Four issuers are building tokenized stocks, and they are not building the same thing

By early 2026 the tokenized equity category had settled around four names: Backed Finance, which issues xStocks for non-US retail; Dinari, whose dShares target US accredited investors; Robinhood, with EU-listed tokenized stocks; and Kraken, which distributes xStocks through the Backed partnership. Same headline product, very different architecture.

The cleanest way to tell them apart is to ask what each one optimised for.

Backed optimised for composability. xStocks are issued as SPL tokens on Solana and deliberately designed to leave the platform — into wallets, DEXes and lending markets. Backed is infrastructure; the venues sit on top.

Dinari optimised for regulatory standing in the hardest market. It is the only one of the four with a route to US investors, and that route runs through accredited-investor rules. Narrower audience, sturdier legal footing.

Robinhood optimised for the app. It is the only vertically integrated retail experience of the group, launched in the EU, with a planned Arbitrum Orbit chain of its own for real-world assets. That gives Robinhood control over routing and compliance, and gives users a familiar interface — but the token starts life inside Robinhood's stack.

Kraken sits between infrastructure and app. It is an exchange-branded product, issued by Backed, settling on Solana, with the exchange handling access, fiat rails and order books, and the chain handling everything after withdrawal.

The practical differences follow from those choices. If you want the token to do things after you buy it, the Solana-native route is the one with an actual DeFi ecosystem attached. If you want a single tidy app and you are in the EU, Robinhood's version is less work. If you are a US investor, most of this is closed to you and Dinari's accredited path is the only door.

One thing they mostly share: dividends get passed through, whether as USDC, extra tokens, or a rebasing balance adjustment. The mechanism differs, the economic intent does not.

Where I would push back on the category as a whole is maturity. These are young products competing partly on distribution and partly on regulatory arbitrage, and the winner is not obvious. Picking based on which issuer is likely to still be operating and liquid in five years is a more useful filter than picking based on ticker count.