Tokenized Stocks: Stats, Market Trends, and DeFi Gap

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Tokenized Stocks: Why Now, and What Broke Earlier

Just months ago, it seemed like nothing but a castle in the clouds, and yet, on September 17th, the SEC unveiled its Innovation Exemption for tokenized stocks. The framework enables platforms to provide automated secondary stock trading on public blockchains without having to acquire an exchange license. Additional restrictions: the exemption only applies to NMS stocks, the platforms must halt the trading if primary venues halt the stock (off-hours trading is permitted), and comply with the limits on the number of stock symbols and trading volume. Issuers must get 30 days' advance notice before their stock is listed and can object. Most importantly, tokenized stocks must preserve the full economic and governance rights of the underlying share, dividends and voting rights, not just price exposure. Still, this is a landmark decision creating a safe harbor for both exchanges and liquidity providers.

Why would anyone bother at all? Well, tokenized stocks offer a number of advantages. Transactions settle within seconds, not on the standard T+1 cycle. In some cases, you also get to hold direct custody of the asset, and the market can remain open 24/7 (although that’s not always the case for today’s products). Additionally, with a tokenized stock, you can get the versatility of a blockchain-native asset, using it as collateral for DeFi loans or to earn extra yields from vaults.

We do have to consider that these benefits do not apply across the board. There are different ways to gain exposure to stocks onchain, and they come with their own respective ownership models and associated risks.

The oldest model is synthetic. It traces its roots all the way back to the Synthetix, which launched as Havven in 2018, and Mirror Protocol. The former let users mint synthetic tokens tracking stocks with a 500% target collateral ratio and used an oracle to price the “shares”. Its stock synths never drew much volume, and Synthetix retired them in 2021. Mirror made for more of a story.

Terra-based Mirror allowed users to mint tracker “mAssets” via vaults overcollateralized at 150% at minimum. Like with Synthetix, there were no underlying assets proper, meaning at no point a user would have a claim on Apple or any other company mAssets would track. Accordingly, there were no dividends or shareholder rights. Come the Terra crash, and Mirror, which had UST as its collateral base and was already reeling from a hack, went down with it.

The synthetic stocks of today are quite different, although there is no actual claim on the company involved. Mirror and Synthetix tokens could move from wallet to wallet, work as collateral, and overall acted like fungible tokens with debt backing. Today, the most popular synthetic exposure to stocks onchain comes from perps. Nothing is minted, there's no token you can send to another wallet, you're opening a leveraged position inside a margin account that lives and dies on that specific venue like Ondo Perps or Extended. A stock perp gives you a leveraged, non-transferable derivative position backed by margin, with its price kept honest by funding payments.

Another popular model also goes back to 2020 and 2021, when both Binance and FTX turned to the same company, CM-Equity AG, a licensed investment firm, to launch tokens backed by actual shares 1:1. CM-Equity acted as the custodian, and Switzerland's Digital Assets AG structured the tokens, while the two exchanges ran the trading on their respective platforms. Binance shut its own down soon after taking flak from regulators. FTX's stocks lasted longer: the tokens kept trading until the exchange's own crash and burn in 2022, which left holders in limbo.

Some of the biggest tokenized stock products of today rely on this share-backed model. xStocks, issued by Backed through a Jersey-based SPV, are tracker certificates backed 1:1 by shares held with regulated custodians, and Dinari's dShares are backed 1:1 by shares held through its SEC-registered broker-dealer. Legally, some of these products are custodial interests and others are linked securities.

Finally, the model that comes the closest to bringing stocks onchain is the one where blockchain is the stock registry, or at least its legally-recognized component. Such tokenized stocks are issued by platforms like Securitize and Superstate, and they are, in fact, stocks themselves, recognized as equity in the company, with all the underlying rights.

That same registry model is now built at the market-infrastructure level too. DTCC, which already clears and settles the vast majority of US securities trades, spent 2026 building a tokenization service on the Canton Network, a privacy-focused distributed ledger, that converts the actual DTC book-entry record for Treasuries, equities, and collateral into what it calls "digital twins." DTCC describes them as carrying the same investor protections, entitlements, and ownership rights as the traditional security, and they convert back and forth between formats. More than 30 firms, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan, took part in the first live, production transactions, though access stays limited to DTC participants, there's no retail or DeFi entry point.

Nasdaq is building the exchange-facing side of the same idea. In March 2026, the SEC approved a Nasdaq framework letting eligible securities trade in tokenized form directly on Nasdaq's own order book, alongside the traditional shares, same price, same ticker, same CUSIP, with DTC still handling clearing and settlement. Nasdaq has since layered an issuer-centric "equity token design" on top, due in H1 2027, that writes the blockchain record directly into a company's own official share registry and, through a partnership with Kraken's parent Payward, aims to build a gateway between regulated markets and DeFi rails.

Ownership determines the investor's claim and counterparty, along with the shareholder rights related to the product. Two tokens tracking NVIDIA can deliver similar returns while giving holders different legal positions. With a usual brokerage purchase, investors generally hold beneficial ownership of NVIDIA shares through the custody system. With a tokenized product, the legal structure determines whether the holder owns company equity, a custodial interest, or a separate instrument linked to the shares.

SEC staff recently published a tokenization taxonomy statement for tokenized securities that groups them into issuer-sponsored and third-party products and within third-party products, it distinguishes custodial interests from synthetic exposure.

Under issuer-sponsored tokenization, the company or its agent uses tokenization to issue, record, or transfer the company’s shares. The blockchain does not have to serve as the only authoritative ledger in this case. Tokenized SECZ through Securitize and GLXY through Superstate represent the same common shares traded on traditional exchanges, not separate wrappers or share classes. The company remains the issuer, while its transfer agent and eligibility rules determine how ownership is recorded and transferred.

Custodial models give investors an indirect interest in shares held through intermediaries, rather than direct registration on the underlying company’s shareholder register. For non-U.S. dShares, Dinari describes underlying securities held in a brokerage account in its name on holders’ behalf. Standard dShares receive eligible cash dividends in USD+, while wrapped dShares accumulate additional underlying dShares. Stock splits adjust standard dShare balances, and redemption returns stablecoin proceeds from selling the underlying shares.

Coinbase’s Vested Holders have a proportionate beneficial interest in the deposited property (AAPL prospectus for reference). Unvested Holders instead have a beneficial interest in certificates held for them by the issuer and cannot redeem or submit voting instructions until they complete KYC and the other vesting conditions (see FAQ here). Vested Holders may submit voting instructions, but the issuer does not guarantee voting participation. Cash dividends are generally reinvested net of applicable withholding taxes, a distribution fee equal to 5% of the gross dividend, and other applicable charges.

Holding a bStock gives investors a certificate backed by the corresponding shares and issued by BTech Holdings with zero commission, custody, management, or conversion fees. They receive the stock’s price performance and reinvested dividends after the mandatory deductions, but no shareholder or voting rights. Eligible users (Binance Stock Trading access) can convert the stock token into the underlying share through Binance.

A third-party linked instrument gives investors the rights embedded in the wrapper, not ownership of the referenced company. Ondo holders own a structured note and therefore a debt claim against its issuing SPV. xStocks holders own a bearer debt instrument structured as a tracker certificate, while Robinhood Stock Token holders own a debt security issued by RHJ.

All three pass through dividend value through automatic reinvestment rather than cash distributions. Reinvestment increases the underlying equity exposure represented by the holding, reflected through shares-per-token adjustments or adjusted token balances.

Ownership defines the investor’s claim while backing identifies the assets behind it and the holder’s access to them if an intermediary fails. The two are not interchangeable because a token can be marketed as 1:1 backed by NVDA even though its holder owns a certificate or debt security instead of an actual NVIDIA share.

Issuer-sponsored tokens can represent the shares themselves, so there is no separate backing share. Custodial products represent an interest in securities held on investors’ behalf. Linked securities are separate instruments whose obligations may be secured by the referenced shares. Ondo’s structured notes, for example, are backed by the corresponding securities and cash in transit, plus additional collateral. Those assets secure the issuer’s obligations but do not make token holders shareholders in the underlying company.

In case of issuer default, recovery depends on which entity fails and the holder’s legal rights to the assets. Custodial holders rely on an enforceable interest in securities held for them; secured-wrapper holders rely on their claim against pledged collateral. Segregation and bankruptcy remoteness can reduce risk, but neither guarantees immediate or complete recovery. A custodian’s SIPC membership alone does not establish that every token holder qualifies as a customer entitled to coverage.

Several leading stock-token products exclude U.S. persons, but non-U.S. access is not uniform. Eligibility can depend on country, investor status, venue, and activity. Secondary trading may be available even when direct issuance or redemption is not.

These restrictions decide whether an investor can access the primary market, trade on a secondary venue, withdraw to self-custody, transfer the token, use it in DeFi, or redeem it with the issuer. The above terms and restrictions apply as of September 22, 2026.

Around-the-clock trading is one of the main value propositions of tokenized stocks, and it can describe four different functions: blockchain transfers, secondary trading, primary creation and redemption, and trading in the underlying stock. A token may move between wallets at any time while the issuer only creates or redeems during supported sessions. A venue may also quote the token over a weekend even though the U.S. cash market and the issuer's main hedge are closed.

Trading schedules differ by product and platform and sometimes by asset.

24/7 access now accounts for a substantial share of tokenized-stock trading. During most of September, 49% of Kraken volume, 56% of Binance volume, and 58% of Robinhood volume occurred outside U.S. regular hours, while weekends alone contributed consistently 10%–16% month over month (July to September).

Chain-level data shows that this behavior extends beyond individual venues. Across Solana, Robinhood Chain, BNB Chain, and Base, 60%-69% of tokenized-stock spot volume occurred while U.S. markets were closed.

Note that off-hours cover most of the week, so trading remains more concentrated when U.S. exchanges are open. The underlying market still supplies most liquidity and price discovery.

New platforms expanded the market beyond Ondo and xStocks in 2026 and created a multi-platform competitive landscape.

Ondo and xStocks controlled 76.2% of value in January. Today, Ondo and bStocks hold 53.4% of the total market, with xStocks ranking third. New competitors such as bStocks and Robinhood reshaped the market, so six platforms now each hold roughly 5% or more. Distribution via exchanges, brokerages, and wallets now matters as much as first-mover advantage.

Ondo’s share fell from 61.4% in May to 28.4% in September. New entrants expanded while Ondo’s distributed value declined by roughly 20%, amplifying the loss of market share. In the meantime, bStocks reached 25% within roughly 3 months.

Robinhood’s 334% increase partly reflects its small starting base, but it still added about $120M of market value in 30 days. bStocks added even more in absolute terms at roughly $173M. Recent growth came from new products, while several established platforms stayed flat or contracted.

xStocks, Reality, and Dinari offer large catalogs, but average value per product remains low. bStocks, Robinhood, and Ondo on the other hand, concentrate more capital in fewer products. Securitize stands out as the one with the lowest count of products but the highest value per tokenized stock. Also, demand appears concentrated in a smaller set of recognizable stocks rather than distributed evenly across every available token.

BNB Chain grew from $145M in January to $1.09B in market value after attracting both xStocks and bStocks. Avalanche reached $351M as Securitize deployed SECZ across Avalanche and Solana. Robinhood Chain reached $142M within three months of launch as activity soared and tokenized stocks found utility. Ethereum and Solana both more than doubled in absolute value, yet their combined market share fell because newer distribution channels grew faster.

Secondary trading activity still concentrates within a few ecosystems and issuers. bStocks generated 55% of spot DEX volume and BNB Chain settled 56%, while Robinhood represented 26.6% in both views. Solana differs, as its 14% share comes from several issuers, making it the most shared trading venue/chain.

Robinhood puts 41.3% of its active value in DeFi apps, versus 27.2% for xStocks and only 0.8% for Ondo. This also explains why Robinhood can rank higher than bStocks despite BNB Chain holding more tokenized-stock value. Still, most tokenized stocks sit outside DeFi, especially on the largest platforms like Ondo.

SECZ accounts for $281M, or 78.6%, of Securitize’s tokenized-stock value. EXOD contributes $61.5M and CURR $15M. One issuer-sponsored listing can therefore reach meaningful value size, especially when the token launches alongside the public stock.

There is no doubt that much of the recent innovation in tokenized stocks has been centered in the United States. However, it would be a mistake to overlook the significant role Asia is already playing behind the scenes.

The first factor is Asia's massive investor base. Binance bStocks is currently the second-largest tokenized stock platform by tokenized equity market capitalization, behind Ondo. Both Binance and BSC have particularly strong user bases across Asia.

A Binance Research report provides particularly interesting data. Onchain trading accounts for 72% of total bStocks trading volume. Of that onchain volume, 92% takes place outside U.S. market hours. In addition, 59% of bStocks trading volume on Binance itself occurs outside U.S. market hours.

The hourly trading pattern is also notable. Both offchain trading on Binance and onchain trading volumes rise sharply around 20:00 ET, which corresponds with the beginning of the Asian trading day. Binance Research explicitly points to this pattern as evidence of regional demand that is not well served by traditional U.S. market hours.

Asia has long been at the center of the global manufacturing supply chain, and the rise of AI has made this structural advantage even more important. The AI industry depends on physical hardware such as semiconductors, memory, data center equipment, batteries, sensors, and robotics. A significant share of these industries is concentrated in Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan. This means Asian equities are becoming increasingly attractive to global investors.

Onchain markets are catching up with that. SK Hynix, the Korean memory semiconductor manufacturer, has consistently ranked among the most actively traded equities on perp markets even after some of the initial excitement surrounding AI and semiconductor stocks cooled down.

Other Asian equities are also actively traded, including Samsung Electronics, the Korean integrated semiconductor company, the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF, and Chinese AI companies such as MiniMax and Z.ai. More recently, Chinese memory company CXMT and robotics company Unitree also attracted significant attention in perpetual futures markets around the time of their IPOs.

Historically, major platforms such as Kraken xStocks, Ondo Global Markets, and Robinhood Stock Tokens relied on complex legal structures spanning multiple jurisdictions. These structures could involve an SPV in Jersey, issuing debt securities linked to underlying shares, using the Swiss DLT Act to establish the legal connection between the token and the economic rights represented by the security, and obtaining prospectus approval from the Liechtenstein FMA to distribute the product across EU and EEA markets.

Abu Dhabi Global Market, or ADGM, makes it possible to handle many of these components within a single jurisdiction. SPV establishment, the legal recognition of the tokenized security, public offering, and distribution can all be structured within ADGM's regulatory framework.

• Under ADGM's Digital Asset Framework, if a token has the characteristics of a security, the FSRA treats it as a digital security and applies the existing securities regulatory framework.
• The FSRA is responsible for reviewing and approving prospectuses for tokenized securities. Once approved, the relevant security can be offered to the public in ADGM. If the necessary RIE approval is also obtained, the security can be traded on a regulated exchange within ADGM.

ADGM also applies a stricter regulatory framework than traditional offshore jurisdictions such as Cayman, BVI, and Jersey. From an institutional investor's perspective, this can provide a higher degree of regulatory credibility.

For these reasons, ADGM has emerged as a particularly attractive jurisdiction for companies looking to tokenize equities. Both Binance bStocks and Coinbase Tokenized Stocks use ADGM's regulatory framework to tokenize equities

Major jurisdictions across the region are developing their own regulatory frameworks for tokenized securities.

Geographic proximity should not be taken for uniformness. Asia is significantly more socially, culturally, economically, and politically fragmented than North America or Europe, and its national jurisdictions have very different approaches to tokenization.

Japan established its regulatory framework for security tokens relatively early, but actual activity in tokenized equities remains limited. Korea only recently passed amendments establishing a legal framework for security tokens, with implementation scheduled for February 2027. China, meanwhile, prohibits crypto trading activities within the country and also restricts the domestic tokenization of securities.

Companies entering the region need to study the financial laws, tokenization frameworks, regulatory developments, and market structure of multiple jurisdictions separately. They then need to identify the countries with the best commercial and regulatory fit.

Korea is opening a legal path for stock tokenization, but at least initially, the model will be closer to a gradual blockchain-based modernization of existing capital market infrastructure.

In January 2026, amendments to the Act on Electronic Registration of Stocks and Bonds and the Capital Markets Act passed the National Assembly. These amendments established the legal basis for using distributed ledgers as securities’ account books. The new framework is scheduled to take effect on February 4, 2027.

A roadmap announced by Korea's Financial Services Commission in September 2026 provided additional detail on the scope of tokenization. During the initial phase, Korea plans to begin with products such as private MMFs for institutional investors, privately placed bonds, and unlisted shares. The scope is expected to expand to public securities over time.

For equities, the initial framework expected in 2027 will prioritize a hybrid structure. Unlisted shares that have already been issued as traditional electronic securities can be placed into a trust, with the resulting beneficial interests tokenized.

However, the initial infrastructure is expected to rely on distributed ledger networks jointly operated by authorized financial institutions such as Korea Securities Depository and securities firms. This will likely look very different from the public blockchain-based tokenization models used in global crypto markets today.

Japan already has a regulatory framework capable of accommodating tokenized equities, but an onchain tokenized stock market targeting global investors has not yet developed at a meaningful scale.

The revised Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, or FIEA, which took effect in 2020, introduced the concept of Electronically Recorded Transferable Rights to regulate certain securities-like rights that can be transferred using blockchain technology. At the same time, assets that were already considered securities under the FIEA, such as shares and corporate bonds, continue to be regulated as securities even when they are issued in tokenized form on a blockchain.

In practice, Japan has seen the continued issuance of security tokens through institutional blockchain infrastructure such as Progmat. These products have included real estate-related securities, corporate bonds, and funds.

However, Japan's security token market today is focused more heavily on improving the issuance and administration of real estate products, bonds, and trust beneficiary interests than on creating a market where listed stocks can be traded 24/7 in tokenized form.

Hong Kong has strong infrastructure that could eventually support a broader tokenized stock market. At this point, however, a large-scale onchain market for ordinary listed equities has not yet emerged.

Since 2023, the SFC has broadly followed a "same business, same risks, same rules" approach. If an existing security is tokenized, it generally remains subject to the existing securities regulatory framework under the Securities and Futures Ordinance, or SFO. In other words, regulation focuses primarily on the legal rights represented by the token rather than on the token itself.

In April 2026, Hong Kong moved one step further by announcing a new regulatory framework allowing secondary trading of SFC-authorized tokenized investment products. Subject to relevant conditions, retail investors can trade tokenized products on SFC-licensed virtual asset trading platforms, or VATPs. Over the longer term, the SFC is also exploring the use of regulated stablecoins and tokenized deposits as settlement assets, with the goal of enabling trading environments closer to 24/7 markets. This represents an important step toward connecting traditional financial products with crypto market infrastructure.

However, the existing market remains significantly more focused on MMFs and open-ended funds than on tokenized equities.

As of March 2026, the number of tokenized products offered to the Hong Kong public had reached 13. The SFC has also indicated that the initial implementation of the new secondary trading framework will focus primarily on tokenized money market funds.

Within the UAE, Abu Dhabi Global Market has emerged as one of the most important regulatory jurisdictions in Asia where tokenized stocks have already moved into commercial use. Rather than introducing a separate and lighter "token securities law," the FSRA applies the existing Financial Services and Markets Regulations, or FSMR, when a blockchain-issued token has the characteristics of a traditional security.

Under this framework, the issuance, public offering, prospectus approval, listing, custody, and secondary trading of tokenized securities can all be regulated within the existing securities regime. This framework is not limited to a regulatory sandbox. As discussed earlier, it is already being used by commercial tokenized stock services such as Binance bStocks and Coinbase.

As discussed above, tokenized stock markets across Asia are not yet converging toward a single model. As a result, the near-term future is unlikely to produce one unified "Asian tokenized stock market." Instead, different models are likely to emerge based on each country's financial system and regulatory environment.

Despite these differences, Asia has significant long-term potential to become one of the most important regions for tokenized equities.

The first reason is the sheer size of the underlying equity market. As of the end of 2025, the combined equity market capitalization of China, Hong Kong, Japan, and India exceeded approximately $34 trillion, representing around 23% of global exchange-listed market capitalization.

Asia also has a particularly strong concentration of companies in industries attracting significant global investor interest, including semiconductors, memory, batteries, robotics, electric vehicles, and advanced manufacturing. This creates a large pool of attractive underlying assets that could eventually be brought onchain.

The potential on the demand side may be even greater. Asia is already one of the fastest-growing regions in the world for digital asset adoption. According to Chainalysis, APAC onchain crypto transaction volume increased 69% year over year during the 12 months ending June 2025, rising from $1.4 trillion to approximately $2.36 trillion. This made APAC the fastest-growing region globally during that period. And the regional investor base is already familiar with digital wallets, stablecoins, centralized crypto exchanges, and onchain trading.

Regulation is also gradually moving. Asian jurisdictions often do not open new financial technologies to the market all at once. Instead, they tend to institutionalize them within a limited scope first and then expand the framework over time.

The starting points remain very different across countries. However, as tokenization becomes more institutionally validated, there is significant room for today's limited experiments to expand into broader segments of the securities market.

Perpetual markets on Hyperliquid have established themselves as a new venue for pricing private companies before they become publicly-tradeable. Trade.xyz built the first HIP-3 markets at meaningful scale, covering US equities, commodities, indices, FX, and pre-IPO assets, and by August 2026 those markets had processed $458 billion in total notional across 94 active listings since January. July alone accounted for $109 billion and saw a single-day peak of $8.9 billion on July 29. Monthly volume grew 505% between January and July.

September cooled off, but not by a lot: trade.xyz markets handled more than $50 billion in the first 28 days, pushing cumulative volume past $500 billion, with active listings rising to about 109. Pre-IPO pricing also got its biggest live test yet. Entropy's Anthropic perp, launched on Hyperliquid in late August, implied a valuation of up to $2.3 trillion on September 9, more than double the $965 billion Series H. When Reuters reported details of Anthropic's prospectus on September 28, the contract barely moved, holding near a $2 trillion valuation.

Three companies traded as perpetuals on trade.xyz ahead of their Nasdaq debut: Cerebras, Quantinuum, and SpaceX. By comparing the last full hourly candle before each listing to the actual opening print, we can see how closely the perp anticipated the public price.

The gaps range from a 14.8% undershoot to a 34.5% overshoot, so none qualifies as precise price discovery. But for a private company with no public market reference, the perp was the only continuously available price signal before the opening bell. Imperfect price discovery is still price discovery.

Despite the imprecision, a broader pattern suggests the mechanism itself holds up even when individual prints miss. RedStone's own analysis of 449 market-weekends across 21 trade.xyz markets in equities, commodities, and recently listed assets found that the perp price at Sunday 20:00 ET, a point with no pre-market or dark-pool activity to lean on, moved in the same direction as Monday's actual market open 65% of the time: a result 6.4 standard deviations above what random chance would produce.

While the format holds up, the open variable now is oracle quality. How a mark price gets constructed onchain determines how tightly a perp tracks the asset it references, and how large the gap is at listing. It impacts the frequency of liquidations on stale data and the spreads.

RedStone has been operating within HIP-3 markets since November 2025, where RedStone Live now powers 15 markets. That is a narrower slice of RedStone's footprint, but it covers the conditions where oracle reliability is hard to hold: thin liquidity, high volatility, and continuous 24/7 operation.

The other route into pre-IPO exposure rests on a very different structure. A perpetual position on trade.xyz is a leveraged bet on price, so there is no ownership claim. The special purpose vehicle model makes that claim, and it has drawn sharp pushback.

On June 30, 2025, Robinhood gave European users "OpenAI tokens" and "SpaceX tokens" as part of a promotional rollout tracking each company's implied valuation. OpenAI responded within days. "These 'OpenAI tokens' are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it," the company said on July 2, 2025. Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev countered that the tokens were backed by Robinhood's own stake in an SPV holding OpenAI shares, offering indirect price exposure rather than a transfer of actual equity.

The same week exposed how fragile that structure can be. On July 8, 2025, Linqto, a pre-IPO platform that used an identical SPV mechanism to offer retail investors access to companies including Ripple, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Court filings put more than $500 million in securities across 111 companies, including 4.7 million Ripple shares, into limbo, and the SEC's Division of Enforcement opened an investigation into allegations that Linqto marketed to ineligible retail investors, failed to properly transfer security titles, and sold shares at markups above the SEC's 10% cap.

The confrontation escalated in 2026. On May 12, 2026, Anthropic and OpenAI both updated their investor-facing policies to declare that any sale or transfer of their private shares without board approval is null and void, meaning a buyer acquires no recognized shareholder rights regardless of what a token or SPV certificate claims to represent.

The warning had its consequences. Within 24 hours of the announcement, PreStocks tokens tracking both Anthropic and OpenAI fell by around 35% each.

The comparison with the HIP-3 model yields the takeaway that the two approaches fail differently. A perpetual market's worst case is a pricing error. An SPV's worst case is a security disputed by the issuer. Only one of the two models delivering retail investors pre-IPO access to companies survives the company saying no.

The tokenized RWA market has grown past $38 billion in assets issued onchain, but most of it is sitting idle. Roughly 89% of the issuance is not utilized in any DeFi protocol, according to Falcon Finance's Artem Tolkachev, who traces the gap to a mismatch of purpose: many tokenized products were specifically built to be held for yield and redeemed on schedule. RedStone's own market sizing puts the idle portion at roughly $30 billion.

Midas, an EU-regulated tokenization platform, named the complexity of exiting at scale as the main obstacle in tokenized finance. It raised $50 million in March 2026 to build a redemption facility for tokenized assets.

The exit problem has two sides. On the one hand, it prevents the holder from utilizing their capital on their own timeline. On the other, it creates a hurdle for the lending protocol that accepted the token as collateral and now needs to liquidate it in seconds, not weeks. RWA redemption windows typically run from a few days to months, and DEX liquidity for most tokenized funds is too thin to absorb a forced sale. That combination is why most lending protocols still won't take RWA collateral at a meaningful loan-to-value ratio: there is no reliable way to turn it into cash on the timeline a liquidation demands.

Midas built instant redemption to let holders and borrowers exit a position in the same block where they requested to. RedStone Settle builds the same kind of same-block settlement into the liquidation side. A closer look at the usage patterns of Midas's instant redemption shows why both pieces are needed.

The more structurally interesting finding sits one layer lower. Instant redemption also works as the exit instrument for a specific kind of leveraged position built entirely inside DeFi lending markets. What happens under the hood there is a lot more complex than a holder cashing out.

A borrower deposits an mToken, mF-ONE (Midas's tokenized wrapper on Fasanara Capital's private credit fund), into a Morpho Blue market as collateral. They borrow USDC against it, use that USDC to buy more of the same mToken, and deposit it again. At the 91.5% liquidation LTV set on the mF-ONE/USDC market, a handful of loops compound to roughly 4 to 5x leverage on the underlying private credit yield, funded by the spread between that yield and the USDC borrow rate.

Getting out of that position in a hurry is only possible through instant redemption. The mToken sits locked as Morpho collateral until the Morpho debt against it is repaid, and repaying that debt takes USDC. mF-ONE's standard redemption cycle runs close to 30 days, so unwinding loop by loop on that schedule would leave a borrower exposed to NAV and market risk for months across seven or more iterations. It would also require holding idle capital to fund every repayment along the way. Instant redemption collapses that into a same-block settlement, which makes it the only realistic way to exit. For a borrower without spare USDC sitting around, it’s rather the only way to exit at all.

Onchain data shows two distinct patterns for how this actually happens. Four confirmed cases unwind the whole position atomically, in one transaction, using a flash loan to repay the Morpho debt, pull the collateral, redeem it instantly, and repay the flash loan out of the proceeds, all before the block closes. The largest confirmed atomic unwind, $3.15 million, happened on November 5, 2025, in the middle of the Stream Finance cascade. It's capital-efficient but requires a smart contract rather than a standard wallet and carries a flash loan fee (about 0.09% on Aave v3).

The dominant pattern, fifty confirmed cases, is sequential: each loop layer gets peeled off one at a time, with the USDC from each redemption funding the next repayment. One example from May 31, 2026, a $1.5 million base position levered roughly 4x, unwound $5.97 million across seven iterations in thirteen minutes. After an initial $351,000 to kick off the first repayment, every subsequent step was funded entirely by the previous instant redemption, with the mToken amount withdrawn from Morpho at each step matching exactly what got redeemed the step before. The date lines up with Fasanara's monthly private credit NAV window, consistent with a position built for a month's yield and unwound right on schedule.

Across four Morpho mToken markets on Ethereum (mF-ONE/USDC, mHYPER/USDC at two different LLTVs, and mHyperBTC/USDC), the same dataset counts 54 leverage-unwind events from 26 or more distinct borrowers, redeeming more than $50 million through this mechanism since January 2025. Seventeen of those borrowers unwound leveraged mHYPER positions on November 5, 2025, the same day as the $133 million spike. A real share of that spike was mechanical loop-unwinding running in parallel with direct panic selling, a detail the headline number alone doesn't show. Outstanding borrowing on the mF-ONE/USDC market alone currently exceeds $20 million, and all of it depends structurally on instant redemption as the only exit that exists.

RedStone Settle, launched in April 2026, unlocks T+0 settlement for T+X assets. It lets KYC-whitelisted solvers compete to supply liquidity the moment a settlement event is due, be that a holder seeking an instant redemption or an RWA-collateralized position crossing its liquidation threshold. The winning bidder takes over the RWAs, redeeming them natively, while onchain, the redemption happens in one atomic transaction. This delivers lending protocols the instant liquidations they need to treat RWA collateral as safe at a meaningful LTV in the first place.

The leverage-unwind data above points to a second, related use for the same underlying design. Right now, the atomic pattern above is built by hand: a borrower (or their own contract) sources a flash loan, and the sequential pattern takes thirteen minutes of manually sequenced transactions with the outcome entirely dependent on LP buffer availability at each step. A Settle-style auction, matching solver liquidity to an unwind request the same way it matches solver liquidity to a liquidation, could collapse that fourteen-step manual process into one instruction. The same solver capacity that backs a forced liquidation or a fast-tracked exit could just as easily back a borrower unwinding, or building, a leveraged position voluntarily, on their own schedule. That extends Settle's settlement layer into infrastructure for the loop itself, well beyond the moment a loop gets force-closed

Binance traded $342.9 billion of equity-linked perpetuals in August 2026, by its own count. In January the figure was $410.9 million. Over the same August, tokenized stocks from the issuers Binance Research tracks traded $7.9 billion, and CoinDesk had tokenized stock DEX volume on course for about $10.6 billion ($9.62 billion through August 28). One exchange's equity perps did 32 to 43 times the trading volume of the tokenized stocks themselves.

July shows the same gap across more venues: CryptoQuant counted roughly $250 billion of equity perp volume on centralized exchanges that month, against CoinDesk's $12.3 billion of tokenized stock DEX volume.

Open interest confirms the point further. Equity perps on decentralized venues alone carried about $3.3 billion of open interest on September 28, more than RWA.xyz's $3.16 billion valuation of the whole tokenized stock market. Leveraged onchain exposure to equities now exceeds the entire supply of tokenized equities, and it sits in a different product.

Price discovery for tokenized equities mostly happens outside tokenized equities: in the listed shares (while US markets are open), and in perps (during off-market hours). The spot tokens follow.

HIP-3 lets third parties deploy their own perp markets on Hyperliquid's order book, and its open interest set a record above $4.44 billion in August. One deployer dominates. trade.xyz held an estimated 95.1% share of HIP-3 trading by the end of Q2, where its equity perps traded $58.9 billion. Equities are only part of the HIP-3 total, though: that $58.9 billion was 29.1% of trade.xyz's Q2 volume, with commodities and indices making up much of the rest. On September 28, trade.xyz carried $3.79 billion of open interest and roughly $52 billion of 30-day volume, per DefiLlama.

Binance grew faster still. Its equity perp volume rose more than 800-fold between January and August. By August, equity-linked contracts made up 79% of its TradFi perp volume.

Tokenized stocks are growing quickly too: their total onchain value rose 395% in the year to September 28, and RWA.xyz put their distributed value at $3.16 billion on September 28. Much of their reported trading never touches a chain, though. Ondo has processed $27 billion of cumulative volume, $18 billion of it on centralized exchanges, which leaves at most a third for DEXs and primary mint and redeem combined.

When xStocks passed $25 billion of total volume in February, $3.5 billion of it was onchain, about 14%. CoinMarketCap Research put cumulative DEX volume for Ondo and xStocks together at $7.05 billion as of June 23, and noted that most xStocks trading is matched on Kraken and Bybit order books.

The onchain share is also less about equities than it looks. On Robinhood Chain, analytics firm SQD found that 32.1% of cumulative stock token volume through August 30, about $711 million, came from trades against other tokens, mostly meme coins. And a few distributors now carry most of the flow: Binance's bStocks and Robinhood went from 0.8% of tracked issuer volume in June to 87.8% in September month-to-date.

Aggregates blend very different markets, so we took an onchain snapshot and compared the daily averages for trade.xyz perps on Hyperliquid and the matching xStocks tokens on Solana.

On volume, the gap holds across all three markets. Over September, trade.xyz perps traded 10.5 times SPYx's daily volume, 7.3 times NVDAx's and 13.4 times TSLAx's. TSLA stands out in a different way: its open interest is only about half to two-thirds of the TSLAx in circulation, but the token barely trades, at about $1.4 million a day. And this compares onchain venues only. On Binance and the other centralized venues, single-stock perp volume runs further ahead still.

NYSE and Nasdaq are open about 32.5 of the 168 hours in a week. For the other 135 or so, an onchain market has two options: make its own price, or hold the last one. Perps and spot tokens have gone opposite ways.

trade.xyz's oracle uses external venue prices while those venues are open. Once they close, it advances an exponentially weighted moving average driven by the perp's own order book, with a 30-minute time constant, and returns to the external price on the first tick after the reopen. Off-hours, the order book is the oracle.

0xArchive studied 199 symbol-weekends across 37 Hyperliquid markets over six weekends in February and March 2026. The last perp price before the reopen beat Friday's close as a guide to where the market would open in 78.4% of cases, and cut the mean reopen error from 125.4 to 60.5 basis points. On weekends when a stock or equity index reopened more than 1% away from its Friday close, the perps had already moved 64% of the way there by Monday's open. They did it on thin books, with median weekend depth at 33.9% of weekday levels. RedStone's own analysis of 449 trade.xyz market-weekends, covered in the Pre-IPO section, points the same way: the Sunday-evening perp price called the direction of Monday's open 65% of the time.

Spot tokens anchor instead. xStocks can only be minted and redeemed on US business days, although secondary venues trade them around the clock. Kamino's xStocks lending market accepts off-hours prices only inside a band around the last market close. Over the Labor Day weekend, tokenized stocks traded $1.01 billion, and Binance's QQQ token (QQQB) still finished at $719.36 against a Friday close of $718.96, about 6 basis points apart. One holiday weekend proves little on its own, but it is the result you would expect from a spot stack built around the last close. Ondo has gone furthest toward changing this, with 24/7 mint and redeem on six tickers since June 25.

The SpaceX listing, covered earlier in this report, is the cleanest case. Before June 12 there was no share to tokenize, so perps were the only market. On trade.xyz's last full hourly candle before listing, the perp stood at $176.76, against a $135 IPO price and a $150 open (see the table in the Pre-IPO section). It got the direction right, landed 17.8% above the open, and still sat below the $185 close the shares reached on June 18.

Arrakis recently traced 71,697 buyers of tokenized dollar-yield products and found a crypto-native institutional base. Wallets writing cheques of $1 million or more made up 4% of buyers and held about 93% of the capital, and 93% to 100% of it arrived through primary subscription.

Tokenized stocks have close to the opposite profile. The holder base is enormous, and the tickets are small. At the time of writing, RWA.xyz counts 4.04 million holders against $3.16 billion of distributed value, about $780 per holder on average, and the holder count grew 67.6% in the last 30 days. Much of that growth has come through distribution platforms and meme-paired markets. Stock-paired meme markets generated about $2.49 billion of volume on Robinhood Chain and $2.90 billion on BNB Chain between July 26 and September 9.

The biggest wallets belong to intermediaries. On Solana, the largest holder of each xStock we checked is the xStocks minter, sitting on inventory: 25.8% of SPYx, 55.7% of NVDAx and 25.2% of TSLAx, about $81 million across the three. Exchange hot wallets come next. Kraken holds 10.8% of TSLAx, and OKX and Bybit together hold 9% of NVDAx. The top 100 wallets hold between 86% and 95% of each token. Retail is present in large numbers, but it shows up as millions of small balances, and a meaningful share of the float sits in exchange custody on its behalf.

Very little of that supply is working as collateral. Binance Research put tokenized stock DeFi deposits at $289.1 million, or 7.2% of a $4.0 billion active market cap, as of September 9. Liquidity pools held 65.4% of that and lending markets 28.1%, which puts stock collateral in lending at roughly $81 million, about 2% of the market. Grayscale's estimate is in the same range: about 5% of the tokenized equity market is put to work onchain. In the Arrakis data for credit products, by contrast, debt against Midas's mF-ONE peaked at 42% of the token's notional once it listed on Morpho.

The Solana snapshot shows where the exceptions are. Jupiter Lend and Kamino's xStocks markets together hold 21% of SPYx supply, about $15.6 million. For NVDAx and TSLAx the figure is roughly 5–6%. Across all three tokens, lending markets hold about $24.5 million of collateral, while open interest on the matching trade.xyz perps is $577 million, about 24 times as much. Across all chains, the $81 million of stock collateral in lending comes to about 2.5% of the $3.3 billion of equity perp open interest on DEXs.

Some of the collateral that does exist is packaged yield. Kraken's xStocks Vaults, launched September 14, take SPYx, QQQx and NVDAx, post them on Kamino, borrow stablecoins against them and redeploy the proceeds, with initial estimated APYs of about 2% (1.8% for NVDAx), net of fees and paid out in the underlying token.

The collateral use case is also growing inside exchanges. Binance opened bStocks as margin and futures collateral for all eligible Cross and Portfolio Margin users on September 21, and Kraken applies haircuts of 10% on broad-market ETFs, 20% on large single names, and 30% on volatile ones.

The open interest shows that demand for leveraged equity exposure exists. It found a cheaper route than borrowing against spot.

A trader who wants 5x NVDA can open a perp in one transaction, around the clock, paying funding and fees. Building the same position from spot means buying NVDAx, posting it in a lending market, borrowing stablecoins against a price feed that stops updating when Nasdaq closes, and relying on a liquidation path that runs through a token most issuers only redeem on business days. Lenders price those constraints in through bands and haircuts, and each one makes the loop less attractive.

The carry math points the same way. The loops in the Midas section work because mF-ONE earns a private credit yield above the USDC borrow rate, so leverage amplifies a positive spread. A stock token has no comparable yield, only dividends, which issuers such as Ondo reinvest into the token. Borrowing against it pays off only to fund another position or to raise cash without selling, which is the margin-loan business TradFi prime brokers already run. Until a lending market can price and liquidate stock collateral during the roughly 135 hours a week the exchange is closed, perps will remain the default way to hold leveraged equity exposure onchain.

The bottleneck is pricing and settlement. RedStone runs RedStone Live, a price feed built for HIP-3 that uses institutional data sources during market hours and alternative aggregation off-hours; RedStone Live has powered billions’ worth of volume across 15 HIP-3 markets. The same weekend-pricing question now applies to stock collateral in lending markets, and the settlement side of it is the gap Settle was built for.

Stock tokens can do more than sit in users’ wallets. They can trade 24/7 in DEXs, supply them to trading pools, borrow against them, and use them in strategies that separate or reinvest their returns. Today most value sits in a small number of issuer-protocol venues, with lending deposits growing much faster than debt.

Uniswap V4 holds roughly two-thirds of Robinhood’s deployed value. Pendle holds one-third of xStocks’ total DeFi value through STRCx alone, while the rest spreads across Solana mainly. Lista Lending accounts for most bStocks deployment.

Tokenized stock deposits have grown to almost $80M, increasing by almost 25% over the past month. Solana lending markets hold most tokenized-equity collateral, led by Kamino’s Superstate and xStocks markets. BNB Chain supports a broader set of smaller ListaDAO pools, while Robinhood Chain remains at an earlier stage.

Deposits exceed debt in every leading market. Kamino’s Opening Bell and xStocks markets hold $38M and $29M of deposits, respectively, against $7.5M and $5.2M of debt. Debt equals less than 20% of deposits in both markets. Smaller Lista pools reach roughly 25% to 40%.

Kamino’s loan to deposit ratio went up from 11% in January to roughly 34% in February and March, then fell to 18% as deposits grew faster than debt. Lista grew from 10% in its first week to almost 30% by September, while Morpho held near 29% through August before falling to 6.7%.

Few would have expected tokenized stocks to trade against memecoins, yet AI/NVDA and STONK/SPYx now rank among the three deepest stock-token pools with more pairs like this trading on Robinhood, BNB Chain, and Solana. Permissionless markets let users pair a familiar equity with a native speculative asset, using the stock token as collateral and a quote asset rather than simply holding it for price exposure.

STRCx accounts for about one-third of xStocks' deployed DeFi value, and Pendle holds 97% of STRCx's DeFi balance. Pendle separates Strategy's discrete distributions from the principal position, allowing users to trade the income stream, take directional yield exposure or provide liquidity around both claims.

Traditional finance has wanted programmable settlement, instant collateralization, and round-the-clock liquidity for a long time. The problem was never the idea, it was the plumbing. Blockchain doesn't add a new layer on top of existing infrastructure, it replaces the part that was always the bottleneck: settlement. Everything that depended on overnight clearing cycles, reconciliation across intermediaries, and manual custody workflows gets dramatically simpler when the ledger itself is the source of truth.

Collateral markets are where this gets genuinely interesting. Posting a lower-liquidity asset as collateral in traditional finance is often just not practical. The infrastructure doesn't support it, the counterparty appetite isn't there, and the operational overhead kills the trade before it starts. Onchain lending changes that equation, but not overnight. Instant settlement is yet to become an industry standard for RWAs. The legal groundwork, compliance frameworks, and curator relationships still have to be in place first. What's different is that once that work is done, the asset can actually function as collateral in a live market, something that for many asset classes was simply out of reach before, regardless of how much operational effort you were willing to put in.

The first foundations are in place, institutional adoption is real, and the direction of travel is clear. What comes next is less about proving the concept and more about how fast the collateral universe expands, and whether the compliance and composability tradeoffs of the first generation resolve into something the whole market can build on.

Authors

Core Contributors To The Report

• Marcin Wilk Research Analyst at RedStone @wolf_indexed
• Marcin Kazmierczak Co-Founder at RedStone @MarcinRedStone
• Jinsol Bok Head of Research at Four Pillars @100y_eth
• Denis Khoronenko Content Specialist at RedStone LinkedIn
• Dimitris Pechlivanidis Senior Analyst at Alea Research @demetriusweb3