Tokenized stocks are the next big fintech buzzword. Are they an innovation or a regulatory loophole?
Tenev's gambit was the highest-profile launch yet of an increasingly buzzy product in the world of crypto and fintech: tokenized stocks, which are traditional equities in a blockchain wrapper. Proponents argue that by tokenizing publicly traded shares like Apple and Tesla, investors will be more easily able to trade and access assets, including outside the U.S. Robinhood took an even bolder step by claiming that it could tokenize shares in private companies, like OpenAI and SpaceX, that are typically only available to the world's wealthiest through venture funds or secondaries.
OpenAI did not take lightly to the announcement, posting on X a few days later that Robinhood's OpenAI tokens are not OpenAI equity. 'We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it,' the company wrote. 'Please be careful.' Tenev admitted that Robinhood's OpenAI tokens are not 'technically' equity, but added that they still give retail investors exposure to private assets. (If you want a more thorough explanation on how it actually works, you can turn to the king, Matt Levine.)
While Robinhood's flashy announcement was more marketing than anything, with the product still limited to the European Union, you can expect to be soon inundated with discourse about tokenized stocks, which has already permeated the crypto industry for several years. Until recently, any serious forays into the space were limited to blockchain companies like Kraken and Coinbase, but Robinhood represented a crossing of the Rubicon. Don't forget, after all, that Robinhood helped push its stodgy competitors into commission-free trading for retail customers. Securities and Exchange Commission chair Paul Atkins gave an interview the same day as OpenAI's post, saying that 'tokenization is an innovation,' and crypto-friendly commissioner Hester Peirce released a letter last week calling tokenized securities 'enchanting, but not magical.'
As red-hot startups like OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe stay private for longer, companies from Robinhood to Forge have been trying to create new vehicles allowing retail customers to access them, from private market ETFs to tokenized stocks. But while these companies will tout such innovations as 'democratization,' they also come with the same risks associated with private companies—namely, a lack of disclosure and oversight. At a hearing last week on proposed crypto legislation, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) argued that tokenized stocks will help companies evade SEC regulations, though Peirce later gave a statement that market participants must adhere to federal securities laws.
The future of stock trading is around the corner. But if even OpenAI is telling you to be careful, you might want to read the fine print.
Leo SchwartzX: @leomschwartzEmail: leo.schwartz@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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One of the Best Cryptocurrencies to Buy With $500 Right Now
Key Points The crypto's value will likely rise as its network activity increases. Its upcoming network upgrades should attract more developers. New ETFs with staking features could drive its price even higher. 10 stocks we like better than Ethereum › Cryptocurrencies aren't great investments for conservative investors, since they're usually volatile, difficult to understand, and tough to properly value. Higher interest rates also tend to curb the market's appetite for cryptocurrencies and other risky investments. Therefore, it's not a great idea to park your life savings in the crypto market. But if you have some cash you can afford to lose, it still might be smart to nibble on a few promising cryptocurrencies. One of the best tokens to buy right now is Ether (CRYPTO: ETH), which could turn a modest $500 investment into a few thousand dollars within the next few years. What sets Ether apart from other cryptocurrencies? Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain, which was launched in 2015. Ethereum originally used the same proof of work (PoW) consensus mechanism as Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), which meant its tokens could be mined. But in 2022, Ethereum transitioned to the more energy-efficient proof of stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. After that transition, Ether could no longer be mined -- it had to be "staked" to earn interest-like rewards. Ethereum also gained the ability to support smart contracts, which are used to develop decentralized apps (dApps), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other tokenized assets. Ethereum is now the largest developer platform for decentralized applications, and it has deployed over 3 million smart contracts and hosts thousands of dApps, NFTs, and other assets. Every transaction that occurs on Ethereum costs a "gas fee," which is paid to the validators who process the transactions and execute the smart contracts. A percentage of each fee, which is paid in a tiny fraction of Ether called a "gwei," is then burned (removed from circulation). That process makes Ether both an inflationary and deflationary token. When Ethereum's network activity increases, it becomes deflationary as more tokens are burned than issued. But when its network activity declines, it becomes inflationary as more tokens are issued than burned. That's why Ether, which has a circulating supply of 120.7 million tokens, is usually valued by the growth of its developer ecosystem instead of its fluctuating scarcity. Why is Ether a promising long-term investment? Ethereum faces some competition from Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) and Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA), which are both PoS blockchains that can process transactions faster than its Layer 1 (L1) blockchain. That might seem like a red flag for Ethereum's developer-oriented blockchain. Yet, Ethereum is keeping pace with those faster challengers with its Layer 2 (L2) solutions, which bundle together multiple transactions and process them off-chain at higher speeds. After being processed, they're returned to Ethereum's L1 blockchain, which is often considered more secure than Solana or Cardano because it has the biggest pool of validators. Ethereum's usage of L2 solutions also relieves the network congestion on its L1 blockchain. Solana is the fastest L1 PoS blockchain, but it has consistently struggled with congestion and security issues. Cardano's network also slows down during peak periods. Ethereum's next three upgrades -- The Verge, The Purge, and The Splurge -- should widen its moat against Solana, Cardano, and other developer-driven PoS blockchains. The Verge will improve its scalability, The Purge will reduce its network congestion and gas fees, and The Splurge will provide more optimizations to ensure its blockchain runs as efficiently as possible. As those upgrades attract more developers and boost Ethereum's network activity, more Ether will be burned. Lastly, the first spot price ETFs for Ether were approved last year, but they didn't include any of its staking features (which would have added a 3% to 4% annual yield). If the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approves a new batch of Ether ETFs with staking rewards, they could draw in more investors as interest rates gradually decline. How much could a $500 investment in Ether grow? Ether currently trades just below $4,500 with a market cap of $542 billion, but it's still a lot less valuable than Bitcoin, which trades at nearly $120,000 with a market cap of $2.38 trillion. The near-term price targets for Ether are all over the map, but some analysts expect it to rise as high as $20,000 and boost its market cap to $2.4 trillion within the next year. Ark Invest's Cathie Wood previously claimed its price could reach $166,000 by 2032. I'd take those bullish estimates with a grain of salt, but I believe lower interest rates, new staking ETF approvals, and its upcoming network upgrades could easily cause its price to double or triple within the next few years. So while its price might remain volatile, it has a clear path toward turning a $500 investment into at least a few thousand dollars. As always, crypto should only make up a small part of a larger, diversified portfolio. Do the experts think Ethereum is a buy right now? The Motley Fool's expert analyst team, drawing on years of investing experience and deep analysis of thousands of stocks, leverages our proprietary Moneyball AI investing database to uncover top opportunities. They've just revealed their to buy now — did Ethereum make the list? When our Stock Advisor analyst team has a stock recommendation, it can pay to listen. After all, Stock Advisor's total average return is up 1,070% vs. just 184% for the S&P — that is beating the market by 885.55%!* Imagine if you were a Stock Advisor member when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $668,155!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,106,071!* The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of August 13, 2025 Leo Sun has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. One of the Best Cryptocurrencies to Buy With $500 Right Now was originally published by The Motley Fool Sign in to access your portfolio
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She was living her life on Instagram. Then scammers turned her into a fake crypto queen.
Months ago, Ahmet Tozal took out three credit card loans and withdrew his life savings to make a fortune off crypto. The 44-year-old Turkish garment worker, who lived in Istanbul at the time, said he'd been goaded by a new friend who contacted him via a random WhatsApp message in 2023. The woman claimed she'd messaged him accidentally, but was friendly and seemed interested in Turkey, Tozal said. She told him she was a wealthy businesswoman who would soon be visiting his country on holiday. Tozal said she sent him dozens of photos of herself, a young East Asian woman traveling the world and attending prestigious conferences. He said they video-called once, for a few seconds. Eventually, she suggested he try investing in crypto. The trajectory of their relationship has the hallmarks of what global authorities call a classic pig-butchering scam, typically run by gangs in Asia. Tozal said that over several weeks, the woman convinced him to invest about 400,000 Turkish lira, or a year's worth of his wages, into a cryptocurrency called UAI Coin. It never existed. Tozal told me he lost everything. Saddled with debt and broke, Tozal moved alone to Uzbekistan to find a higher salary that could feed his family and pay off an extra 200,000 lira in loan interest. His wife and four children stayed behind in Turkey. "Whenever I think about it, it makes one almost go mad," he told me on a call from his shared apartment in Andijan. Pig-butchering, a crypto scam that started in China, is now a global crisis. It draws its name from the concept of fattening a pig before slaughter: The purveyors build a relationship with a mark over weeks or months before persuading them to give away or invest large sums. A 2024 University of Texas study estimated that $75 billion has been lost to such schemes since 2020. In 2023, the Heartland Tri-State Bank in Kansas went bankrupt after its CEO poured $47 million of company cash into a similar scam. Tozal has little chance of recovering his money, and dozens of other men say they were fooled by the same scam. Betrayed and desperate for any restitution possible, they latched onto the only lead they could find: the woman behind the screen. Who was she? Each of the men had photos and videos of her, the young East Asian woman who seemed to be living the high life, but not much else to go on. As they hunted for answers, their stories of loss and grievance would come to haunt a person thousands of miles away, a millennial trying to make a name for herself on Instagram. For months, as he was lured into the crypto trap, Tozal knew her only as Dora. Over nine months, I spoke with more than a dozen men from around the world — many in Central and West Asia — who say they've been affected by this specific pig-butchering scam. While their experiences varied, each one was tricked with the likeness of the same Asian woman. Seven of these men, including Tozal, agreed to full interviews. I verified all of their identities, and they showed me evidence of their online interactions. Several also showed me screenshots of their financial transactions. Many were unwilling to be named and said they did not report their losses to the authorities for fear of being seen as fools and damaging their reputations. Some said they'd fallen in love with their WhatsApp acquaintance; Tozal said he and Dora were strictly friends. The men come from different companies and walks of life. The common denominator? They all had jobs and thus a source of cash. Aamy Ace, a 44-year-old Indian pharmaceutical manufacturing worker, said he was cheated out of $12,000 meant for his father's cancer treatment. Another man, a 24-year-old Kazakhstani restaurant manager in Almaty named Amir, said he borrowed and lost $8,000 — 10 times his monthly salary. They remember different names. Some said they spoke to "Jasmine" for weeks, while others knew her as "Anna." Several, like Tozal, told me their contact was "Dora." The playbook for this scam is standardized. Men like Tozal would receive a cold text and slowly be persuaded to strike up a friendship or romance with the texter. All were sent photos of the same young Asian woman. "A very standard hook is an attractive person, male or female, coming in and saying: 'Oh yeah, I have a business opportunity, I'm going to come see you soon,'" said Joshua James, a cybercrime coordinator in Bangkok with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Eventually, their contacts convinced them to invest in a fake asset. Most of the men said they put their money into a faux cryptocurrency called UAI Coin. A mobile app and fake trading website lent a sheen of legitimacy to the setup. At first, the profits seemed eye-watering. Erdi Bilgiç, a 36-year-old Turkish electrician in Zonguldak, told me his initial $100 investment turned into $500 overnight in late 2023. Bilgiç, calling himself an avid investor, said he tracks stock prices and bitcoin almost daily, and felt UAI Coin's prices moved in sync with the market. He said that when he withdrew his initial gains, he received the full sum in his bank account. Emboldened, he took out a $1,500 loan at Dora's behest, gathered his life's savings of about $10,000, and put them all in UAI Coin. "She told me: 'Sell your car, sell this, sell that,'" he said. Losing it all To Tozal and Bilgiç, it seemed as though there was only one woman contacting them. But scam gangs, many based in Southeast Asia, are known to force human-trafficked victims to work in teams, sometimes with multiple people posing as the same woman in conversation with a mark. The US Institute of Peace estimated in 2024 that some 220,000 trafficked victims are involved in scams. "Judging by a lot of testimonies of survivors of human trafficking coming from scam compounds, many of them were being asked to pose as attractive young ladies," said Mina Chiang, founder of Humanity Research Consultancy, a UK-registered anti-trafficking social enterprise. To make their ploy more convincing, gangs have a woman take part in occasional video calls or voice messages. Several men in the Dora scam told me they received voice messages and forwarded them to me. A few, including Tozal, also said they had brief video calls. These tactics helped to convince them that Dora was real, they told me. Once the men's savings are invested, the critical point of the scam unfolds. The victims discover they can't withdraw their funds, and the scammers try squeezing them for more. "It is what it is. My money is gone." Tozal said he asked Dora for help and was directed to pay a tax-related fine to unlock his account. When that didn't work, he said, an engineer's fee was required. He said he knew then that he'd been fooled. The funds he lost, including his debt, are worth about $15,000 now, in a country where the average worker earns $7,300 a year. "It is what it is. My money is gone," Tozal said. Others said they've lost even more. A 50-year-old Turkish academic in Ankara said he and his wife had sold their apartment to save for a new city-center flat and dumped that money, along with $50,000 he convinced relatives to invest, into UAI Coin. He showed me a police report he made in Ankara, in which he reported losing more than $100,000 to the scam. "I asked myself, how am I going to live? I can survive, but I have a daughter in school," he said. Now, he added, he and his wife are working weekends and second jobs to make ends meet. Finding Dora In the spring of 2024, the group scamming Tozal appeared to make a mistake. As the men nursed their wounded pride, some received an email offering further help. The sender neglected to blind carbon copy each victim's email address, and the men began to contact each other. They gathered on WhatsApp groups and social media, swapping stories of how they'd been fooled by UAI Coin. Soon, they realized they'd all been talking to the same woman. Younger ones, like Bilgiç the electrician, put her photos into a reverse Google image search. They found someone. She wasn't Dora, or Jasmine, or Anna: Her name was Abe. "I can't be sure 100% it's her, but the videos and photos that we saw online were consistent," Bilgiç said. Abe is a Malaysian woman, they learned. She lives over 5,000 miles from Tozal and Bilgiç and runs a public Instagram account. Her name quickly spread among the men. To those like Tozal, it seemed like the first real step to getting their money back. But as I soon discovered, this woman wasn't the mastermind of an audacious lonelyhearts scam; she was a different kind of victim. Abe Lim was 20 minutes late when we met at a café in Kuala Lumpur's upscale shopping district. Traffic was crazy that morning. "I'm so sorry," said the 29-year-old, sheepish as we shook hands. Lim was easy to find online, and once I got in touch with her, she was keen to talk. She has some 175,000 followers on Instagram, where she posts roughly twice or thrice a week, often glamour or fashion shots of herself. Lim told me her personal brand's focus is the climate crisis. Her family, she said, runs a petrochemical business that she left to build a social media following as an environmentalist. In 2023, she ran for a local state parliament seat while campaigning on climate action, but lost. Lim's day job is running a plastics recycling company she founded in 2021. She posts photos from conferences and symposiums across Asia and the US, and snaps of herself on holiday in Bali and at Buckingham Palace. The array of photos found its way into the phones of men like Bilgiç and Tozal, who believed "Dora" was a charitable multimillionaire. Sometime in late 2023, Lim said, she started receiving online messages from these men. She thought little of it at first. "Because I've sort of put myself in the public spotlight, I felt like it was expected," she said. In early 2024, she said, the men began contacting her friends and family and claiming she'd defrauded them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. There were rumors of self-harm or suicide. "You're like, OK, this is serious now," she said. "There were messages that said like: 'I'll fly down to kill you, track you down and make you pay for what you did.'" As the year went on, Lim was trapped in an escalating online storm. Messages flooded her inbox and Instagram comments. She said she received dozens of emails and texts a day and showed me several on her phone. Lim was all smiles in her interview, but her fatigue and frustration were palpable. "It's mentally draining," Lim said. Some heartbroken men tried to rekindle a nonexistent relationship with her; others sent threats, she said. For the first few months of 2024, she told me, she feared leaving her home in Malaysia. Lim now tries to delay her social media posts by a few days to keep her live location secret. "There were messages that said like: 'I'll fly down to kill you, track you down and make you pay for what you did,'" Lim said. The men were divided on whether Lim was "Dora" or an unwitting victim of someone pretending to be her. Some, like Bilgiç, said she clearly wasn't the woman they had chatted with. Several sent me recordings of their video calls, which showed East or Southeast Asian women holding up a hand or using a camera angle to obscure their faces. "Internet connection is not good," said a woman in one video I viewed. She was clearly not Lim. 'Should I compensate them?' As Lim and I sipped tea in Malaysia, she explained how she was grappling with a dilemma. With her personal brand living on Instagram, how much time should she spend defending her reputation and speaking out against scams? Should she stop posting? Her brand was about the climate crisis, not going to war against fraud. "I have a platform, it's not that hard for me," she said. "But do I want to be known as the person that combats this?" In February 2024, she posted several warnings about scams on Instagram. Some of the men were insisting she was liable for their losses because her images were used. "They say they know it's not you, but it's your photos anyway, so you should take some responsibility of compensating them with some amount," she said. Lim said she considered paying some of them until her family talked her out of it. "I had a lot of guilt," Lim said. "I felt like, would these allegations have appeared if I had brought this up in public earlier?" 'Who are you going to sue?' James, the UNODC cybercrime coordinator, said Lim fits the profile of a content creator whose images are farmed by scam rings. "This is actually just a third party that has nothing at all to do with anything in the scam, and they sometimes have to even suffer the legal consequences afterward. Because, who are you going to sue?" James said. For swindlers, Lim's account was perfect. She was not well-known enough for a target to recognize her, and she frequently posted photos of herself in new outfits or at public events — a wealth of content to exploit. Online footage and voice data can also be fed to an artificial intelligence algorithm to create a face filter for use in video calls, James added. In Lim's case, several victims sent me screenshots of video calls with scam workers, which appeared to feature AI-empowered deepfake face filters. When analyzing the screenshots, James said some images were highly suspicious, with tell-tale features of AI filters such as discoloration on the edges of the face and crispness around hair. He added that varying chin shapes and neck bumps in the webcam images also indicated the victims were likely called by at least two different women using deepfake filters. "I would say it is very likely the images with white are deepfakes," James said. Fraudsters, roaming free Lim said what frustrates her most is that she's reported dozens of Instagram and Facebook accounts using her name and photos. Many were not taken down. A Facebook search of her name shows her photos on a dozen accounts purported to be of women living in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Some claim to run a plastics recycling company with the same name as Lim's firm. "If you have a verified account with this face," Lim said, pointing to herself. "You shouldn't allow an account with the same photo to stay up." A spokesperson for Meta, which runs Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, told me via email that it was committed to keeping its platforms safe and that it continues to "invest in detection technology and work with law enforcement to prosecute scammers." "Impersonation is against Meta's policies and we remove these accounts when they're found," the spokesperson wrote. The company said it dealt with 1 billion fake accounts on its platforms in the first quarter of this year. Meta did not comment on Lim's case specifically. Legally, Lim can't do much to compel Meta, which is headquartered in California, to take down accounts using her images, said Eric Goldman, the codirector of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. "In the United States, Facebook may have no obligation to intervene to shut down or correct scam accounts," he said. US law protects social media firms from liability for third-party content posted on their platforms. Meanwhile, Bilgiç and other victims in Turkey have engaged local lawyers in hopes of suing whoever took their money or compelling their arrest. It'll be a long shot. "It's the general principle of criminal law. If you cannot find the person committing the crime, your hands are tied," Tarık Güleryüz, a partner at the Turkish law firm Güleryüz Partners, told me about the country's legal standards. James, the UNODC anti-cybercrime coordinator, said perpetrators know the world's law enforcement system is ill-equipped to deal with pig-butchering scams. A victim's best hope is an international coalition involving Turkey, Malaysia, and wherever the culprits are located, James said. China, a country with considerable influence in Laos and Cambodia, has performed cross-border raids there, mostly against scam rings targeting Chinese citizens. For countries like Turkey and Malaysia, nearly 5,200 miles apart, the best the men can do is hope and wait. These days, Lim is posting frequently on social media and is trying to grow her brand as an environmentalist. "All I lost was some reputation and photos. I didn't lose money, I didn't go through heartbreak with someone who didn't exist," Lim said. This year, she enrolled in a master's program for sustainable development management at Sunway University in Selangor. Tozal, who lost his life savings to "Dora," is also trying to move on. He said his wife was furious with him, and when I asked last month how their relationship was faring, Tozal said he's just trying to focus on working to support his family. He travels to see his children once every six months or so. Sitting in the kitchen of the Uzbek flat he shares with a roommate, he wondered aloud if he should blame himself. Years ago, he'd seen news reports of men falling for scams and marveled at how they could be fooled. "But when you see bits of a luxurious life coming your way, when you see the money coming into your account, inevitably you start feeling a type of way, even if you don't want to," Tozal said. He was just being human, he said. Now, he's in a foreign land, working alone. Translation by Ezgi Evrim Ozkol and Evgeniya Strygina. Read the original article on Business Insider Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
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Mikautadze gets Lyon off to winning start in Ligue 1 at Lens
Georges Mikautadze scored the only goal as Lyon got their Ligue 1 campaign off to a winning start at Lens on Saturday. Mikautadze struck at the end of the first half to give the seven-time Ligue 1 champions their first win since American businesswoman Michele Kang took over as president in June to save the club from relegation after compatriot John Textor resigned amid financial irregularities. Lyon turned the page on this era by winning against their former coach Pierre Sage, who took over at Lens after Will Still's departure. Financially constrained for summer signings, Lyon built its success with what it already had with strikers Malick Fofana and Mikautadze and midfield stalwart Corentin Tolisso combining well. Fofana ran rings around the Lens defence, breaking through at the end of the first half when he provided an ideal cross to Mikautadze. Despite 18 shots on goal, Lens were unable to deliver with Wesley Said and Deiver Machado both missing numerous chances. New recruit Florian Thauvin came off the bench for Lens after 57 minutes to rapturous applause from the home fans but despite bringing creativity and freshness, the World Cup winner could not make the difference. bur/ea/pb
