If you hold a tokenized stock, the company whose share it tracks is not the only company you are exposed to. You are also exposed to the issuer that made the token. What happens if that issuer fails depends on the legal wrapper it chose, and the five issuers we track chose three different structures.
This is the structural fact most easily missed about these instruments, because the price on the screen tracks the share either way.
Three structures, three positions
A debt security. Robinhood states it issues its stock tokens as debt securities, through Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited. A debt security is a claim on the issuer. That is a structural statement rather than a criticism: what stands behind your token is the issuer's obligation, so in an insolvency a claim on the issuer is what you would be holding, rather than a claim on a specific share sitting in a specific account with your name near it.
A bankruptcy-remote SPV. Ondo Global Markets issues through a bankruptcy-remote special purpose vehicle, and states its tokens give economic exposure similar to holding the share and reinvesting dividends rather than title to the share. The phrase "bankruptcy-remote" is the point of the structure: the intent is that assets in the vehicle are separated from the operating company's insolvency. Whether such a structure performs as intended is a question about specific documents in a specific jurisdiction, and we cannot answer it for you.
A certificate. Backed, through xStocks, issues tracker certificates. Dinari issues dShares. Coinbase issues B20 tokens through a special purpose vehicle registered in the Abu Dhabi Global Market. For a product of this kind the questions that decide your position are what, if anything, is held behind each token, who holds it, what happens to it in the issuer's insolvency, and by what process a holder reaches it. Each issuer publishes its own answer. This site links to it rather than restating it, because a statement about what backs a token is the one most likely to change without anyone noticing, and a stale copy of it would look exactly like a current one.
What we are not going to tell you
We will not rank these, and we will not tell you which is safest. Be wary of anyone who does. The honest answer depends on the insolvency law of Jersey, the British Virgin Islands, the Abu Dhabi Global Market or the United States, on documents that run to dozens of pages, and on facts that have never been tested, because none of these issuers has failed.
What we will say is that "a stock token is not a share" carries practical content, and this question is where it shows up. The share, where one exists, is held by somebody else. Your position is defined by a document, and that document is published.
The question to ask
"What exactly am I holding a claim on, and against whom." Every one of these products has a published answer to that.
Each issuer page names that issuer's wrapper, with a link to their documentation. The wrapper is also printed on every row of every stock page, because it is a fact about the token and not a footnote. The glossary defines debt security, tracker certificate, dShare and custodian.
Read the issuer's own terms. Ours is a summary of what they publish, and a summary is not the document.
Every claim about an issuer above is that issuer's own description of its product, linked above.