Tokenized Stocks Explode to $1.2B Market Cap, Mirroring Stablecoin’s Meteoric Rise

Wall Street's ghost is haunting the blockchain—and investors are buying the apparition.

The New Paper Giants

Forget waiting for market hours or navigating brokerage red tape. A wave of digital assets representing fractional slices of Tesla, Apple, and Amazon is bypassing traditional finance entirely. These aren't your granddad's stock certificates; they're programmable, tradeable 24/7, and live on-chain. The total value locked in these synthetic slices just hit a staggering $1.2 billion. Sound familiar? It should—it's the same explosive growth trajectory we saw with early stablecoins before they ate the world.

Why TradFi Should Be Sweating

This isn't just a novelty. It's a direct challenge to the old guard's monopoly on access. The model cuts out intermediaries, slashes settlement times from days to seconds, and opens global markets to anyone with a crypto wallet. The infrastructure is being built now, echoing the quiet, relentless build-up of DeFi protocols that later unlocked billions in value. One cynical take? Traditional finance spent decades building moats; crypto just built a bridge and started charging tolls in a better currency.

The Road Ahead is Programmable

The $1.2 billion figure is a signal flare. It proves the demand for borderless, composable equity. The next phase won't just mirror stocks—it will reinvent them. Imagine dividend payments that auto-compound in a yield vault, or using your Google token as collateral for a loan without ever selling your position. The rails are laid. The train has left the station. The only question left is who's on board, and who's still waiting at the deprecated depot.

Institutions accelerate tokenized stock adoption

All of this has been driven, for the most part, by the institutions that power the game. Backed Finance itself launched its group of xStocks in September on Ethereum, which includes approximately 60 tokenized stocks. The distribution was coordinated with major cryptocurrency exchange operators, such as Kraken and Bybit, providing a user base for the products from day one.

The introduction marked a departure from many similar pilots, favoring approaches that can be scaled more broadly. Volume increased as investors who were already familiar with the public companies being tokenized were able to trade them easily; likewise, the overall market capitalization also rose.

The energy continued into December with the announcement that Securitize WOULD enable compliant onchain trading of public equities. Its model will focus on direct shareholding, which has been a concern for the sector for some time, as the link between synthetic exposure and regulation remains uncertain.

Ondo Finance is also emerging as a major player. The company appears to be the most probable contender for solana to choose, as it aims to launch tokenized US stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) on Solana in early 2026. The move is another sign of growing confidence in high-performance blockchains as potential venues for regulated financial products.

Nasdaq and market infrastructure firms increase commitment

The clearest sign that long-term commitment was faltering might have been the Nasdaq. The exchange has confirmed that it has submitted documents to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to launch tokenized stocks on its platform. It will bring blockchain-based shares to one of the world’s largest market infrastructures.

Tokenization is one of the company’s most important strategic projects, Matt Savarese, Nasdaq’s Head of Digital Assets Strategy, said in a statement. It is not trying to make the markets “bear new witness” but rather to remake them in a way that appeals to regulators and issuers as well as investors, he added.

That being said, Savarese is optimistic that tokenization will become an organic part of the financial system in the future. “We’re not looking at upending the system; we want everyone to come along for that ride and bring tokenization more into the mainstream,” Matt Savarese, Nasdaq’s head of digital assets strategy, said in an interview.

As tokenized equities become increasingly accepted by more institutions, exchanges, and regulators, the sector is gaining more reputation. Although still small in comparison to established equity markets, with emergent institutional support and rapid growth, the future for tokenized stocks could resemble that of stablecoins’ rapid rise from a niche product to a Core financial infrastructure.

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