Doubled in one month: The trend shaking up the stock market
For decades, the path to investing in stocks barely changed. You open an investment account at a bank or investment house, deposit money, wait for trading hours, and buy a stock through the exchange.
Now, the crypto industry is trying to build another route. Instead of the stock remaining strictly within the traditional infrastructure of the capital market, companies are starting to create digital representations of it on top of a blockchain. These are called “tokenized stocks,” and recent data show the idea is starting to gain significant momentum.
According to data from RWA.xyz, the number of tokenized stock holders more than doubled in a month, reaching about 1.31 million.
At the same time, monthly transfer volume surged by approximately 179% to reach $23.13 billion. The number of active addresses rose by roughly 35% to nearly 572,000, and the total value of stocks distributed in this manner reached around $2.38 billion.
In other words, this remains a tiny market relative to the global stock market, but its rate of growth is already hard to ignore.
What is a tokenized stock anyway?
The concept is somewhat similar to the way stablecoins such as USDC or USDT represent US dollars on a blockchain.
Instead of a dollar, a financial asset like a stock is taken and a token is issued that is meant to represent exposure to it. In this way, theoretically, the asset can be transferred between wallets, integrated into blockchain-based applications, and in some cases traded outside normal exchange hours.
However, this is also where one of the most critical points for investors lies: “Tokenized stock” is a general term for products that can differ greatly from one another.
In some cases, the token is backed by a real stock held by a financial institution. In other cases, it is a product that provides exposure to the price alone. Accompanying rights, such as voting, dividends, or legal ownership of the stock, can also vary from product to product.
Therefore, buying a token that tracks Apple is not necessarily identical to buying Apple stock directly through a broker.
The race for digital Wall Street has already begun
One of the companies currently leading the field is Ondo, with distributed assets valued at roughly $872 million. It is followed by Kraken’s xStocks at about $558 million and Binance’s bStocks at around $522 million.
The latter figure is particularly striking because bStocks launched only in June and has already drawn very close to xStocks in terms of asset volume.
The industry’s ambitions do not end with stocks that are already publicly traded. Earlier this year, crypto platforms also began competing for the opportunity to offer investors exposure to private companies before their initial public offerings. SpaceX became one of the prominent examples of this ahead of its planned June IPO.
Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bybit, Bitget, and Blockchain.com offered, in various ways, products designed to provide exposure to the company even before its entry into the public market.
Demand was immense. A single campaign by Binance attracted demand totaling roughly $557 million.
Yet this is where the problem was exposed. Several platforms were forced to cancel plans related to the IPO and refund money to customers after failing to obtain enough actual shares to back the demand for the tokens.
This serves as an important reminder that while blockchain can make trading faster and more accessible, it cannot eliminate the physical constraints of the underlying asset.
Why transfer stocks to the blockchain at all?
The great potential of tokenization is not necessarily the creation of a new type of investment. Ultimately, an Apple stock remains exposure to Apple.
The big change lies in the infrastructure. Digital securities can, depending on their structure and regulation, move between users quickly, allow trading over expanded hours, be divided into smaller fractions, and connect directly to other financial applications.
In the long run, this could mean blurring the line between an investment account and a crypto wallet.
Instead of one system for stocks, another system for bonds, a separate app for transferring dollars, and a distinct wallet for crypto, blockchain infrastructure offers a vision where various types of assets can exist and transfer over the same system.
That is already a much bigger story than tokenized stocks.
A market worth trillions of dollars?
Stocks are only part of what are known as RWAs, or Real World Assets – real-world assets represented on a blockchain.
Government bonds, money market funds, private credit, real estate, and additional financial assets are gradually undergoing a similar process. Standard Chartered estimated that the market for tokenized assets could reach approximately $4 trillion by the end of 2028.
That forecast is naturally far from guaranteed, and the road there still runs through regulation, liquidity, security, and above all the question of what rights a token holder actually receives.
Nevertheless, recent data provides an interesting glimpse into the direction in which the capital market may evolve. The revolution this time is not necessarily in what we buy, but in the way we hold, transfer, and trade it.
It is possible that in the not-so-distant future, the question “Which broker do you invest with?” will be replaced by an entirely different question: “Which network are your stocks on?”