From Airdrops to Equity Tokens: A New Era of Blockchain Ownership

Recently, the fact that Uniswap launched its fee switch after a significant delay shocked the crypto industry. More than five years after the 2020 airdrop, a path for token holders to receive rewards has finally opened. However, behind this seemingly simple decision lies a deep contradiction between equities and tokens. Resolving this contradiction is set to become the industry’s biggest theme in 2026.

The Fundamental Contradiction Revealed by Uniswap’s Five-Year Stumble

Why did it take so long for Uniswap to activate the fee switch? It’s not just a technical challenge; it’s fundamentally a clash between the on-chain world and the off-chain legal systems.

Theoretically, UNI token holders are the “owners” of the protocol. They hold governance rights as well. Ultimately, the UNIfication proposal was approved with over 62 million votes. Yet, in practice, a structure persisted for years where the operating company of the protocol siphoned all value from front-end fees through shares.

In other words, a situation arose where both shareholders and token holders competed for the same profit source. This problem worsened over the years and now affects nearly all revenue-generating protocols.

Within the industry, several solutions have been proposed, broadly falling into two extremes. One is to “completely abolish shares and fully on-chainize ownership.” The other is to “abandon tokens entirely and revert to traditional equity structures.” Both approaches, however, have significant flaws.

Why Neither Stocks Alone Nor Tokens Alone Work

The Pitfalls of Fully On-Chainization

In theory, smart contracts could replace shareholder agreements, on-chain balances could substitute for share registers, and governance tokens could stand in for board votes. Ownership would be transparent and settled instantly—an ideal scenario.

But in reality, as long as off-chain courts are the ultimate arbiters of disputes, on-chain-only solutions cannot fundamentally resolve the core issues.

For example, suppose you own a tokenized real estate NFT issued from a smart contract. Legally, you are the owner of the land, but if the off-chain registry disagrees, a sheriff showing up with eviction notices won’t be helped by merely showing the NFT.

A fully “no-stock, pure token” approach only works in limited cases—such as Bitcoin, some public blockchains, or fully autonomous DeFi protocols—where there are no off-chain assets, no customers, no payments, and no operational dependencies. This was the original ideal Bitcoin envisioned—a censorship-resistant, seizure-proof system.

However, most projects, especially those with Web2 or Web2.5 business models, involve off-chain assets, customers, payments, and operations. For these projects, full on-chainization is an unfeasible option.

The Cost of Fully Abandoning Tokens

On the other end of the spectrum, many projects (in fact, most companies) have decided to completely abandon tokens. They raise funds via traditional equity, build products, and avoid all regulatory headaches associated with tokens.

Certainly, without tokens, there’s no SEC visits, and no need to worry about whether governance tokens are securities. There’s no need to worry about tokenomics or emission schedules.

But the cost is significant. They lose the benefits of instant settlement, transparent ownership records, cost efficiency, and the ability to align incentives across a global community.

Traditional stock transfers remain expensive, slow, and largely inaccessible to most potential investors. Private equity exposure remains costly, inefficient, and opaque. Even in 2026, the process of trading public shares looks far more outdated compared to DeFi.

Despite their flaws, tokens have the potential to solve many of these issues. They enable community ownership and user-owned products. Completely abandoning them is a true step backward.

The Hidden Power of Legal Rights in Stocks

So, what exactly differentiates stocks from tokens? Understanding this fundamental difference is crucial.

Legal Status and Recovery Rights

Owning stocks grants you a legal position. You can sue, exercise rights, and have established legal frameworks to recover losses if directors breach fiduciary duties or commit fraud.

In contrast, token holders (except in rare cases) generally lack recognized legal rights or protections. They often can only hope the market will rescue their investment.

Theoretically, a company’s entire governance could be on-chain. But if founders delegate all decision-making to shareholder votes, it would lead to severe operational inefficiencies and contradict the core purpose of investment—trust in the team’s vision and capabilities.

The Reality of Governance

Shareholders elect the board, approve major transactions, and exercise codified rights. Governance tokens, however, often only give the illusion of control.

As Vitalik has pointed out, token governance suffers from serious flaws: low voter turnout (often below 10%), whale manipulation, lack of expertise. In many cases, on-chain governance becomes a “theater of decentralization,” where outcomes can be ignored if they don’t align with the team’s interests, requiring human judgment for implementation.

Legal Clarity of Value Capture

In M&A activities, shareholders have clear legal rights to profit. Recent cases involving Tensor and Axelar show that token holders are often completely ignored during acquisitions.

This strong legal entitlement to profit distribution makes stocks more reliably traded based on future earnings expectations. Conversely, token valuations are often purely speculative, lacking fundamental backing.

Even if a project generates revenue, regulatory risks and fiduciary conflicts mean most cannot reliably route profits to token holders.

Larger Investor Base

Simply put, the investor pool and total purchasing power in the stock market far surpass those in the token market.

The US stock market’s size is over 20 times that of the entire crypto industry. Globally, stock markets are more than 46 times larger.

This means projects choosing tokens have only captured about 2–5% of the potential purchasing power they could have accessed.

2026: Regulatory Clarity and the Innovation of Stock-like Tokens

What is certain is that 2026 will be the year of innovation and experimentation for stock-like tokens.

The DTC pilot program in the US is the first to allow participants to hold legal rights to tokenized securities on a blockchain. It signals that the US capital market infrastructure is steadily moving toward on-chain integration.

In practice:

• Nasdaq has proposed trading tokenized securities
• Securitize offers fully on-chain legal ownership of public shares
• Centrifuge and others are tokenizing shares through SEC-registered intermediaries

The fusion of traditional financial infrastructure with blockchain is no longer a distant dream—it’s happening right now.

A New Framework for Ownership

For crypto-native projects, Uniswap’s five-year struggle serves as a warning. The split between stocks and tokens won’t resolve itself automatically. Intentional design, clear protocols, and structures that resolve conflicts of interest are essential.

Fundamentally, this conflict stems from regulatory uncertainty and the lack of a legal framework. Early this year, the US passed the “Crypto Asset Clarity Act,” promising much-needed regulatory clarity.

By the end of the year, discussions about stocks versus tokens will give way to discussions about ownership—transparent, transferable, legally protected, and natively digital ownership. After five years of evolution since the airdrop, on-chain ownership is finally poised to transform into its true form.