Shares of SpaceX were available for purchase weeks before the company went public—not on Nasdaq, but on crypto exchanges as tokens that the aerospace company neither issued nor approved. Demand for "Elon Musk's papers" far exceeded supply, largely driven by those who previously traded only cryptocurrencies.
Then things took a turn. In just three trading sessions, SpaceX's market value plummeted by $600 billion—almost half of Bitcoin's market capitalization. During the same period, the flagship of the crypto industry lost about 6%—notable, but nowhere near the scale of SpaceX's collapse.
The expensive bet on Musk's AI ambitions let investors down. However, what's intriguing is that tokenized stocks now coexist with digital assets, gradually siphoning off their liquidity.
While altcoins struggle and tens of billions exit decentralized finance protocols, the tokenized stock segment has grown from $20 million to $1.4 billion in just a year and a half.
Let's explore who is capturing this new territory, why it attracts capital, and what remains for those losing in this race.
Stocks, but Not Quite
A tokenized stock is a digital copy of a security like AAPL or TSLA, issued on a distributed ledger. The underlying scheme is simple: a regulated custodian holds the actual asset, the issuer releases tokens in a 1:1 ratio, and an oracle synchronizes their price with the market quotation.
The result is a tool that trades 24/7, can be fractionally owned for less than $1, and is accessible from almost any continent. This is a specific instance of a broader trend of tokenized real-world assets, which also includes bonds, real estate, and gold.
There are two formats. The spot format consists of backed tokens: xStocks from Backed Finance, Ondo products, and bStocks on Binance. The derivative format involves perpetual contracts, with Hyperliquid being the main platform, utilizing the HIP-3 mechanism that allows for futures markets on nearly any asset starting in October 2025. The commonality is that neither format grants the holder co-ownership of the company.
According to xStocks documentation from Kraken, investors receive no voting rights, legal rights to the stock itself, or access to information from the issuer. Dividends are not paid in cash; instead, their economic effect is reflected through a recalculation of token balances.
Bybit explicitly states in its user agreement that xStocks owners "do not have direct legal or beneficial ownership rights" to the underlying shares. In other words, this is price exposure, not a stake in the business.
But there's a more interesting nuance. The companies whose stocks are "turned into" tokens often have no involvement in the process. The issuer of xStocks is Backed Assets (JE) Limited, a private entity registered in Jersey, while the actual shares are held by the American broker Alpaca Securities. SpaceX, Tesla, or Apple did not issue these tokens, did not receive money from them, and are formally unaware of their existence.
A telling episode occurred back in 2025. When Robinhood announced tokens tied to OpenAI and SpaceX shares, Sam Altman's company publicly distanced itself from the initiative. Price exposure does not equate to issuer approval, and for a segment vying for institutional investor trust, this distinction is crucial.
Source: xStocks documentation, Kraken.Numbers That Surprised the Market
Just a year and a half ago, the tokenized stock segment was statistically insignificant. In December 2024, its market capitalization was under $20 million—comprising a few thousand enthusiasts trading "wrapped" Tesla and Apple shares.
By early July 2026, the picture had changed. According to RWA.xyz data, the total value of tokenized stocks surpassed $1.4 billion, and the number of holders exceeded 390,000—a one-third increase in just the last month. The volume of transfers during the same period reached $8.7 billion, doubling in thirty days.
The derivative segment is growing even faster. The total open interest for HIP-3 contracts on Hyperliquid reached $1.43 billion by mid-March 2026—more than a hundredfold increase since its launch six months prior. On certain days, the daily turnover of user markets on the platform exceeded $5 billion.
However, the dynamics are uneven: the segment's capitalization dropped in June amid a general market pullback following SpaceX's historic IPO, yet the number of active addresses increased. This indicates that the average investment per investor has decreased, while the user base has expanded—more and more people are entering tools that barely registered a year ago.
Source: RWA.xyz.Wall Street is Betting Trillions
Predictions from major players align with these developments. Citi's report, Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain, forecasts the total market for tokenized assets to grow from the current $17 billion to $5.5 trillion by 2030 in a baseline scenario; in an optimistic scenario, it could reach $8.2 trillion.
For tokenized stocks alone, the bank anticipates a demand of $2.6 trillion—an achievable figure if by 2030, at least one in ten retail investors in the U.S. transition to blockchain platforms.
Standard Chartered even predicts $30.1 trillion by 2030. Source: a16z crypto.These figures are impressive, but it's essential to keep the scale in mind. Even the upper limit of $8.2 trillion represents about 2% of global financial assets. Today's tokenized stock segment is mere statistical dust in this context.
A similar situation was seen in 2020 with stablecoins, which have since grown into hundreds of billions of dollars and become the settlement foundation for the entire industry.
Who Dominates the Market
In most segments, Ethereum is the undisputed leader in RWA—institutional funds like BlackRock BUIDL are based on it, and it holds the lion's share of tokenized bonds.
Market shares of various networks in the tokenized asset segment. Source: RWA.In the stock niche, the picture is quite different. According to CoinDesk data (citing RWA.xyz), Solana accounted for over 80% of the global turnover of tokenized stocks in the week ending June 26. Trading volume reached $2.5 billion, ten times higher than a month earlier.
Trading volume dynamics for tokenized stocks in June 2026. Source: RWA.The dominance of the "people's cryptocurrency" network in trading volumes is attributed not to architectural advantages, but to low fees and deep liquidity.
Issuers and Platforms
The balance of power among issuers has shifted over the past six months. Initially, the tandem of Kraken and Backed Finance with their xStocks dominated; by February 2026, the product surpassed $25 billion in total turnover and had over 80,000 holders. However, Ondo Global Markets has emerged as the leader in capitalization: its platform was the first among tokenized issuers to reach the milestone of $1 billion in locked funds, surpassing xStocks in the volume of issued assets.
The derivatives front is held by Hyperliquid, where trade.xyz contracts account for most of the open interest. Coinbase and Galaxy Digital have issued their own tokenized stocks, Robinhood operates in Europe, and Backpack, Bitget, and Phemex are entering the retail market.
The segment is no longer the domain of a single player—over the past year and a half, it has grown to include a dozen competing platforms.
Binance Promotes Its Standard
A separate story is bStocks from Binance, introduced in June 2026. These are tokenized securities on the BNB Chain, issued by an entity affiliated with the exchange, BTech Holdings. Each token is backed by a real share in a 1:1 ratio, held by a regulated custodian, and corporate actions like dividends and splits are processed automatically through the Multiplier mechanism.
SpaceX as a Stress Test
If tokenized stocks needed a maturity exam, SpaceX provided it. The largest IPO in history served as both a showcase of opportunities and a catalog of problems for the segment.
The demand for the offering was phenomenal: retail applications exceeded $100 billion, while the company allocated only about 20% of the offering to private investors. Crypto exchanges tried to capitalize on the excitement with their tokenized products, and initially, demand for them was impressive.
Binance Wallet alone attracted $557 million in USDC from 27,689 wallets. Bybit, Bitget, and MEXC launched similar campaigns. In total, over $1 billion in applications flowed through tokenized subscriptions—users hoped to gain exposure to Musk's shares through familiar crypto platforms.
When Blockchain Works, but Shares Don't
Then it became clear that blockchain was not the weak link in this chain. When underwriters distributed shares, it turned out that xStocks— the sole supplier for all four platforms—could not obtain real shares amid a fourfold oversubscription. The campaigns were canceled, and funds were returned. Binance compensated participants for the cancellation by distributing $1 million in SPCXB—its own bStocks token, launched on the same day on the BNB Chain.
The problem turned out to be structural. Exchanges lacked direct access to IPO underwriters, so they relied on xStocks as a link between the client and the asset. This extra layer disrupted the entire structure.
Tom Farley, CEO of Bullish, summarized the essence in one post: tokens should ideally be aligned with the issuer to ensure they represent real shares. ARK Invest analyst Lorenzo Valente, upon seeing advertisements for SpaceX shares on 40 platforms, questioned what exactly buyers were acquiring.
The Premium That Didn't Materialize
Meanwhile, a separate narrative unfolded in the derivatives market. The perpetual contract SPCX on Hyperliquid had already priced the stock at $154 before the offering, implying a valuation of SpaceX at $2.01 trillion. The actual IPO occurred at $135 per share, with a market cap of around $1.75 trillion.
The premium in the derivatives market reflected both speculative excitement and a markup for access to a previously closed asset.
The Flight to Quality
The boom in tokenized stocks is not merely a frenzy around a new niche. It signifies a shift that alters the very logic of capital movement within the industry.
Not long ago, money in the crypto segment followed a clear trajectory: profits from Bitcoin flowed into Ethereum, then into large altcoins, and from there into smaller speculative tokens. The "alt season" was a familiar part of every cycle, but now things are somewhat different.
A Brave New World
Market maker Wintermute analysts noted that in 2025, liquidity ceased to be distributed evenly and became concentrated in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a handful of other popular coins. The share of altcoins in total crypto liquidity dropped from 15% to 12% over two years.
The dynamics of rallies have also changed. If in 2024 the average duration of a single coin's growth was about 61 days, in 2025 it shrank to just 19. Cycles have compressed threefold. The reason is that institutional players, with their ETFs and corporate reserves, are directing capital primarily into proven assets rather than the "long tail" of the market.
Stocks and Tokens Are Swapping Places
Moreover, in February 2026, Wintermute experts pointed out that stocks and cryptocurrencies have become "risk-reducing interchangeable assets." Investors are increasingly allocating funds between the two segments rather than investing in both simultaneously—especially noticeable after the crash on October 10, 2025, triggered by a tariff threat from U.S. President Donald Trump, which resulted in a record cascade of liquidations.
This creates a paradox. A tokenized stock is a digital asset that exists on a distributed ledger. But essentially, it is a bet on the traditional market, not the crypto industry. By purchasing a token for Nvidia or SpaceX instead of another altcoin, an investor is effectively voting against the very idea of an alt season.
At the same time, the scales are incomparable: the global stock market is valued at $120 trillion, while the entire crypto market is just over $2 trillion. Tokenization opens the door of blockchain to the largest segment of the financial market, and even a small share of this massive sum could rewrite the priorities of retail investors.
Altcoins Under Pressure
The numbers confirm a troubling trend. According to observations by CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost, by the end of June 2026, about 84% of altcoins on Binance were below their 200-day moving average. In other words, the overwhelming majority of coins are "underwater."
This situation has persisted for nearly eight months—the second-longest downturn since 2020. A comparable episode occurred during the last bear market and lasted about ten months. Another observation is that altcoins remain closely tied to Bitcoin's dynamics but receive almost no independent momentum.
Source: Wintermute, Darkfost.For most projects, the outlook is grim. When liquidity concentrates in a few major assets, and part of retail moves into tokenized stocks, only altcoins with a strong value proposition will survive.
The rest risk repeating the fate of Loopring, which announced the closure of its platform in June 2026. Competition for investor funds is intensifying, and there is no longer enough free liquidity for everyone.
DeFi Clings to Wall Street
In April 2026, the cross-chain bridge of the rsETH token from Kelp DAO, based on LayerZero, suffered the largest hack in DeFi history. Hackers, linked to North Korea's Lazarus Group, siphoned off about $293 million in rsETH tokens and collateralized them on Aave, obtaining real assets in return.
The smart contracts of the largest lending protocol were unharmed; however, it was left with a problematic debt of about $195 million, and frightened users withdrew over $8.6 billion.
The total value locked (TVL) in the segment peaked at around $168 billion in November 2025 and dropped to approximately $70 billion by the end of June. This significant contraction occurred amid a general market cooling, but the sector held its ground.
Source: DefiLlama.However, the money did not leave DeFi—it shifted to where the segment intersects with traditional finance. Real-world tokenized assets, primarily U.S. Treasury bonds, have become the new "safe" collateral that stablecoins previously provided.
Aave launched the fourth version of its protocol and an institutional platform called Horizon, where tokenized securities serve as collateral. Active loans secured by RWA on the new platform and other markets have already exceeded $500 million.
The entire segment of tokenized assets, excluding stablecoins, surpassed $30 billion, adding over 220% in a year. Nearly half of the total figure comes from American Treasuries.
Source: RWA.This movement has been reciprocal: exchanges and Wall Street infrastructure have themselves gravitated toward DeFi. At the end of June, CoinDesk reported that Kraken's parent company—Payward—is in talks to acquire a 15% stake in Aave at a valuation of $385 million.
The platform's founder, Stani Kulechov, the next day denied such an interpretation, stating that the company does not intend to sell AAVE at a 70% discount to the token's fair value. The deal remains unconfirmed.
However, the very interest in it is already a signal. Earlier, Deutsche Börse acquired 1.5% of Payward for $200 million, and ICE created a joint venture with OKX for stock tokenization.
This trend is further confirmed by Securitize. The platform is responsible for tokenizing BlackRock BUIDL's flagship fund and is going public on the NYSE through a merger with SPAC Cantor Equity Partners II. The listing of shares under the ticker SECZ is scheduled for July 2, and the deal is expected to raise around $400 million. The company manages blockchain assets worth over $4 billion and provides the market with a public valuation benchmark for this entire infrastructure for the first time.
This creates a paradox: DeFi has remained afloat not in opposition to Wall Street, but thanks to its convergence with it. Money that once sought yield in farming and altcoins is now settling in tokenized bonds and capital that traditional players are bringing onto the blockchain. Altcoins lack such a bridge.
The Traps of a Safe Haven
The boom does not eliminate risks—they simply have yet to manifest fully. Regulation and holder rights can be established over time. However, price efficiency and correlation with the overheated AI sector are entirely different matters: the segment must simply live with what it has.
Regulation Lags Behind the Market
In May 2026, the SEC delayed the launch of the "innovative exception"—a rule that was supposed to allow American platforms to trade tokenized stocks. The formal reason was the regulator's concerns about securities issued without the consent of the issuing company—the very model that has led SpaceX and Tesla to be unaware of their digital copies' existence.
The SEC's position is unequivocal. A joint statement from three divisions of the Commission on January 28, 2026, established that tokenization does not change the legal nature of an asset—if it is a security, it remains one and is subject to all federal legal requirements regardless of the form of record.
Holders Currently Lack Rights
The mechanism for voting at shareholder meetings for holders of new assets is still being developed. Broadridge launched an on-chain version of its ProxyVote system in April 2026, with Galaxy Digital being the first to test it—an issuer that released a tokenized version of its own stock. Later, Ondo joined the system, extending voting to over 250 such stocks and ETFs on its platform.
This is an exception, not the rule. Holders of xStocks, bStocks, and most other products still receive neither voting rights nor direct dividends.
The AI Bubble as a Systemic Risk
Tokenized stocks have risen on the same rally wave as the AI sector: a significant portion of the turnover comes from tech company stocks. This makes the "safe haven" dependent on a single narrative.
Wintermute in February 2026 directly identified the overvaluation of this sector as one of the reasons for the prolonged stagnation of the cryptocurrency market: analysts stated that such assets "continuously drain available capital," leaving no room for other segments.
If the trend reverses, tokenized stocks will face a double blow—from falling prices of the underlying shares and from a general capital exodus from blockchain platforms.
Custodial Risk Remains Unaddressed
Each tokenized stock has an intermediary—a custodian holding the actual paper and the token issuer that "wraps" it. Both links are structured as bankruptcy remote—but that is not the same as bankruptcy proof. Separation reduces risk but does not eliminate it.
The fragility of the token backing mechanism also plays a role. The SpaceX example proved that demand for a digital asset can easily outstrip the physical ability of platforms to acquire real shares in the traditional market.
None of this has deterred capital inflow. But it shows that the liquidity shift into tokenized stocks is a change of one set of threats for another, not a guaranteed protection.
What Remains for Altcoins
2026 has become the year when tokenized stocks demonstrated the potential for a symbiosis between blockchain and TradFi while exposing the old vulnerabilities of the industry—from regulatory issues to the fragility of intermediaries.
The scale is still modest: the total volume of tokenized assets is a drop in the ocean compared to the U.S. stock market, which exceeds $75 trillion. However, by 2030, Citi expects the share of tokenized versions in this market to grow to 2.9%—that’s already $5.4 trillion, about two-thirds of the total projected tokenization volume of $8.2 trillion. The DTCC is launching pilot transactions in July, with a full launch planned for October.
The next test for the model will be potential IPOs of giants like Anthropic and OpenAI—the same scheme with unauthorized token issuers risks repeating, but on a much larger scale.
At the same time, the segment does not overstate its own role. The Bitget Wallet Research Institute describes tokenized stocks as an "asynchronous access layer" to U.S. stocks—not a standalone segment with 24/7 trading, but an overlay on an existing market. This is not a parallel financial system, but a more convenient entry into the old one.
This does not bode well for altcoins: the safe haven does not eliminate threats—it merely offers a different set of them, backed by the name of Wall Street. The risk of losing money on them is already well-known. The question now is, what is their purpose for the investor?
The new "safe haven" from Wall Street does not eliminate risks; it simply changes them to others. Losing money on crypto is always frightening, but now the question is different: why should an investor risk in penny coins when they can move to regulated assets? Capital in the market does not evaporate; it shifts to more profitable, convenient, or reliable instruments.
And now we are witnessing the very "flight to quality," but already on the blockchain.