Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)

On June 1, Binance officially announced the long-awaited new product: over 8,000 U.S. stocks and ETFs will be available for trading to non-U.S. users, supporting zero-commission fractional shares with a minimum investment of $5. Users can purchase using cryptocurrencies such as USDC, USDT, and BNB. (Recommended reading "Binance's Major Move: Trade 8000 U.S. Stocks & ETFs 5*24H, Can Stocks be On-Chain?")

Odaily Planet Daily noticed a key piece of information: Binance has chosen the U.S. compliant broker Alpaca as a partner, responsible for asset custody, dividend distribution, and corporate actions handling. This company called Alpaca has a market position in the stock tokenization narrative that may far exceed your imagination, with clients including Bitget, Gate, Ondo, xStocks, and others.

Hidden Giant with a 94% Market Share

At the same time Binance announced its new product, exchanges such as Bitget and Gate are also making significant advances in stock tokens.

On May 28, Bitget officially announced the launch of its stock token platform, Reality, and will issue derivative tokens (rToken) linked 1:1 to stock assets based on Reality. According to Bitget's Mandarin spokesperson, Xie Jiayin, the underlying broker for Reality is Alpaca.

On June 1, Gate officially announced the launch of real stock trading services, allowing users to directly use USDT to participate in trading U.S. mainstream securities and ETFs. Gate official Godot also confirmed that Gate's broker partner is also Alpaca.

Let's look at DeFi again. First is the absolute leader in the stock token market, Ondo, which announced last September that it would collaborate with Alpaca to tokenize U.S. stocks and ETF assets.

Ondo's direct competitor, the stock token protocol xStocks under Kraken, also announced in December last year that it would collaborate with Alpaca to accelerate xStocks' promotion and global adoption outside the U.S.

More examples need no further elaboration. In summary, whether it is CeFi or DeFi, almost every stock token trading service you can see has Alpaca's shadow behind it. According to data disclosed by Alpaca on December 4 last year, the company held a 94% market share in the tokenization of U.S. stocks and ETF assets.

Who exactly is Alpaca?

Alpaca was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in California, USA. Its founders are former Lehman Brothers employee and serial entrepreneur Yoshi Yokokawa (currently the CEO) and engineer Hitoshi Harada (currently the CPO). Alpaca adopts a commonly found global remote distributed office model in the crypto circle, with over 250 employees across 25 countries.

Initially, Alpaca was a startup focused on financial databases and machine learning, committed to developing technology capable of running and processing large market datasets for prediction. In its early days, Alpaca's main product was a trading API for quantitative traders. However, as the business expanded, the company gradually evolved from a pure trading interface provider to a complete financial infrastructure provider, currently supporting trading across asset classes including stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrencies, while also providing market data, securities lending, high-yield cash accounts, and 24/5 U.S. stock trading services.

According to FundBet data, since 2019, Alpaca has raised over $320 million, from well-known investors including Y Combinator, Spark Capital, Portage Ventures, Tribe Capital, and SBI Group.

• Completed seed round financing in 2019;
• Completed $10 million Series A financing in 2020;
• Completed two rounds of Series B financing in 2021 and 2022;
• Completed $52 million Series C financing in 2025;
• Received $150 million Series D financing in early 2026, valuing the company at approximately $1.1 billion.

According to official disclosed data, Alpaca currently serves hundreds of financial institutions and fintech companies across more than 40 countries and regions, and has helped partners open over 7 million brokerage accounts.

A More Accurate Positioning: “Brokerage as a Service”

Unlike traditional brokers that directly serve end investors, Alpaca's core clients are developers, fintech companies, and other brokerage institutions. The Broker API provided by Alpaca helps partners quickly build a complete securities trading service system, including account opening, KYC, account management, order execution, clearing and settlement, and market data services.

In simple terms, if Binance, Bitget, Gate, or Ondo want their users to trade U.S. stocks, they theoretically need to address issues such as brokerage licenses, compliance checks, stock custody, clearing and settlement, market data, and order routing; these matters are both costly and complex, whereas Alpaca provides a complete set of API solutions that developers can easily integrate, allowing them to connect these complex backend capabilities with a single call.

This in some ways resembles a "Brokerage-as-a-Service." With Alpaca's support, platforms like Binance, Bitget, Gate, and Ondo only need to handle traffic and users, while all backend tasks connecting to the real securities market can be entrusted to Alpaca.

First-Mover Advantage and Network Effects

At this point, you might wonder why crypto institutions prefer Alpaca. Can’t other brokers do the same?

Indeed, there is no shortage of brokers in the U.S. compliant financial market. According to FINRA data, there are thousands of registered brokers in the U.S., and traditional financial giants like Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers, and Fidelity have far greater brand influence and asset scale globally than Alpaca.

However, when the wave of stock tokenization began to rise, the dominant position was not held by these veteran Wall Street institutions, but by Alpaca, which had been established for just over a decade. The reason may lie in the fact that from the outset, Alpaca was not a traditional broker in the conventional sense. For traditional brokers, clients are investors; for Alpaca, clients are developers.

Almost all of Alpaca's product design revolves around API, and developers simply need to call the interface to quickly access functions like account opening, KYC, order execution, clearing and settlement, and market data. This "API First" concept highly aligns with the needs of Binance, Bitget, Gate, and Ondo, which aim to embed securities trading functions into their platforms or protocols.

Compared to many traditional financial institutions that are cautious towards the crypto industry, Alpaca is also one of the first licensed brokers in the U.S. to embrace digital assets and the narrative of tokenization actively. Long before stock tokenization became a market hotspot, Alpaca had already begun to establish contacts with the crypto industry and actively explored ways to combine the securities market with blockchain technology.

First-mover advantage combined with industry fit is the core reason why Alpaca has secured its current market position.

Now, as more CeFi and DeFi players opt for Alpaca's infrastructure, the network effects accumulating around Alpaca are also solidifying the company's competitive moat.

For newcomers, choosing Alpaca means the fastest onboarding speed and the most mature compliance pathways, which will facilitate a positive feedback loop: more platforms integrating Alpaca—bringing more accounts and trading volume—prompting Alpaca to further refine products and infrastructure—attracting more newcomers to continue integration…

Stock tokenization is undoubtedly a major trend. Within this lane, how many more Binance or Ondo will emerge in the future remains to be seen, but one thing seems increasingly clear: as more and more platforms begin to compete for the stock token market, the one selling “shovels” to all platforms may be the biggest beneficiary in this competition.

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