Securitize president flags unanswered voting rights question for tokenized stocks in non-KYC wallets

If you tokenize a share of stock and send it to a wallet with no identity attached, who votes that share? Brett Redfearn, president of Securitize and former director of the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets, says nobody has a good answer yet.

Redfearn laid out the problem on the Unchained podcast, dissecting the legal and governance gaps that emerge when tokenized equities drift outside the guardrails of traditional securities infrastructure. His core argument: issuers need approval rights before their shares get tokenized, and the industry’s current approach to non-KYC models creates a void that regulators and courts will eventually have to fill.

The AMC-Robinhood dispute as a case study

Redfearn’s comments didn’t materialize in a vacuum. A public spat between AMC CEO Adam Aron and Robinhood over the platform’s handling of tokenized AMC shares brought the issuer-consent question into sharp focus. The dispute raised a straightforward but legally thorny question: can a platform tokenize a company’s stock without that company’s blessing?

Redfearn used the AMC situation to illustrate what happens when tokens representing equity move into bearer-like instruments. Once a share token sits in a non-KYC wallet, the connection between the beneficial owner and the corporate issuer effectively dissolves. The issuer doesn’t know who holds the share. The platform that created the token may not know either. And if nobody knows who holds it, nobody can answer who gets to exercise the governance rights attached to it.

Securitize’s permissioned approach

Securitize, the firm Redfearn joined as president in April 2026, has built its entire model around avoiding exactly this problem. The platform requires KYC verification for all participants and restricts asset transfers to whitelisted wallets. There are no bearer-style tokens in Securitize’s ecosystem, and no permissionless transfers that would allow shares to disappear into unidentified wallets.

The company manages roughly $4 billion in tokenized real-world assets, making it one of the largest players in the space. It went public on the NYSE under the ticker SECZ on July 2, 2026, and in a move that was equal parts product demonstration and marketing, tokenized approximately $295 million of its own stock on Solana and Avalanche simultaneously with its listing.

The key distinction in Redfearn’s framing is between issuer-sponsored tokenization, where the company whose equity is being represented has signed off and maintains oversight, and unsanctioned tokenization, where a third party wraps an existing security into a token without the issuer’s involvement.

Redfearn’s SEC background lends weight to his position. He served as director of the Division of Trading and Markets from 2017 to 2020, the office responsible for overseeing broker-dealers, exchanges, and market structure.

Why the voting rights gap matters

Corporate governance might sound like a niche concern, but voting rights sit at the foundation of equity ownership. Shareholders vote on board members, executive compensation, mergers, and major strategic decisions. When a meaningful portion of a company’s shares exist in wallets that can’t be linked to identifiable owners, the integrity of those votes comes into question.

Consider the practical scenario. A company holds its annual shareholder meeting. Its transfer agent reaches out to registered holders to distribute proxy materials and collect votes. But some percentage of the tokenized float has migrated to non-KYC wallets through secondary trading. Those shares are in economic limbo: someone owns the financial exposure, but no one can exercise the governance rights. Or worse, the platform that facilitated the tokenization retains voting power over shares it no longer economically owns.

The AMC-Robinhood episode may end up as a footnote or a turning point. If courts or regulators weigh in on issuer consent for tokenization, the precedent will shape the competitive landscape for every platform in the space. Firms like Securitize that built compliance-first infrastructure would benefit from rules requiring issuer approval, while platforms that tokenize assets without permission would face existential legal exposure.

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