What happens if North Korea steals Wall Street’s tokenized assets next

The trade-off is that tokenized assets can inherit some of the same infrastructure risks.

“Key compromise, contract bugs and bridge exploits don’t care what a token represents,” Salman Banaei, general counsel at RWA-focused platform Plume, told me.

What happens after a theft, however, can look very different.

The Binance hack offered a useful demonstration with stablecoins. Tether, Circle, Ripple and World Liberty Financial froze about $2.67 billion of stolen tokens within hours, according to TRM Labs. The attacker, meanwhile, was still holding roughly $2.4 billion of bitcoin and ether that no issuer could simply freeze.

Tokenized securities can come with similar administrative controls, but also with legal ownership rights tied to the underlying asset.

Adam Popat, CEO of tokenization technology firm SettleMint, said a stolen token does not necessarily erase the rightful owner’s claim to the stock, fund or bond behind it. Depending on how the security is structured, an issuer can freeze transfers, invalidate stolen tokens and reissue them to the verified owner.

“The rightful owner retains that claim even when someone else controls the token,” Popat said.

Joris Delanoue, CEO of transfer agent Fairmint, put the distinction more simply.

“The underlying technology may be the same, but the ownership model is fundamentally different,” he said. “A stolen key should not erase your shareholder rights.”