The most active assets on the chain are no longer newly issued tokens, but US stocks, US bonds, gold, and crude oil.

Written by: Conflux

In the past few months, the most lively scenes in the crypto industry have centered around "who can bring US stocks onto the chain".

Binance launched 7,000 US stocks, Bitget introduced Reality, Gate integrated Alpaca, and OKX's CEO Star publicly stated, "Tokenized stocks are one of the most important use cases for RWA. We expect to see xStocks on the X Layer soon"… A consensus within the industry is rapidly forming.

However, if you put aside all this excitement and ask a calmer question: who is steadily making money in this frenzy?

The answer might surprise many.

Migration of Functions in the Crypto Industry

There is a change that many have likely felt. The most active assets on the chain are no longer newly issued tokens, but US stocks, US bonds, gold, and crude oil. What exchanges are rushing to launch are not the next meme, but Tesla and Nvidia. When users open the on-chain trading interface, the assets they see resemble traditional securities trading software more and more.

Stablecoins have long provided a clue. The global scale of USDT and USDC relies not on the narrative of "new currency on the chain," but on the specific problem they address – the dollar is too slow, too expensive, and too restricted in cross-border flows. Wrapping the dollar in blockchain is not to replace the dollar, but to make it run smoother.

Tokenized stocks are following the same path. They are not meant to invent a new financial asset but to provide a more efficient circulation layer for that batch of assets that have existed for decades and are most familiar to global investors.

The significance of this matter is not merely "another type of asset that can be traded on the chain." It means that the core value of blockchain is being re-anchored: not to create new assets, but to become a better circulation infrastructure for existing assets.

Three Signals

This is not another round of "RWA narrative" passing the balloon. There are three signals indicating that tokenization has crossed that critical point.

Signal One: The largest global securities back-end infrastructure starts preparing for tokenization

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is one of the core back-end infrastructures of the US securities market, currently holding over $114 trillion in assets and processing hundreds of trillions of dollars in securities transactions annually.

In December 2025, the SEC issued a three-year No-Action Letter to DTCC, allowing it to conduct a tokenization pilot for Russell 1000 stocks, ETFs, and US government bonds. The project is expected to launch limited production trading in July 2026 and gradually expand its scope.

The industry working group formed around the project has attracted participation from over 50 institutions, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Nasdaq, BNP Paribas, Citi, Morgan Stanley, and digital asset firms like Circle and Anchorage Digital.

Signal Two: Capital scales cross the "experimental phase"

According to data from a16z crypto, the market for tokenized assets (excluding stablecoins) has grown from less than $3 billion to approximately $34 billion in two years, an increase of more than tenfold.

Citi predicts that the tokenized securities market will reach $5.5 trillion by 2030; Boston Consulting, in cooperation with Ripple, estimates it will be $9.4 trillion; Standard Chartered forecasts it will exceed $30 trillion by 2034. These institutions are using their own credibility to endorse this grand future.

Signal Three: Regulatory framework begins to take shape

The GENIUS Act was signed in 2025, providing a federal legal framework for stablecoin settlement, which is critical for the trading and settlement of tokenized assets; concurrently, the SEC issued three categories of classification guidelines for tokenized securities, defining compliance boundaries for issuers; the CLARITY Act is progressing in Congress, aiming to clarify the overall regulatory framework for the digital asset market. These legislative signals combined mean that the entry channels for institutional funds are changing from a "gray area" to "something with a basis."

But there is a number that deserves calm consideration: despite the astonishing growth rate, the total scale of tokenized stocks is currently about $2.2 billion, accounting for only 0.001% of the global stock market value. There is still a high ceiling, but it is still far from reaching it.

First Half: Which Assets are First to Go On Chain and Which Haven't Moved Yet

The penetration of tokenization varies significantly between different asset classes.

• Assets prioritized for going on chain: Assets with clear pricing, stable demand, and simple ownership. US government bonds broke the $10 billion mark within two and a half years, and gold tokens exceeded $5 billion—gold has a globally unified standard, convenient warehousing, and is not easily damaged, making it a natural fit for tokenization logic.
• Tokenized stocks: It took over three years to achieve a scale breakthrough, but overall, it is still smaller than the bond and currency markets.
• Complex assets: Assets like private equity and venture capital, which have complex structures and long cycles, take even longer.

The scale of going on chain is just one dimension. The more critical question is: after these tokens go on chain, are they really being "used"?

The answer is: most are not.

For example, a certain tokenized bond has a market value of $15.2 billion, but the actual proportion deployed in DeFi protocols is only about 5%, approximately $800 million. Most tokenized assets are essentially just "moving the accounting onto the chain" rather than becoming freely combinable and programmable financial building blocks.

Going on-chain is the first step, but composability is the ultimate goal.

Second Half: Who are the Real Winners

The excitement on the front end masks the truths on the back end.

We previously wrote about Alpaca—this company occupies about 94% of the market share in the tokenized US stock market, with Binance, Gate, Bitget, Kraken's xStocks, Ondo's underlying clearing custody all pointing to it. Exchanges compete in the front end, while Alpaca steadily makes money in the back end.

Alpaca is just the most prominent case of this model. If we pull this picture together more completely:

• Custodian banks: Asset tokenization requires someone to hold the underlying real assets. InCore Bank, Maerki Baumann, and licensed custodial institutions in the US—no matter which platform wins users, custody fees are unavoidable.
• Clearing organizations: DTCC is also likely to be one of the significant beneficiaries. For tokenized products based on real securities, the underlying securities still operate within the traditional securities system. As long as this model exists, the securities registration and settlement network represented by DTCC is hard to bypass completely.
• Market makers: Tokenized stocks require liquidity, and market makers are responsible for providing quotes and bid-ask spreads. The larger the market, the higher the market-making profits, and they do not bear the risks of platform competition.
• Infrastructure service providers like Alpaca: Licensed, self-clearing, API-focused, first-mover advantage has formed a moat. The more intense the platform competition, the more platforms that connect to Alpaca, and its revenue flywheel spins faster.
• Public chains: Every minting, circulation, and combination operation consumes on-chain resources and contributes transaction fees. High-performance, compliance-friendly public chains acceptable to institutions are becoming long-term value bearers.

It can be said: front-end competition is about market share, while back-end infrastructure is about the entire market itself.

Prologue to the Game

Having said that, there is a bigger question that still lacks an answer: when tokenized assets truly achieve "composability," will the landscape be reshaped?

The current tokenization is mostly still "moving the accounting"—moving the ownership records of offline assets onto the chain, with higher settlement efficiency, but the operational logic of the assets themselves has not changed.

The next stage is where the real difficulties lie: making these tokenized assets programmable financial building blocks—usable as collateral for loans, capable of participating in DeFi protocols, able to flow freely across chains, and combinable with other tokenized assets. By that stage, today's infrastructure may need reworking, and today's entry points may need redefining.

DTCC, BlackRock, Ondo, and Nasdaq are all laying out their plans, but the real beneficiaries may not be the front-end participants—but those who provide infrastructure, clearing, custody, liquidity, and public chain resources.

The story of tokenized assets is just beginning.