Why tokenised stocks matter for all South Africans
By Christo de Wit, Country Manager for Luno South Africa
Tokenised stocks launched globally in May this year and are now available to South Africans through Luno, starting with 40+ US stocks and ETFs.
This gives investors access to some of the largest companies in the world like Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Tesla.
Open the Luno app, press buy, and the trade clears in seconds. No intermediaries, no bureaucracy, no waiting.
This isn’t just an incremental improvement in how we invest, it’s the completion of a 400-year journey toward truly accessible global markets.
Four centuries in the making
The first stock market saw its beginnings in 1602 in Amsterdam, born from the same frustrations that plague South African investors today.
The United East India Company (VOC) was looking for a way to make investments more liquid for shareholders who had to wait a minimum of 10 years before being allowed to sell their shares.
So the directors made a concession by adding a line to the company register: “Conveyance or transfer may be done through the bookkeeper of this chamber,” allowing shareholders to sell equity to anyone buying.
To find buyers and sellers, investors went to a bridge that sea captains crossed to deliver mail when they returned from voyages, being literally the first in line to hear news that could move VOC share prices.
History has it that the bridge became so crowded with traders that eventually the city shifted trading to a courtyard nearby, creating the world’s first stock exchange.
The exchange only operated between 11am and noon, and for an hour before dusk, market hours that constrained trading much like today’s limitations.
By the touch of a computer key
Fast-forward 400 years to 1999, when the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) decided it was time to “dematerialise” actual stock certificates for digital ones, reducing settlement times from two weeks to five days.
“You will still buy and sell shares through your stockbroker but when you sell shares, ownership will be transferred from you to the buyer at the touch of a computer key,” a newspaper article published at the time read.
Before this digital migration, the only way to trade stocks was to place an order with your stockbroker, who gave instructions to traders on a physical trading floor, who struck deals by shouting and gesticulating across the chaos.
Physical share certificates were couriered between buyers and sellers.
The process of buying international shares required a byzantine effort involving chains of brokers, banks, and currency controls.
Twenty-five years later, this system sounds insane.
The strange thing is, it still is, given the ongoing limitations and available crypto solutions that up until now have been hiding in plain sight.
Here’s why tokenised stocks matter
It’s taken more than 15 years for the financial system to latch onto the potential of blockchain technology, and a big part of that drive is everything that a decentralised automated ledger enables.
What blockchains excel at is recording and clearing transactions without requiring intermediaries to verify that value has been exchanged.
JP Morgan, BlackRock and some of the world’s biggest financial institutions have realised this potential and have started tokenising US bonds and US Dollars on blockchain networks.
The logical next step? Tokenised stocks.
Tokenised stocks are blockchain-based tokens that represent ownership in traditional company shares.
Each token is backed by actual shares held in custody, and its price tracks the real-time value of the underlying stock.
This gives investors the same market exposure as buying actual shares, but with blockchain’s key advantages: global accessibility, fractional ownership, and trading outside traditional market hours.
It took roughly four centuries for stocks to evolve from the Amsterdam trading floor to the computer, and this globalisation of a stock market built on crypto technology is the next step in this evolution.
A fundamental shift
Tokenised stocks fundamentally changes how South Africans can build wealth through global markets.
Previously, investing in Apple or Tesla required significant capital, complex processes, and high fees.
Now it’s as simple as buying crypto through an app: instant, affordable, and accessible from your phone.
Where those VOC investors had to wait 10 years to access liquidity, and where South African investors have long faced barriers of minimum investments, currency controls, and settlement delays, tokenised stocks eliminate these friction points entirely.
You can buy fractional shares worth R20, invest outside of trading hours, and settle transactions in seconds rather than days.
If cryptocurrency has been accused of being a technology in search of a solution, it seems to have found one that every person can relate to: democratising access to the global investing opportunities.
For South Africans looking to diversify beyond local markets and build wealth through global equity participation, the 400-year evolution from Amsterdam’s bridge to blockchain-based trading represents more than technological progress, it’s the further democratisation of investing.
Click here to download the Luno app and access US stocks on Luno today.
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