Author: White55, Mars Finance

The On-Chain Revolution of Wall Street: How xStocks is Shattering a Century of Financial Barriers

When the stocks of Apple and Tesla transform into digital codes on the Solana chain, a silent financial breakout battle has quietly begun.

On June 30, 2025, the world's top cryptocurrency exchanges Kraken and Bybit simultaneously launched the xStocks product on the Swiss compliant platform Backed Finance. More than 60 tokenized U.S. stock assets made their first large-scale debut on mainstream crypto platforms, with stocks from giants like Tesla, Apple, and Nvidia becoming SPL tokens, enabling 24/7 trading on the Solana chain.

Argentinian users buy Tesla token TSLAx, with the entire process from order to on-chain confirmation taking only 10 seconds; a university student in Kenya purchases 0.01 shares of Apple for $1; an Indonesian miner pledges ETH to borrow gold ETF tokens to hedge against local currency depreciation—these once-unimaginable scenarios are reconstructing the underlying logic of capital market participation for 8 billion people globally.

01 Breakthrough: The Second Charge of the Zero Team

The entrepreneurial story of Backed Finance is full of drama. The three Israeli co-founders, Adam Levi, Yehonatan Goldman, and Roberto Klein, all came from the now-defunct DAOstack project. This DAO operating system, which raised $30 million in 2018, ultimately collapsed as the GEN token plummeted to near zero, officially shutting down in 2022.

This "losers' alliance" captured a key opportunity in 2021. After witnessing the success of stablecoins, they founded Backed Finance, aiming to bring traditional assets into compliance on the blockchain. The team is distinctly polarized:

• Compliance Fortress: Anti-money laundering consultant Angélica Sola (founder of AS COMPLIANCE) and legal expert Jerome Dickinson (Master of Laws from McGill University) form a regulatory moat.
• Technical Assault: CTO Yotam Katznelson leads a team of former engineers from 21Shares to build a cross-chain system.

Interestingly, the musical master's background of growth director David Henderson contrasts sharply with traditional finance, hinting at the project's ambition to attract cross-disciplinary users. In April 2024, Backed completed a $9.5 million Series A funding round led by Gnosis, laying the groundwork for the explosion of xStocks.

02 Technical Anatomy: Four Steps to Reconstruct Asset Flow

The operation of xStocks resembles a precision clock, achieving a balance between off-chain compliance and on-chain freedom:

Asset Anchoring is the cornerstone of trust. After purchasing Tesla stocks through Interactive Brokers, Backed deposits them into a segregated account at Clearstream, Europe's largest custodian. Each account number is publicly auditable, ensuring that even in the event of the issuer's bankruptcy, the rights of token holders remain unaffected.

On-Chain Mapping enables instant conversion. When Clearstream confirms the stock deposit, a smart contract on the Solana chain automatically triggers the minting of the corresponding number of TSLAx tokens. These ERC-1400 standard tokens are 1:1 anchored to the stocks but gain new life through the blockchain.

Multi-Level Circulation releases liquidity. Tokens penetrate globally through exchanges like Kraken and Bybit, while also being transferable to Phantom wallets for participation in liquidity mining on Raydium or collateral lending on Kamino. Stocks upgrade from "sleeping assets" to income-generating tools, with annualized returns three times higher than traditional brokerage margin accounts.

Redemption Closure ensures an exit channel. After users submit KYC, Backed destroys the on-chain tokens and instructs Clearstream to transfer the stocks to a designated brokerage account, completing the return to the traditional financial system within 1-3 business days.

The core of the technological breakthrough lies in the combination of Clearstream account segregation and Solana's high concurrency settlement, achieving atomic-level anchoring of on-chain rights and off-chain assets. As Solana's throughput of 65,000 transactions per second crushes the traditional financial T+2 settlement system, the efficiency revolution is unstoppable.

03 Market Shockwaves: A Liquidity Feast and Concerns

Data from the first day of launch reveals a mix of enthusiasm and risks:

• On June 30, on-chain trading volume reached $1.338 million (with 1,225 users).
• The next day, it soared to $6.64 million (with 6,565 new users).

However, liquidity presents a brutal pyramid. The three major tokens, TSLAx ($1.71 million), SPYx ($1.53 million), and CRCLx ($940,000), account for 70% of the trading volume, while 80% of small-cap stock tokens have fewer than 20 trades per day, with slippage as high as 5%. This differentiation exposes the Achilles' heel of the tokenized market: when capital only chases star assets, the liquidity black hole of long-tail assets may devour the ideals of inclusive finance.

Traditional brokerages are facing a triple-dimensional assault:

• Time Dimension: xStocks' weekend trading volume surpassed $4.7 billion, accounting for 12% of the traditional market's weekly volume.
• Cost Dimension: Bybit charges a fee of 0.04 USDT per share, only 1/100 of the international brokerage's cross-border commission (3-5%).
• Scenario Dimension: Robinhood is forced to acquire Bitstamp to enter the crypto space, while Futu Securities urgently launches Bitcoin deposit features.

Deeper transformations are fermenting in DeFi scenarios. Filipino workers sell Apple AAPLx tokens on the subway to pay rent using the Kraken app; retail investors in Hong Kong transfer dividends into Solana wallets to purchase NFTs; African farmers pledge corn warehouse receipt tokens to borrow for entrepreneurship—these fragmented financial behaviors are deconstructing the power walls built by Wall Street over the past century.

04 Under Currents: Dancing on the Regulatory Tightrope

The compliance structure of xStocks can be described as the art of regulatory arbitrage:

• Swiss DLT license as a shield: Utilizing the characteristics of the "Distributed Ledger Technology Act" that requires full collateralization of tokens to build a legal moat.
• Jersey shell as a spear: Issuing bond-like tokens through special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to circumvent equity registration requirements.

DigiFT analyst Ryan reveals a key loophole: xStocks is essentially corporate debt rather than equity tokens. Backed issues bearer bonds tracking stock prices, avoiding stamp duties on equity transfers and bypassing custodial qualification restrictions. Distribution relies on Kraken's subsidiary PDSL holding a Bermuda DA license for global penetration.

This intricate design lays the groundwork for dual risks:

• SEC's Long Arm Jurisdiction: Despite excluding U.S. users, VPNs masking addresses may still trigger cross-border enforcement.
• Incomplete Rights: Token holders only receive economic benefits, with voting rights systematically stripped away.

As Argentinian arbitrageurs exploit the price difference between after-hours U.S. stocks and on-chain prices (for example, buying Tesla at $215.3 after hours while TSLAx trades at $215.9 on-chain, immediately buying U.S. stocks → minting TSLAx → selling on-chain for a $0.6 profit per share), the information moat between traditional exchanges and regulatory agencies is crumbling.

05 Future Landscape: The Key to a Trillion-Dollar Market

The ultimate battlefield for tokenized securities extends far beyond stocks:

• Tokenization of Treasury Bonds: Backed collaborates with Ondo Finance to boost the yield on U.S. short-term Treasury bonds to an annualized 5.3%, 400 basis points higher than bank deposit rates.
• Breaking the Ice for Private Equity: Robinhood launches tokenized equity for OpenAI and SpaceX in Europe, opening up channels for the circulation of unlisted assets.
• Derivatives Revolution: Gate launches the world's first U.S. stock contract market, integrating leveraged operations with a USDT pricing system.

The market structure is facing fundamental reconstruction. When over 50% of Tesla stocks circulate through tokens, traditional exchanges' pricing power may yield to the depth of on-chain order books. Deloitte's "2025 Global Tokenization Forecast" states: "Blockchain is building a new bridge connecting traditional finance with digital natives."

The path to resolving the liquidity dilemma is already emerging:

• Perpetual Contracts Breakthrough: Decentralized platforms like Hypeliquid deploy stock perpetual contracts (stonk perps), using oracle prices and funding rate mechanisms to circumvent spot liquidity bottlenecks.
• Cross-Chain Liquidity Pools: Products cover eight public chains, including Ethereum, Avalanche, and Base, connecting fragmented depths through aggregators like Jupiter.
• Market Maker Incentives: Dynamically adjusting spreads to 0.5% to compensate for risks during non-trading hours, albeit sacrificing some low-cost advantages.

BlackRock's predicted $16 trillion tokenized asset market is accelerating towards realization. As real estate, carbon credits, and music copyrights all go on-chain, xStocks is merely the prologue to this on-chain renaissance.

Tesla stock certificates quietly rest in Swiss bank vaults, while Solana's TSLAx tokens pulse with dozens of trades every second. The asset mirroring between the physical and digital worlds is establishing a quantum entanglement-like connection between Clearstream's segregated accounts and Solana's validation nodes.

The first crack has appeared in the century-old fortress of traditional finance, with light streaming in through the fissures. A Kenyan university student holds fractional shares of Apple with the $1 saved from lunch; a Brazilian trader buys Nvidia at the bottom during the NYSE's off-hours; an Argentinian arbitrageur captures a $0.6 price difference—these financial behaviors in micro-time and space are converging into a new paradigm of capital flow.

As Kraken CEO Arjun Sethi declares, "We are not launching a new product; we are unlocking the underlying protocol for human wealth freedom," the bell of blockchain has already tolled outside the marble halls of Wall Street.

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