Is a significant amount of directly registered shares new or in any way noteworthy?

External question — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: SirHawrk Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/149984 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. I have found this Reddit post , which states that about 25% of Gamestops Free Float (yeah this again) has been directly registered by retail share holders. The post (and the community as a whole) make it sound like this is significant and has never happened before. Is it actually true that this has never happened before? (Perhaps only considering bigger-ish companies) And even if that is true is that actually significant? As far as I understand the premise of why Reddit thinks this is significant is that with Shares held by Brokers these Brokers never actually buy the shares (why would they not?) or they buy them and still lent them to other entities and thus directly registering the shares is the only way to actually own them. The benefit as far as I could gather is that then those shares can no longer be lent out to companies who want to short the underlying security, meaning this would stop some selling pressure induced by those short sales. It would also apparently uncover some sort of naked shorting in the market if it would be possible to directly register all (or more than) the shares the company has issued, tho this is a bit too deep into the conspiracy theory world for my liking. So far the only sources I can find on the matter are inside the same Reddit Forum, meaning I am not entirely certain how impartial and reliable those actually are