You’re Not Buying U.S. Stocks on CEXs: The 94% Clearing Monopoly
Author: Ethan @sunc97956 & Xinyang @OneCryptoNomad | IOSG Ventures
In 2026, the intensive rollout of U.S. stock trading products across centralized exchanges (CEXs) has engineered a booming narrative of 'seamlessly trading NVIDIA with USDT' at the frontend. However, stripping away the frictionless user interface to audit the underlying legal relations and clearing workflows reveals that this is far from a simple 'RWA asset revolution.' Instead, it represents a complex web of interest play and structural mismatch involving spot pricing, ownership attribution, and the monopolization of underlying custody.
TL;DR:
- Three divergent tracks: Crypto exchange U.S. stock offerings have split into three parallel paths — traditional API, tokenized, and perpetual contracts.
- Tokenized model heavily reliant on Alpaca: It monopolizes 94% of tokenized U.S. stock clearing, creating a time-lag risk between on-chain real-time settlement and off-chain T+1 settlement. Ultimately, hidden costs and black-swan liquidity gaps are borne by users.
- Tokenized U.S. stocks market still in a blue ocean phase: Asset size has expanded roughly 15x in 10 months, with DeFi collateral potential beginning to emerge, while the traditional API route is rapidly siphoning away capital.
Chapter 1: The Three Paths of U.S. Stock Offerings
When it comes to capital flows, asset forms, and — most fundamentally — legal relationships, the U.S. stock trading products currently offered by CEXs do not belong to the same category. Beneath their highly homogeneous front-end trading interfaces, they have diverged into three completely distinct evolutionary paths based on differences in underlying assets and legal structures:
The coexistence of these three models is not the result of overnight product design, but rather the product of years of continuous compromise and iteration between on-chain ecosystem liquidity efficiency and traditional compliance clearing frictions.
1.1 Early Exploration and Liquidity Limitations of Offshore Tokenization
The starting point of this track dates back to 2021–2024, with early attempts at on-chain tokenized securities represented by Backed Finance (xStocks) and Ondo Finance. The core business logic of this phase involved setting up Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) in offshore jurisdictions, fully collateralizing real stocks off-chain, and minting corresponding tokenized certificates on-chain (e.g., AAPLx). These assets possessed native characteristics of crypto assets — they could be withdrawn to Web3 wallets and transferred permissionlessly on-chain, successfully completing the paradigm shift from zero to one for bringing assets onto the blockchain.
However, during the window period when traditional financial clearing giants had yet to meaningfully enter the crypto ecosystem, this model exhibited severe supply-side scarcity and scale limitations. Lacking underlying liquidity support from mainstream centralized exchanges (CEXs), these tokenized assets could only circulate among a handful of decentralized protocols or second-tier platforms, causing the total value locked (TVL) of the entire sector to languish at low levels for an extended period. As of August 2025, the total on-chain U.S. stock market cap across all networks stood below $100 million. This characteristic of "having asset mapping but lacking transaction friction efficiency" meant that early tokenized U.S. stocks inevitably became low-liquidity deposits on-chain, failing to truly reach mainstream retail traders.
1.2 Synthetic Perpetual Contracts: Pure Price Derivative Gambling
To compensate for the liquidity deficiencies of tokenized spot stocks, U.S. stock/ETF perpetual contracts quickly became the market's main focus. In September 2025, Bitget was the first to launch U.S. stock perpetual futures, rapidly expanding its offering to over 40 underlying assets with cumulative trading volume exceeding 15billion. However, what truly ignited the track was Hyperliquid′s launch of HIP−3 (a permissionless perpetual contract deployment mechanism) on October 13, 2025, which fully activated the around−the−clock equity derivatives market. As of June 2026, the notional open interest(OI) for U.S.stock−related perpetual contract shad surpassed 2.25 billion. Among them, Hyperliquid held a dominant share thanks to HIP-3, with its Nasdaq-100 (XYZ100) and S&P 500 index perpetuals recording OI of over 310 million and340 million respectively.
Binance also made a strong push in early 2026, capturing over 56% of the CEX market share in RWA perpetuals. Notably, pre-IPO derivatives such as SpaceX (SPCX) saw single-day peak trading volumes reaching billions of dollars. Additionally, Binance launched Korean stock perpetual futures (Samsung, SK Hynix, Hyundai) in early June 2026, with cumulative trading volume of approximately 470 million in the first week. SKHynix alone contributed over 90100 million — reflecting retail leveraged traders' strong interest in global hot spots like AI semiconductors. This highlights a key advantage of crypto perpetual contract platforms: the ability to quickly integrate international hot assets that traditional brokers find difficult or insufficiently covered, providing global retail investors with timely leveraged trading channels.
These synthetic perpetual contracts involve no actual off-chain stock delivery whatsoever; they rely entirely on oracle real-time price feeds, settling long-short battles within the crypto exchange itself. This design delivers extremely high capital efficiency and continuity, especially during U.S. market closing hours when efficient price discovery and liquidity are still available. In contrast, real tokenized spot stocks, due to the need to interface with traditional T+1 clearing, custody, and underwriting processes, often exhibit significant liquidity gaps, wider slippage, and price distortions on-chain. This paradox — where "derivative pricing efficiency outperforms spot" — has become a structural pain point that the current tokenized stock model cannot easily escape.
1.3 Traditional API Model: Exchanges Return to Internet Brokerage
Entering 2026, although the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been advancing the "Project Crypto Innovation Exemption Framework" aimed at providing a regulatory sandbox for digital assets, due to uncontrollable delays in the legal characterization and full compliance implementation of native on-chain securities (Tokenized Securities), major exchanges have begun turning their attention to a more pragmatic path. In June 2026, Binance officially announced a deep partnership with Alpaca, a U.S.-licensed self-clearing broker, launching U.S. stock and ETF trading services.
This "traditional API routing model" is essentially an extension of traditional retail brokerage architecture grafted onto the front end of a crypto exchange. Through its affiliated broker Nest Trading for order routing, blockchain technology plays no settlement role whatsoever throughout the entire lifecycle of the product — users' holdings are merely a row of data mapped within the exchange app, orders are ultimately executed on the NYSE or NASDAQ, and the underlying securities are custodied in Alpaca accounts.
The cost of this model is the sacrifice of all native characteristics of crypto assets: stocks cannot be withdrawn to Web3 wallets, cannot be transferred on-chain, and certainly cannot be moved across platforms. Users' "holdings" are just a line of digital mapping inside the exchange app. However, its underlying logic is the most robust: users are legally recognized as the "beneficial owner" of the securities, entitled not only to full dividends and nominal voting rights but also protected by the U.S. Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). This may appear to be a compromise and regression for crypto exchanges, yet it is currently the only path through which users can genuinely "own" stocks.
1.4 Exchanges' Multi-Track Parallel Strategy
Looking across the current mainstream U.S. stock product lines, a deeper industry consensus emerges: most leading exchanges have not placed all their chips on a single path, but instead adopted a multi-model parallel product layout. For example, platforms such as Binance, Bitget, and Bybit often simultaneously operate multiple underlying systems including traditional API routing, tokenized assets, and synthetic perpetual contracts. This multi-track parallel design is not product redundancy; the core reason is that it allows them to address the actual needs of different customer segments within the crypto ecosystem — high-frequency speculators prioritize the high capital efficiency and leverage of synthetic contracts, while large long-term allocators (whales) place greater value on the compliance guarantees and SIPC legal protection offered by the traditional API model.
This hybrid layout also serves as a hedging strategy for exchanges facing regulatory uncertainty. The traditional API model represents leveraging and compromising with existing Web2 securities compliance frameworks; the tokenized model pushes the boundaries of RWA innovation in offshore jurisdictions; while synthetic derivatives purely digest risk within the crypto internal network. By preparing multiple channels, exchanges can flexibly adjust their product focus according to regulatory policies in different regions, thereby dispersing policy risk.
Chapter 2: Architecture Layers — Rights Dilution Across Five Pipelines
To understand the essence of equity rights dilution in on-chain U.S. stocks, we must shift our gaze away from the seamless front-end experience and audit down the data pipeline layer by layer. The root of the difference lies not in the name of the token or the on-chain narrative, but in how many intermediary layers are stacked between the end user and the ultimate underlying asset.
The traditional API model is able to preserve shareholder rights intact because it follows an extremely clean Web2 three-layer architecture:
User → Broker → DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation)
In this pathway, the broker acts merely as a custodial conduit, and the law extends ownership protection directly through to the end user, ensuring their legal status as "beneficial owner."
However, the tokenized model, in its forced attempt to "bring stocks on-chain," introduces multiple nested intermediaries into the architecture. It is compelled to stretch into a complex five-layer structure:
[End User] ──> [Crypto Exchange] ──> [Token Issuer] ──> [Intermediary Broker (Alpaca)] ──> [DTCC]
This increase in layers is by no means a harmless engineering cost — it is a process in which asset rights are consumed at high frequency during transmission. Within this structure, each layer intercepts or distorts the legal rights that originally belong to shareholders.
2.1 Voting Rights: Idle Circulation and Evaporation
At the foundation of the traditional securities system, the underlying shares of all U.S. stocks are actually registered under the name of DTCC's nominee holder, Cede & Co. Alpaca or Apex, as participants of DTCC, are the holders at the level of beneficial ownership. This means that corporate actions such as shareholder meeting notices and voting instructions, at the end of the traditional clearing network, are only delivered to licensed brokers like Alpaca.
When the architecture stretches to five layers, the chain of rights transmission breaks down here directly. As a standard broker, Alpaca's legal obligations and system interfaces only connect to its direct clients — namely token issuers such as Backed Finance or Ondo. Alpaca has no legal obligation to develop a complex voting rights pass-through system for these crypto entities.
Meanwhile, the issuer layer faces a similar systemic vacuum in both technology and compliance: they have never established the infrastructure needed to map the daily voting decisions of potentially thousands of underlying stocks onto on-chain token holders in real time and securely. The result is that voting rights stop transmitting at the bridge broker layer, and at the issuer layer, they completely idle and evaporate.
2.2 Dividend Redistribution and Contractualization
Unlike the outright extinction of voting rights, dividends — the most attractive economic benefit — evolve into an indirect, repackaged distribution mechanism within the complex five-layer architecture.
When Apple or NVIDIA pays a cash dividend, the U.S. dollars first flow into Alpaca's account. After deducting applicable taxes, Alpaca remits the funds to the nominal account holder — the token issuer. From this moment onward, the funds exit the jurisdiction of securities law and become the issuer's corporate assets. Whether on-chain token holders receive the money, and in what form, depends entirely on the contractual agreements and operational procedures that the issuer has signed in its offshore jurisdiction.
In practice, to avoid the complex cross-border clearing and securities regulatory risks associated with directly distributing U.S. dollars, mainstream projects such as xStocks and Ondo commonly adopt an "automatic reinvestment" mechanism. After receiving cash dividends off-chain, they automatically reinvest the proceeds in the secondary market to purchase more underlying shares, and then reflect this return non-intuitively in the user's token balance or token NAV price by adjusting the on-chain smart contract multiplier or the net asset value (NAV) price of the token.
Currently in the market, only a very small number of platforms, such as Bitget Reality, attempt to directly distribute dividends on-chain in the form of USDT. However, neither of these models constitutes the shareholder dividend granted to you by securities law in essence. Rather, they represent a contractual claim between you and the offshore token issuer — one that depends on whether the issuer's technical nodes function properly.
2.3 SIPC Protection Failure
Within the five-layer architecture, the most fatal risk lies in the legal vacuum that emerges during extreme events. In the traditional U.S. securities market, the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) provides a bankruptcy protection net of up to $500,000 for broker customers — this is the cornerstone of trust that gives retail investors the confidence to entrust their assets to emerging brokerages.
However, under the tokenized model, Alpaca's direct client on its books is a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) registered in the Cayman Islands or Seychelles — such as those of Backed, Ondo, or Bitget — not each individual user on the chain. This means that SIPC's protection net can at most extend only to the "token issuer" layer.
If Alpaca itself faces a liquidation crisis, the issuer might be able to file a claim with SIPC as a client. But if the token issuer itself goes bankrupt, absconds, or suffers a hacker attack, the protective umbrella of traditional securities law completely collapses. Under current bankruptcy and securities law frameworks, there is no clear legal precedent supporting the "pass-through" of SIPC protection to an on-chain terminal holder who holds a Solana SPL token on one hand but has zero record in the securities system on the other.
This harsh legal reality is candidly disclosed in the official compliance documents of major issuers. Ondo Finance's legal terms state explicitly: the token provides economic exposure to the performance of the underlying asset, and holders do not have the right to hold or receive the underlying asset.
This clearly defines the ultimate physical reality of on-chain U.S. stocks: You are not the owner of the stock. You are merely the holder of a digital IOU issued by some offshore entity that tracks the price of U.S. stocks.
2.4 Potential Risks Under SEC Compliance Regulation
Under the five-layer architecture of nested intermediaries, the outbreak of risk does not follow the compensation path of traditional securities law. Instead, it is directly subject to the compliance game between offshore Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) and upstream clearing brokers. When regulators such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) conduct look-through enforcement against cross-border tokenized securities, the potential default and risk transmission pathways typically manifest in three distinct stages:
First, upstream licensed self-clearing brokers, in order to mitigate compliance reputational risk, will usually choose to cut off the API routing to offshore SPVs. Since the offshore issuer loses its actual off-chain clearing and settlement channel, its on-chain smart contracts will be forced to suspend all minting and redemption functions.
Second, because on-chain anonymous addresses lack compliant entitlement records in the traditional securities settlement system (DTCC), SIPC's bankruptcy protection umbrella stops entirely at the issuer entity and cannot penetrate downward to exempt terminal holders. Once the issuer goes bankrupt, tokens held by users face default risk with no recourse to recover the underlying assets.
Faced with this legal fault line, the current on-chain tokenized U.S. stock spot path is gradually evolving toward contractual trustification. Platforms represented by Ondo Finance are progressively moving away from the primitive form of pure SPV mapping and embracing a more structurally rigorous off-chain compliant trust fund architecture. Through contractual monetization, they legalize dividend distribution and liquidation rights. This design, while unable to bypass regulatory friction, preserves to the greatest extent possible the legal creditor status of holders in traditional financial courts — making it the best available solution for this model to counter the legal vacuum.
Chapter 3: Supply-Side Scarcity — Alpaca's Single-Point Monopoly and Liquidity Fault Lines
If we were to dissect the pipelines of all tokenized U.S. stocks and traditional API trading products within the current five-layer architecture, we would uncover a startling fact: nearly the entire crypto industry's underground network connecting to U.S. equities converges, at its most critical execution and custody layer, on a single point — Alpaca.
Whether it's on-chain RWA-focused protocols like Ondo Finance and Backed (xStocks), exchange-backed platforms like Bitget Reality, or even Binance's traditional U.S. stock trading launched in June, the underlying asset purchasing, clearing, and securities custody are all independently carried out by Alpaca without exception. According to incomplete statistics, Alpaca effectively monopolizes over 94% of the clearing and custody market share for tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs currently available.
3.1 Why Alpaca: Self-Clearing Qualifications and Traditional Brokers' "Risk Aversion"
This highly concentrated single-point monopoly is not due to Alpaca offering some irreplaceable cutting-edge Web3 technology, but rather stems from the extreme scarcity of traditional financial supply and the inherent compliance divide.
Within the U.S. securities system, brokers are subject to a strict hierarchy. One category consists of the large number of Introducing Brokers, which only have order-taking capabilities and must outsource clearing, settlement, and custody to third parties. The other category comprises the very few Self-Clearing Brokers. Alpaca belongs to the latter. It is a formal member of DTCC, OCC, and FICC, capable of independently completing the entire chain from order execution to final asset registration. For crypto asset issuers, integrating with Alpaca means they do not need to separately coordinate with cumbersome execution, clearing, and custody institutions — one broker handles all the dirty work of traditional securities.
An even stronger moat comes from the "risk aversion" of traditional licensed institutions. Giants like Interactive Brokers, with hundreds of billions in market capitalization, have immense reputational costs and are unwilling to risk regulatory backlash by cooperating with crypto exchanges registered in offshore tax havens for a small API access fee. Meanwhile, vertical leaders like DriveWealth are already earning substantial profits from Web2 traffic pools (e.g., Revolut, Cash App) and similarly lack the incentive to venture into cross-border risks.
For a long time, the only licensed broker willing to serve crypto tokenization companies while possessing self-clearing capabilities and an open API architecture was virtually Alpaca alone. For token issuers, Alpaca not only provides the trade execution, clearing, and custody capabilities required of traditional brokers, but also reduces the conversion cost between securities assets and on-chain tokens through standardized APIs and the Instant Tokenization Network (ITN).
3.2 The Illusion of Efficiency: On-Chain Real-Time Minting vs. Off-Chain T+1 — "Asymmetric Time-Lag Risk"
To solidify its infrastructure position, Alpaca launched the Instant Tokenization Network (ITN) in 2025. This system does not directly handle token issuance; instead, it standardizes processes such as inventory verification, asset journaling, minting notifications, and redemption settlement within the traditional securities world, automating connections to token issuers via APIs.
Under the traditional model, from stock purchase and custody confirmation to token minting, multiple rounds of manual confirmation between the issuer and the broker were often required. Under the ITN model, Alpaca can verify in real time whether the underlying securities have been deposited and automatically send minting or redemption instructions to the issuer, compressing a process that previously took hours or even days to near-real-time.
But this precisely creates a huge illusion of efficiency: ITN shortens the "information synchronization time between securities and tokens," but does not change the settlement cycle of the underlying securities market itself. The upper layer of token minting and on-chain transfer operates 24/7, measured in seconds. Yet the lower layer of underlying securities settlement remains locked within the T+1 (or even future same-day settlement) clearing clock of the traditional financial system.
This mismatch in settlement timing — "fast on top, slow on bottom" — is masked during stable market conditions by liquidity bridging from Alpaca and the issuer. However, during extreme black swan events, it exposes a fatal Liquidity Gap. In actual clearing and trading workflows, the resulting spread and time risks follow a clear path of responsibility and cost transfer.
At the very bottom layer, Alpaca makes an absolute cut in liability: as a licensed clearing broker, its ITN network is only responsible for "second-level inventory verification and instruction issuance," while securities account settlement strictly adheres to traditional T+1 clearing rules. This means that Alpaca bears no legal or financial responsibility for absolute spreads arising from market volatility during traditional market closures or settlement periods.
This time-lag risk then shifts to the issuer layer. Since the underlying securities remain constrained by traditional market trading hours and settlement cycles, issuers typically manage the temporal mismatch between on-chain liquidity and underlying assets by setting subscription/redemption windows, delayed settlement arrangements, and emergency powers to suspend mint/redeem operations. For example, xStocks restricts primary market subscriptions and redemptions to specific market hours, while some issuers explicitly reserve the right in legal documents to delay, suspend, or even cancel subscription/redemption transactions under abnormal market conditions.
Issuers insulate themselves from risk through delayed settlement and the ability to shut the gates at any time. The resulting liquidity pressure is then passed directly to the front-end market makers. To maintain 24/7 on-chain quotes while the underlying clearing network is closed, market makers typically convert this time-lag risk into liquidity costs by widening bid-ask spreads, reducing quote depth, limiting inventory exposure, or hedging using related markets.
Ultimately, this interlocking chain reaches its logical endpoint: Alpaca provides the tools but bears no risk; issuers set the rules for emergency; market makers hedge the time lag by widening spreads; and all the everyday implicit friction costs, along with the liquidity gap when channels close during black swan events, are ultimately borne in full by on-chain trading users and end holders.
Therefore, what ITN creates is not true instant settlement, but rather instant liquidity built on top of the traditional securities clearing system. When markets are operating smoothly, the two are nearly indistinguishable. But under extreme market conditions, liquidity can vanish in an instant, while the settlement cycle always remains.
3.3 Liability Segmentation: A Compliance Safe Harbor Under Precise Calculation
Faced with such structural vulnerabilities, Alpaca's management has demonstrated extremely compliance calculus. After completing a 150million Series D financing round in early 2026 (valuing the company at 1.15 billion, with investors including Citadel Securities, Kraken, and BNP Paribas), the capital market priced its current irreplaceable bottleneck position. Yet its compliance logic has always followed a single principle: strict liability segmentation.
Alpaca's compliance approach is not simply to distance itself from the on-chain world, but rather to participate in the tokenization process while strictly avoiding becoming a token issuer.
Through ITN, Alpaca is deeply involved in key steps of the securities on-chain process, including inventory verification, asset journaling, minting notifications, and redemption settlement. However, in terms of legal structure design, it consistently leaves the issuance, destruction, holder management, and on-chain compliance obligations to issuers like Backed and Ondo to bear on their own.
Alpaca's scope of responsibility typically stops at the securities account system. It is responsible for confirming whether the underlying securities exist, whether they have been transferred, and whether minting conditions are met. But who ultimately holds the tokens, which chain they circulate on, whether they are used in DeFi protocols or cross-chain bridges, and whether on-chain participants meet relevant regulatory requirements — these matters are typically left to the issuers and their partners.
ITN Mint process
The entire current model is built upon a finely layered division of responsibilities: Alpaca provides the securities infrastructure, issuers provide the tokenization structure, and exchanges provide the distribution channels. As long as regulators continue to recognize this division of duties, each party can operate within relatively clear boundaries. However, if the SEC were to determine in the future that certain on-chain activities within the securities tokenization process fall under the regulatory purview of brokers or clearing agencies, then Alpaca's current risk isolation zone would face reexamination.
In this sense, Alpaca's competitive advantage derives both from the existence of regulatory boundaries and from the continued persistence of those boundaries.
Chapter 4: On-Chain Landscape — The Real Trading Demand for Tokenized U.S. Stocks
As of June 2026, the overall scale of trading U.S. stocks through the crypto ecosystem remains at an early stage. Among this, the total Open Interest (OI) for U.S. stock perpetual contracts, dominated by Hyperliquid, stands at approximately 2.25B (TigerResearch,2026Q1); the publicly observable TVL of Tokenized U.S.Stocks (RWA.xyz)sits around 1.5B, exhibiting a highly concentrated distribution. Additionally, since May-June 2026, the traditional API routing model driven by Alpaca has been intensively rolled out on major CEXs. Binance launched trading for 7,000+ U.S. stocks along with its bStocks tokenized products, accumulating cumulative trading volume in the hundreds of millions of dollars within a short period. However, the corresponding position sizes and TVL remain relatively limited. Taken together, the total exposure developed by the entire industry over several years is still less than the single-day trading volume of a single leading large-cap stock on the Nasdaq.
4.1 Scale and Structure of On-Chain U.S. Stocks
According to data from RWA.xyz, as of June 23, 2026, the total market cap of on-chain tokenized U.S. stocks stood at 1.56B. Looking at the growth trajectory, the entire sector has experienced rapid expansion, with trading volume and TVL surging driven by hot stocks. From below 100M in August 2025 to the current level, asset size has expanded approximately 15x in just 10 months.
From a time-series perspective, on-chain tokenized U.S. stocks have exhibited phased capital competition. According to RWA.xyz data, the total on-chain spot TVL peaked at 1.6B in late May 2026, before rapidly declining by 250M in early June. This outflow window closely coincided with the intensive rollout of "traditional API U.S. stock products" by major CEXs such as Binance and Gate, confirming an initial substitution effect — some retail investors seeking true ownership and SIPC legal protection chose to defensively migrate their large-cap stock positions to off-chain real securities accounts. However, following Binance's official launch of bStocks on June 11, 2026, total trading volume reached 91.5M (as of June 24, 2026, calculated by summing Binance bStocks official data). The total on−chain tokenized U.S.stock market cap has now recovered to1.56B.
4.2 Tokenized US Stocks as DeFi Collateral: Early Exploration of Lending Functionality
The true potential of on-chain tokenized U.S. stocks extends far beyond trading itself — it lies in whether they can serve as programmable assets within DeFi. On June 20, 2026, Venus Protocol officially included Binance-issued bStocks (TSLAB, NVDAB, SPCXB, etc.) as supported collateral in the BNB Chain Core Pool, with Collateral Factors set at approximately 60%, 60%, and 50% respectively. This marks the first deep integration of tokenized U.S. stocks issued by mainstream CEXs with a major lending protocol on BNB Chain, allowing users to supply bStocks as collateral and obtain liquidity while retaining their stock price exposure.
Although this step remains in the early validation stage, its significance lies in opening a door. Over the past few years, the crypto-native market has developed a mature suite of DeFi products around BTC, ETH, and mainstream altcoins — including high-utilization staking lending pools, automated strategy vaults, and spot-based options products. Now, with the emergence of genuinely pegged tokenized U.S. stocks, these proven mechanisms are naturally extending toward equity assets.
For instance, staking lending pools can use tokenized U.S. stocks as primary collateral, allowing users to borrow stablecoins for other strategies without selling their holdings. Strategy vaults could package multiple tokenized tech stocks and employ algorithms for automatic rebalancing, leverage, or hedging, generating products with varying risk-return profiles. Meanwhile, innovations such as option vaults and on-chain stock ETF-like structures may enable investors to trade "stock baskets" directly on-chain or obtain structured yields. If these products materialize for tokenized U.S. stocks, they will likely not simply replicate crypto-native versions, but instead evolve into new forms more closely aligned with equity asset characteristics — incorporating stock dividend mechanisms, earnings event pricing, and traditional market volatility patterns.
From this perspective, the true value of tokenized U.S. stock lending lies in unlocking DeFi's composability space for RWAs, transforming isolated stock exposure into a productive tool that can interact with other crypto assets. Of course, these remain in the conceptual and early experimental stage at present, with practical implementation still facing multiple challenges such as oracles, volatility matching, and liquidation safety. However, if protocols like Venus can successfully transition from Supply to substantive lending, and attract more developers to build upper-layer applications, such innovations could become a critical step in the evolution of tokenized U.S. stocks from "trading substitutes" to "financial infrastructure."
Chapter 5: DTCC Tokenization Service — A Disruptive Strike from the Infrastructure Layer
So far, we have witnessed a multi-layered yet fragmented market: CEXs rapidly roll out various U.S. stock products (including bStocks) via APIs from Alpaca and others, providing non-U.S. users with much-needed 24/7 exposure and leverage channels; the DeFi side experiments with using tokenized stocks as collateral to improve capital efficiency. However, these innovations remain essentially at the "wrapper" stage — weak regulatory protection, fragmented true ownership, liquidity heavily dependent on incentives, and overall scale remaining relatively niche, far below the single-day trading volume of traditional markets.
The current boom in tokenized U.S. stocks is, in essence, a spontaneous filling of the structural imbalance in global capital allocation by the crypto ecosystem. Emerging market and crypto-native users face domestic currency depreciation pressure, capital controls, and cross-border investment frictions. What they truly need is not merely price exposure to U.S. stocks, but an efficient channel for dollar asset anchoring and wealth preservation. CEXs and tokenized products compress the three steps of "currency exchange — investing — self-custody" into a single account, significantly reducing behavioral friction and cognitive costs. As a result, users are willing to bear wrapper credit risk and regulatory gray areas in exchange. However, this model struggles to resolve fundamental structural contradictions: the disconnect between true ownership and economic exposure, the mismatch between off-hour pricing and traditional clearing and settlement networks, and the fragility stemming from the absence of a centralized risk absorption mechanism. This also directly explains why synthetic perpetual contract trading volume explodes far more easily — perps completely abandon the collateral requirement of "real assets," engaging solely in price speculation, achieving higher capital efficiency and continuity; whereas real spot tokenized stocks must constantly struggle to balance "on-chain convenience" with "traditional underlying anchoring," resulting in persistently limited liquidity depth and user trust — appearing lively but lacking substance.
The true inflection point is likely to arrive in the second half of 2026 — DTCC plans to launch a tokenized securities pilot in July, with formal service rollout in October. This service targets Russell 1000 constituents, major ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries, with participation from over 50 institutions including BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Nasdaq. The core concept is to achieve tokenization within DTC's existing custody framework, granting tokenized versions the same legal rights, investor protections, and settlement mechanisms as traditional securities.
If the DTCC pilot succeeds and gradually expands, it will inject traditional market-level trust anchors and liquidity connectivity into tokenized U.S. stocks. At that point, CEX/Alpaca-style wrapper products may face clearer stratification: some will continue serving crypto-native and global retail users (emphasizing 24/7 and DeFi composability), while institutional and large-scale capital will increasingly migrate toward DTCC-backed compliant pathways. This is not about crypto "winning" or TradFi "co-opting," but rather the gradual convergence and long-term coexistence of two systems — crypto channels cannot quickly attain traditional-level investor protection and systemic risk buffers, while traditional infrastructure also needs to leverage crypto technology to achieve greater global accessibility and efficiency gains. Until then, the current wave of tokenized U.S. stocks remains in a phase of validation and boundary exploration. Its growth potential is real, but to evolve from a "niche supplement" into true mainstream infrastructure, it requires the landing of DTCC-level clearing and settlement layers, as well as further regulatory clarity on "economic exposure vs. true ownership." Only when the core infrastructure of traditional markets begins systematically embracing tokenization will this wave truly transition from a "crypto experiment" to a "digital evolution of capital markets."