it holds up after the customer clicks buy.
Tokenization is sold
as access: anyone, anywhere, one tap into assets that used to be gated. RWA
Labs Chief Business Officer Anton Golub says access is the easy part. The hard
parts, the two that decide whether tokenized real-world assets become real markets
or expensive disappointments, are what sits behind the token and who stands
ready to buy it back.
Start with the
question that trips up almost everyone who buys a tokenized stock: what do you
actually own?
“Usually when you
buy a stock on the stock market, you own the stock,” Golub told Finance
Magnates at iFX Expo in Cyprus. “Now in tokenization, many times when you
buy a token that represents (a stock), you’re not buying the stock, you’re
buying the wrapper.”
That distinction
sounds academic until a wrapper turns out to be empty. Asked about the
recent scramble around tokenized SpaceX exposure, when several platforms
launched a big campaign tied to a SpaceX IPO and pulled it days later, Golub is
blunt about what was underneath.
“There was nothing behind the
wrapper,” he says. “That’s why a lot of these platforms had to refund
the users because they bought into something that was not objectively
real.”
Golub’s point is not
that tokenization is a trick. It is that the token and the ownership are two
different things, and the gap between them is where the risk lives. What
actually sits behind a given wrapper is the fine print a broker or platform has
to read rather than the marketing.
Before the ownership
question comes a definitional one that, as Finance Magnates noted, comes up
constantly: people keep asking what a real-world asset actually is. Golub
prefers to define the category by what it excludes.
“Cryptocurrencies
are not real-world assets,” he says. Bitcoin and Ethereum are native
tokens of their own blockchains. Utility tokens and meme coins are creatures of
crypto too. None of them are real-world
assets.
A real-world asset is
anything that already exists in the world outside the chain. “A stock is a
real-world asset. A bond is a real-world asset. A futures contract,” Golub
says. Some of those are already digital: a stock today exists only in digital
form. But the category also covers the physical, oil, gold, commodities, real
estate.
From left: Anton Golub, Founding Member, RWA Labs, and Yam Yehoshua, Chief Editor, Finance Magnates.
The dividing line is
legal, not technical. “The reason why real-world assets are a special
category within the digital asset industry is because their legal framework and
their ownership exist outside of the blockchain,” Golub says.
Buy
tokenized real estate and there is still a notary, still an authority, still a
registry off the chain that records who owns the building. The entire
tokenization project, in his framing, is the work of mapping those off-chain
rights onto a chain without losing them in translation.
Tokenized Does Not Mean Liquid
The pitch for
tokenization is access: something that was hard to buy becomes easy to buy.
Golub’s warning is to think one step past the purchase, to the sale.
“Many times when
you tokenize an asset, it doesn’t mean you actually made it liquid,” he
says. “If I buy a tokenized real estate and I’m very happy with it… and
now I want to sell it, but there is nobody on the other side to buy when I’m
selling, the part that’s missing there is liquidity of the assets.”
The fix is not novel.
It is the same machinery the brokerage industry already runs on. The way to
resolve that problem, Golub says, is market makers. “The same way you have
in [the] CFD brokerage industry, you have market makers, liquidity providers.
The same way, you need to have market makers for tokenized real-world assets.
Otherwise… you give access, but then you have a problem of actually getting
out of that access.”
This is the line that
should matter most to anyone running a trading venue. Tokenization does not
remove the need for a liquidity layer; it relocates it. A platform that lists
tokenized assets without market makers behind them has built a shop window customers
can walk into but not out of.
The Fix: A Token
Has to Carry Real Ownership
Ask Golub what a
properly built tokenized market looks like and the shape that emerges is
familiar. Today, he notes, the only way to buy a stock of SpaceX is directly
through a traditional finance institution.
The tokenized version only works if
the law and the infrastructure make the token equivalent to the share. When we
compared that requirement to a stablecoin, a token that needs an actual asset
pegged behind it, Golub embraced the analogy: exactly right, in his words.
“You need to have
a token, and you need to have the actual ownership and redemption, let’s call
it like that, behind the token,” he says. Two worlds, traditional and
tokenized, but with equal rights for the end user and the same legal principles
underneath. “Otherwise
tokenization then doesn’t make sense.”
For a broker or
platform weighing whether to list a tokenized asset, that collapses into a
short diligence checklist Golub’s answers keep circling back to. Is there real
ownership or redemption behind the token, or only price exposure? Is there a
market maker committed to the other side of the trade? And does the token
holder end up with the same rights as the traditional holder?
Get those three
right and tokenization is an efficiency gain. Get them wrong and it is a refund
waiting to happen.
Where The Regulated Entities Are
Golub, who comes from
Dubai, is upfront that he is not a neutral judge when the conversation turns to
the UAE, but he makes a specific claim rather than a boosterish one. The
country, he says, “has
the most regulated crypto entities in the world,” with more than 100
regulated companies, custodians, brokers, exchanges and asset managers. A big
achievement, he adds, for a country that started on crypto regulation only
recently.
He is quick to widen
the lens: the United States is the biggest capital market in the world, and
Europe remains one of the largest, “maybe struggling with regulatory
frameworks.” How much can hang on a single license is clearest in the
Binance case.
Asked earlier in the
conversation about Binance’s
application for a license in Europe under the region’s new crypto framework,
Golub was careful to note he was not speaking on behalf of the exchange and
could only describe what is publicly announced.
He was direct about the stakes,
though: a rejection would be a big blow for Binance and for its European users,
who would then have to work out how they access its products and services.
More and more data points are pointing in the same direction: tokenization is no longer just a concept. It is becoming real financial infrastructure within the #RWA ecosystem.
What’s interesting is that we are no longer talking only about experiments or pilot projects.… https://t.co/ktrqAeugGP
— Reental | Real Estate Investing 3.0 📲 (@Reental_co) March 11, 2026
What Is Next
Two big trends, he
says, are coming before the end of the year.
The first is perpetual
futures coming onshore. Perpetuals are the most popular crypto product in the
world, and in the US there is now a big initiative to offer them under a
regulated framework and bring the offshore product home. “There’s a lot of
appetite” in the US to trade them, he says.
The second is
prediction markets, and here Golub is blunt about the lineage. “Prediction
markets are a great rebranding of binary options,” he says. Put to him
that the product is already spreading fast through the CFD space, with everyone
now offering it through white labels, he agreed without hesitation.
The open question is
regulatory: binary options are risky for end users, and the coming fight is how
to scale prediction markets in a compliant way that actually protects them.
There may not be one
answer. In many countries, betting and gambling laws already exist, and the
slice of the product that behaves like a wager may belong under those
frameworks, while the more financial applications sit under financial
regulation. Where each contract lands is the line the industry has not yet
drawn.
That is the
throughline across everything Golub covers. Tokenized assets, onshore
perpetuals, prediction markets: the technology to launch them exists today.
What is still being built is the legal and market structure that decides
whether any of it holds up after the customer clicks buy.
