If you buy a tokenized stock today, as a rule you do not acquire ownership of the share itself but a claim against the provider that holds the real security for you. That is exactly where a proposal from the US Securities and Exchange Commission dated September 1, 2026 comes in: it would permit the official register of shareholders to be maintained on a blockchain. For the first time, the question is open whether a token can itself be the proof of ownership rather than merely its digital wrapper.
The proposal is not yet law, and it applies to the US market. It matters nonetheless, because it touches the layer on which everything else is built: market infrastructure. Anyone who wants to understand the ownership question around tokenized stocks has to know first who keeps the register.
What a Transfer Agent Is and Why It Decides Who Owns Your Shares
A transfer agent is the company that, on behalf of an issuer, maintains the record of who owns which shares in a corporation. It enters every transfer, deletes old entries, issues shares and cancels them again. In Germany you know the function as the share register; in the United States the body is called a transfer agent and must be register...
English (US)