Q3 2026

Deconstructing the Tokenised Stock Phenomenon

Tokenised stocks bring shares, or financial instruments linked to them, onto a blockchain, where they can sit in crypto wallets and be made available to trading and lending applications. The underlying assets are familiar, but the way investors access and use them can be different, and over the course of 2026, that difference has become the more interesting part of the story.

The market has grown considerably this year with trading volumes rising, more platforms distributing stock tokens and liquidity deepening. Yet the change worth examining is more the character of that growth than its scale. Equity tokens are increasingly being held as trading inventory, posted as collateral and used to price other assets, rather than just being bought and held for their own returns. Binance Research captures this through what it terms a capital activation rate, the proportion of tokenised equity actually deployed onchain rather than sitting idle, which rose from 1.95% to 7.54% across 2026. Whether that shift proves durable, what investors actually own when they hold these products, and how the new regulatory framework will shape the next phase are the questions that follow.

An Old Idea Finally Sticks

Tokenised stocks are not a new invention. Binance offered stock tokens before discontinuing them in 2021, and Mirror Protocol tracked stock prices using crypto collateral rather than holdings of the corresponding shares. Those experiments showed that equity exposure could circulate in crypto markets, though their structures differed considerably from today’s share-backed products.

The newer wave uses securities held in custody to back transferable tokens, and composability was part of the design from the outset rather than something added later. When Kraken launched xStocks on June 30, 2025, eligible customers could already withdraw them to Solana wallets and use them in decentralised finance, so trading outside a conventional brokerage account and posting tokens as collateral were available well before the latest surge in activity.

Adoption preceded that surge as well. By February 19, 2026, Kraken reported more than 80,000 unique onchain xStocks holders and approximately $225 million in assets, while at the market level RWA.xyz data cited by a16z puts tokenised stocks and related equity products at roughly $329 million in June 2025 and $1.7 billion a year later. That fivefold expansion preceded Robinhood Chain’s July 2026 mainnet launch, and the same analysis found that more than half of the June 2026 market value sat in assets which had not been onchain twelve months earlier, suggesting the growth involved considerably more than just appreciation in existing holdings.

Turnover Rises

Blockworks’ tracked tokenised-equity spot markets processed approximately $3.72 billion in June 2026, $14.14 billion in July and $12.62 billion in August. August turnover remained more than three times June’s level, although it had declined from July’s peak. These figures measure trading on decentralised exchanges, not new investment or trading in the underlying shares. 

Weekly trading volume across tracked tokenised-equity products. Source: Blockworks.

The chart shows activity increasing before July, with xStocks and Backpack prominent in June. Binance-linked bStocks then dominate the late-July spike, while Robinhood tokens contribute substantially to September’s renewed activity. The changing composition matters: this was an expansion involving several providers, rather than a market created by one platform’s launch.

Part of the appeal is distribution. Stock tokens offered through established crypto platforms can reach users who already hold digital assets and are familiar with trading them. Where available, equity exposure can sit alongside stablecoins and other crypto holdings rather than requiring a separate investment workflow. However, availability remains subject to geography, platform eligibility, and the particular product’s restrictions. 

Some turnover was also encouraged by rewards and inexpensive trading. Blockworks’ research links the bStocks surge to Binance Alpha incentives and near-zero fees. High volume demonstrates that these products can attract activity, but does not establish that the same demand will persist without incentives. 

Participation Rises Too

Trading volume alone cannot separate a large market from a smaller one changing hands quickly, though holder and address counts offer a partial check. RWA.xyz recorded 538,740 holders of tokenised stocks on July 20, 2026, alongside approximately 120,000 monthly active addresses and $1.85 billion in distributed value. By late September, those figures had risen to roughly 4 million holders and about 3.24 million monthly active addresses, while distributed value increased by around 70%. Participation therefore grew considerably faster than the assets themselves, which suggests the third quarter brought new users rather than simply more activity from existing ones.

Asset Holders for Tokenised Stock grouped by Network. Source: RWA.xyz.

Where that participation came from is worth noting, because it was not principally new supply. Robinhood Chain launched on July 1 and by early September ranked around sixth among issuers by value, at roughly $91 million across 189 assets in a market then worth about $2.55 billion, with Ondo, bStocks and xStocks remaining the largest issuers. What the newer venue contributed was users, turnover and a set of applications that gave existing tokens additional uses, rather than a material increase in the stock of tokenised equity outstanding.

One qualification applies. RWA.xyz currently shows monthly transfer volume falling sharply over the trailing thirty days even as holder and address counts continue to rise. Participation and turnover are moving in opposite directions, which may indicate a broader base of users forming beneath a receding speculative wave, or may simply reflect recent arrivals who have not yet traded much. Either reading would be premature at this stage.

Transfer Volume for Tokenised Stock grouped by Network. Source: RWA.xyz.

What Investors Actually Own

Stock-backed tokens do not necessarily turn their holders into shareholders. Several popular products give investors a separate financial instrument linked to shares held in custody. The token may follow a stock’s price and provide dividend-linked benefits without carrying the same ownership or voting rights as the stock.

Robinhood’s tokens, for example, are debt securities providing economic exposure without legal or beneficial rights in the underlying shares. Binance’s bStocks similarly distinguish tokenised price exposure from ordinary shareholder ownership, with voting rights currently unsupported. Backing and shareholder rights are separate questions.

Other rarer arrangements can preserve actual share ownership. Exodus’s Class A common stock, for example, was digitally represented on Algorand following its 2021 capital raise. The important distinction is the product’s legal structure, not the blockchain on which it exists.

Investors also need to understand who holds the backing assets and what their claim would be if the token issuer or an intermediary failed. Moving a financial instrument into a personal wallet does not remove its dependence on off-chain custody and legal arrangements. SEC staff have specifically highlighted these differences and the additional third-party risks some structures introduce. 

Liquidity Catches Up

Trading volume measures how often assets change hands. Liquidity concerns the assets available to support those trades. A market can report impressive turnover while still offering limited depth for investors who want to buy or sell larger positions.

The value of equity tokens supplied to decentralised-exchange liquidity pools. Source: Blockworks.

The chart shows pool balances rising from roughly $20 million at the start of June to a peak of $156 million in September. Much of the recent increase comes from Robinhood tokens, with up to $80 million worth of liquidity being provided by them at the peak. Liquidity has continued to expand even as weekly trading volumes have fluctuated.

That is encouraging, but the distribution matters as much as the total. A large pool of liquidity concentrated in a few issuers or popular stocks does not guarantee competitive prices across the entire market. For tokenised stocks to become useful beyond small trades, liquidity needs to remain available across more products and through quieter periods.

More Than Just Buy and Hold

Transferable stock tokens can serve as collateral, enter lending applications, or become one side of a trading pair. Where supported, an investor could retain equity exposure while borrowing stablecoins against it, rather than selling the position to obtain funds. These uses extend the token’s purpose beyond holding an investment in a wallet. 

One example is the pairing of memecoins with stock tokens. Instead of trading a meme against a dollar-linked stablecoin, users can trade it against tokenised equity exposure. Stock tokens become assets used to trade other crypto assets, rather than only products bought for their own returns. There is a commercial logic behind the pairing that helps explain why it persisted rather than passing within a few weeks. Memecoin trading fees ordinarily accumulate in a token that few participants wish to hold, whereas if the quote asset is an equity wrapper, those fees accrue in the stock token, an instrument with a clearer use, and several projects have directed them into treasuries that accumulate equity exposure as trading continues. Independent teams across separate networks arrived at variations of this design within a short period, which suggests the structure reflects a genuine incentive rather than one project’s novelty.

Weekly trading split between dollar-paired, memecoin-paired and equity-equity markets. Source: Blockworks.

The yellow segment becomes much more significant during September, showing that memecoin pairings contributed meaningfully to net activity. USD-paired markets nevertheless account for most of the trading shown. Such applications could create additional demand for stock tokens. If sustained demand requires new share-backed tokens to be issued, providers may need to acquire additional underlying shares. However, secondary token trading does not automatically trigger stock purchases, and high turnover in these pairs does not necessarily lead to a material impact on listed stock prices. 

There are also limits to the promise of round-the-clock access. Tokens can continue trading while the underlying stock exchange is closed, but issuance and redemption may operate within narrower windows. That mismatch can make it harder to keep token prices aligned with their reference assets. More flexible trading hours do not eliminate the constraints of the market supplying the backing. In one case, weekend trading of a memecoin-stock token pair (BONER/HIMS) inflated the price of the tokenised stock to ~4.6x the Friday closing price for the stock, only for the stock token’s price to fall back to normal levels once markets opened. This was because the proportion of stock tokenised was less than 0.1% of the total supply.

A Regulatory Opening

On September 17, 2026, the US Securities and Exchange Commission issued an “innovation exemption” providing conditional relief for certain blockchain-based stock-trading venues and liquidity providers, opening a route for permissioned trading through automated liquidity pools subject to safeguards. The relief lasts five years from publication and limits both listings and trading volumes, while existing securities-offering requirements continue to apply. Crucially, eligible tokens must preserve the rights of equivalent ordinary shares, including dividends and voting, and separate securities providing merely synthetic exposure to another security are excluded.

The practical effect of that exclusion is considerable, since as presently structured the largest issuers by value would not qualify. Ondo, bStocks and xStocks each provide economic exposure without conferring shareholder rights, which is precisely the arrangement the framework sets aside, so the products responsible for much of this year’s growth sit outside the route it creates.

Some adjustment has already begun. On September 14, three days before publication, Robinhood said that in-kind redemption and voting were coming for its Stock Tokens, describing one-for-one share redemption and voting for eligible holders as being on its roadmap, though no timeline was given. Whether other issuers follow will indicate how far the framework shapes product design before any venue actually operates under it. What the exemption offers is a different kind of legitimacy from commercial traction: a defined basis on which specified products and venues can operate, rather than validation by popularity.

Supporting infrastructure has begun forming around the same question. On the day the exemption was published, S&P Global announced an agreement to acquire smart contract security firm OpenZeppelin and place it under S&P Global Ratings, with the stated aim of assessing onchain technology risk alongside conventional creditworthiness. Since the exemption requires venues to operate auditable contracts on a public ledger, institutions capable of assessing that code are a precondition for tokenised securities being held at scale, whatever the rules permit.

Future Outlook

Forecasts for the next five years diverge widely. Binance Research puts tokenised equities at $61 billion in its conservative case for 2030, $349 billion in its base case and $987 billion in its bull case, the last of which would still represent under one percent of global public equity market value. Citi’s Tokenization 2030 report reaches a figure roughly seven times larger for the same asset class, estimating around $2.6 trillion of tokenised public equities on the assumptions that three percent of the US stock market is tokenised and that a tenth of US retail investors have moved to onchain platforms by then. Both are built from adoption assumptions rather than observed trends, and the distance between them is a fair measure of how much is yet to be determined.

As regulated US offerings are developed, the market’s shape will be influenced by how shareholder rights and redemption are implemented, and how easily eligible products can move between brokerage accounts, wallets and onchain applications. An interconnected market could emerge, or access could remain divided among separate offerings with different restrictions. The significance of this year’s activity is that equity exposure is acquiring functions beyond an investment held for its return. Memecoin pairings are just one example, but the broader shift concerns the relationship between stock markets and crypto’s financial machinery. The next phase will establish the terms of that relationship: who can participate, which use cases are supported, and where responsibility sits when something goes wrong.

Sources

• a16z crypto, 3 Charts on the Tokenized Stocks Boom, on market growth, issuance and transfer activity, July 20, 2026.
• RWA.xyz’s stocks dashboard, for distributed asset value, holder counts, active addresses, and transfer volumes.
• Blockworks’ dashboards for Spot Volume by Token Issuer, Spot DEX Liquidity by Issuer, and Spot DEX Volume by Category.
• Blockworks Research’s report on tokenised-equity market growth, 
• Robinhood, Invest with Stock Tokens, and Stock Token documentation, on backing, ownership, redemption, and eligibility.
• Product documentation and disclosures from xStocks, Ondo, and Binance bStocks, on economic exposure and shareholder rights.
• DeFiPrime, A Memecoin Cornered a Tokenized Stock, on the HIMS float squeeze and subsequent issuance.
• DeFiPrime, Inside the Stock-Paired Memecoin Boom.
• CryptoSlate, on stock-paired memecoin activity and stock-token price dislocations.
• Adam Tehc’s Robinhood Chain dashboard on Dune, and Anchored, for tracking memecoin–stock-token pools.
• US Securities and Exchange Commission, Innovation Exemption for Tokenized NMS Stock, September 17, 2026.
• CoinDesk, on Robinhood’s announced plans for share redemption and voting rights.
• S&P Global’s agreement to acquire OpenZeppelin.

Project Spotlight

NEAR

Over the past three months, NEAR has continued to gain traction around its broader strategy of becoming infrastructure for cross-chain finance and AI rather than competing solely as a standalone Layer 1. The clearest evidence of this shift has been the growth of NEAR Intents, its cross-chain execution layer, which has now processed more than $30 billion in cumulative volume across 35 chains. NEAR’s revenue dashboard also shows more than $51 million in total fees generated, while capital held in NEAR Intents’ confidential pools reached approximately $183 million as of September 29, up more than 500% over the prior 90 days. These figures are significant because they demonstrate usage occurring beyond applications built natively on NEAR. Rather than requiring users to move onto the NEAR blockchain, Intents allows NEAR infrastructure to sit behind wallets and applications across multiple ecosystems. If this model continues to scale, NEAR can increasingly capture economic activity from the broader multichain ecosystem while distributing fees to solvers, integrations, and the protocol itself.

Privacy has increasingly become part of that cross-chain strategy. Confidential Intents allow transactions to execute through a dedicated NEAR private shard, preventing information such as order size, direction, and timing from being publicly exposed before execution. The architecture is designed to reduce risks such as frontrunning and MEV while also supporting selective disclosure when required. The rapid increase in confidential TVL suggests that privacy is becoming more than an experimental feature within the ecosystem. For NEAR, this creates a potential point of differentiation as onchain markets attract larger traders, enterprises, and institutions that may be unwilling to expose treasury positions or trading strategies on a fully transparent public ledger. It also reinforces NEAR’s positioning around confidentiality across both financial transactions and AI workloads. Furthermore, Near.com has also integrated perpetuals with backend infrastructure powered by Hyperliquid. This will allow greater trading volume flowing through intents.

NEAR also expanded the asset universe accessible through its infrastructure through an integration with Ondo Finance. On September 22, Ondo Stocks went live on near.com and NEAR Intents, initially bringing 20 tokenized U.S. stocks, ETFs, and commodity-linked products to eligible users. Because NEAR Intents functions as the routing layer, these assets can ultimately be distributed across wallets, applications, and more than 30 connected blockchain networks rather than remaining confined to a single chain. The integration is notable because it moves NEAR Intents beyond crypto-to-crypto swaps and toward becoming infrastructure for a broader range of financial assets. As tokenized securities and other real-world assets move onchain, NEAR has an opportunity to position Intents as a distribution and execution layer connecting those assets with users and liquidity across otherwise fragmented blockchain ecosystems.

Institutional accessibility also advanced materially during the period. Bitwise’s NEAR ETF completed important U.S. regulatory and listing milestones in September, with NYSE Arca approving the fund’s listing application and the SEC registration statement becoming effective on September 24. The ETF is designed to hold NEAR directly, with a secondary objective of earning additional NEAR through staking. For the ecosystem, the importance extends beyond providing another vehicle for exposure to the token. An exchange-traded product creates a familiar, regulated access point for investors that may be unable or unwilling to custody crypto assets directly, while the inclusion of staking connects the traditional investment wrapper to the underlying network’s proof-of-stake economics. It represents another step toward NEAR becoming accessible through conventional financial-market infrastructure rather than exclusively through crypto-native venues. Bitwise also released a report with a base case price target of $155. Read more here.

At the same time, NEAR AI has made progress on both distribution and enterprise-grade privacy infrastructure. In August, NEAR AI integrated Intel Trust Authority, allowing confidential AI workloads running in Intel TDX environments to receive independently verified, machine-readable attestations rather than relying solely on NEAR AI to verify its own infrastructure. In September, NEAR AI’s confidential inference became available through privacy-focused AI gateway SayGm, and on September 28 NEAR AI became an inference provider on OpenRouter, initially serving GLM 5.3 Flash. OpenRouter materially expands developer distribution because developers already using the platform can route requests to NEAR AI without establishing a separate integration. Importantly, requests routed through OpenRouter itself do not receive NEAR AI’s end-to-end confidentiality guarantees, while developers requiring verifiable confidential inference can access NEAR AI directly or through compatible confidential infrastructure. Together, these integrations indicate that NEAR AI is moving from building the underlying technology toward putting that infrastructure into existing developer workflows, an important step if confidential AI is to generate meaningful usage.

NEAR AI has also created a more direct connection between the NEAR token and demand for AI compute. On July 30, it introduced staking-based payments that allow users to stake NEAR and receive credits for confidential AI inference or hosting IronClaw agents. Users retain ownership of their underlying NEAR and can unstake it, while the stake or its yield determines the compute credits available to them. This adds a new form of token utility beyond network transaction fees and traditional validator staking: NEAR can function as productive capital that provides access to AI infrastructure. If adoption of NEAR AI grows, the model could more closely connect demand for AI services with demand to hold and stake the token, linking two of the ecosystem’s core strategic pillars—AI and blockchain economics.

Taken together, the recent developments show NEAR increasingly building around a unified thesis: cross-chain execution, confidential infrastructure, AI, and access to a broader range of financial assets can sit on top of the same underlying ecosystem. NEAR Intents provides the transaction and liquidity layer, near.com provides a user-facing distribution surface, Confidential Intents adds privacy, and NEAR AI extends the confidential-computing model into AI inference and autonomous agents. The most important development for the ecosystem is therefore not any single partnership or product launch, but the increasing integration between these components. If NEAR can continue translating this infrastructure into sustained transaction volume, developer usage, fee generation, and token utility, its role could increasingly resemble a cross-chain execution and agent infrastructure layer rather than simply another application blockchain.

Source: https://revenue.near.org/ (Sept 29, 2026)

MARKET NEWS

• The U.S. Federal Reserve’s policy stance turned more hawkish through Q3. It held rates at 3.50%–3.75% in July despite three dissents favoring a hike, before raising the target range by 25 basis points to 3.75%–4.00% in September. Persistent inflation, resilient domestic demand and higher energy prices effectively ended the rate-cut narrative that had shaped the start of the year.
• Long-dated U.S. Treasury yields became a macro story of their own. The 30-year yield reached 5.33% on August 18, its highest level since 2007. The Treasury responded by doubling the size of its buybacks of longer-dated bonds. That did little to bring yields down, but bitcoin rallied sharply because markets read the move as a signal of future liquidity support.
• Crypto markets recovered strongly despite the tighter macro backdrop. Bitcoin was on track for a gain of roughly 44% in Q3, its best quarterly performance since Q4 2024, and Ether posted an even larger gain. In mid-July, U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs were down about $5.8 billion in net flows for the year. By late September, they had turned positive for 2026 after a $2.4 billion week, their largest weekly inflow since October 2025. The swing reinforces how cyclical and macro-sensitive ETF demand has become.
• The CLARITY Act suffered a major setback after advancing in Q2. A September procedural vote to begin Senate consideration failed 49–50, short of the 60 votes required. Disagreements over ethics restrictions, illicit-finance provisions and regulatory authority prevented a compromise, leaving comprehensive U.S. market-structure legislation stalled and increasing the importance of SEC and CFTC rulemaking.
• Implementation of the GENIUS Act continued even as broader market-structure legislation stalled. The Federal Reserve proposed full reserve backing, capital and risk-management requirements for the stablecoin issuers it supervises, alongside a tailored application process for banks seeking to issue payment stablecoins. 
• The SEC moved ahead with its own crypto framework. Its proposed Regulation Crypto Assets would create tailored offering exemptions for certain crypto-related investment contracts and a conditional safe harbor for assets whose issuers have completed their promised managerial work. 
• Stablecoin adoption by payment and banking incumbents accelerated further. Visa introduced an enterprise platform for stablecoin wallets, minting, redemption and movement; Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK; and Citi and Coinbase enabled institutional merchants to accept stablecoins while receiving fiat settlement. 
• Circle launched the public mainnet of Arc, its Layer 1 blockchain for payments, capital markets and agentic economic activity. Arc went live with native USDC integration, more than 100 applications and more than 100 institutional and ecosystem participants. 
• Exchanges and brokerages continued converging around multi-asset, always-on platforms. Robinhood launched its public blockchain mainnet and made stock tokens available through its wallet in more than 120 countries, while Nasdaq agreed to invest $100 million in Kraken parent Payward and deepen their tokenized-equities partnership. The London Stock Exchange also partnered with Payward on tokenized UK shares. The distinction between a crypto exchange, brokerage, and traditional market venue is becoming increasingly blurred.
• Institutional tokenization progressed from pilots toward live market infrastructure. DTCC began limited production transactions involving tokenized equities and Treasuries, with participants including JPMorgan, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. Wells Fargo separately announced tokenized deposits that will allow corporate clients to move and program regulated commercial-bank money around the clock.
• Q3 also produced two major digital-asset security incidents. Bitget reported roughly $387 million in unauthorized transfers from exchange wallets, with the attack suspected of being linked to North Korean actors. Earlier in September, attackers exploited Liquid Network’s transaction-validation software to create unbacked L-BTC and withdraw approximately $320 million in bitcoin. Around 85% of the Liquid funds were later returned, but the incident demonstrated that sidechains and tokenized representations can introduce risks not present in the underlying asset.
• Prediction markets achieved record activity while facing growing legal and conduct risks. World Cup trading helped Kalshi and Polymarket reach approximately $50.6 billion in combined July volume; activity then declined to $45.3 billion in August but remained far above earlier levels. Courts reached conflicting conclusions over whether state gambling laws apply; the Ninth Circuit allowed Nevada to restrict Kalshi, and the CFTC brought an insider-trading case involving event contracts. The category is scaling faster than its legal boundaries are being resolved.

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Warm Regards,

Woodstock Team

Disclaimer and Risk warning:
Every financial product, asset class, or investment has a risk. Investments in digital assets, cryptocurrencies, and related markets are no different and involve a high degree of risk, including the complete loss of capital. Market prices for these assets are highly volatile and can be impacted by regulatory, technological, economic, and geopolitical factors outside of the Fund’s control. Investors should be prepared for material fluctuations in the value of their investments.

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