On October 3, RickyW, a member of the investment team at YZi Labs, published an analysis arguing that a token carrying a stock's name does not, by itself, confer shareholder rights on its holder.

According to the analysis, the substance of any tokenized equity product built on a blockchain depends on who holds the underlying shares and what rights attach to them. In this view, a token's branding is not a substitute for the legal arrangements that determine whether a holder actually participates in the economics and governance of the underlying equity. For anyone evaluating tokenized equities, the practical weight of this argument is that a ticker alone says nothing about whether dividends, voting rights, or other shareholder protections reach the token holder — those outcomes depend on the custody and contractual structure behind the token.

YZi Labs is the venture firm that out of Binance Labs and adopted its current name in early 2025, with investments spanning Web3, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology.

Tokenized stocks, such as the xStocks referenced in the report, are blockchain-based tokens designed to track shares of publicly listed companies. The structure of these products has been a recurring point of legal discussion, since token holders do not automatically receive the dividends, voting rights, and other protections that come with direct share ownership unless the underlying arrangements provide for them. For readers following the category, the questions to watch are consistent across products: who legally holds the underlying shares, what rights are contractually extended to token holders, and how those arrangements evolve as the product category develops.

Beyond the structural question, the article also flags three startup bets that RickyW identifies in the tokenized xStocks market.

This content was first published on COINOTAG: https://en.coinotag.com/yzi-labs-rickyw-tokenized-xstocks-startup-bets