The Securities and Exchange Comission is pushing back against a growing market for “tokenized stocks” that look like equity, trade like equity, but do not actually confer ownership, releasing new guidance that puts third-party synthetic equity products squarely under traditional securities and derivatives rules. The latter category, the SEC warned, often amounts to synthetic exposure rather than real equity ownership, a distinction that became newly salient after OpenAI publicly disavowed tokenized “equity” linked to its shares offered through Robinhood in Europe. Only issuer-sponsored tokenized securities, where the company integrates blockchain records into its official shareholder register, can represent true equity ownership, the agency said. By contrast, third-party tokenized stocks generally fall into one of two buckets. By formalizing how tokenized stocks are classified, regulators appear intent on limiting the spread of synthetic equity products to retail investors while steering compliant tokenization toward issuer-approved, fully regulated structures.