In the business of moving stocks onto the blockchain, what is truly valuable, the assets or the counter selling the assets?

Written by: Clow

It is not that crypto companies have stormed Wall Street, but rather Wall Street has turned crypto into its own backend.

In July 2026, Robinhood launched its own chain, and within 7 days, the locked assets surpassed 100 million dollars. The company's most famous prior identity was as a brokerage that allowed young Americans to trade stocks without commissions.

It is not just one person taking action. In December 2025, the established exchange Kraken directly acquired the issuer of tokenized stocks xStocks, Backed Finance. Immediately after, Telegram packed these US stock tokens into the chat windows of one billion people.

Three giants, the same move.

What they are fighting over is not the assets, not the technology, and even not the licenses. What they are fighting for is the interface where you click the "Buy" button.

So the question arises: in the business of moving stocks onto the blockchain, what is truly valuable, the assets or the counter selling the assets?

01 Public chains have become utilities, issuers have become factories

Moving stocks onto the chain is not a new idea. In the wave from 2020, Mirror's synthetic assets and FTX's equity tokens tried it, but ultimately perished in regulatory and ecological collapse, because what users bought were just price shadows, not real stocks.

This round is different because the assets have become real.

The ERC-8056 standard promoted by Robinhood and Superstate allows for stock splits and dividends to be seamlessly managed at the smart contract layer; Ondo joined forces with proxy voting giant Broadridge, enabling token holders for the first time to vote in corporate shareholder meetings using private keys.

Even more brilliant is the combinability. Storing tokenized Nvidia stocks in lending protocols, borrowing stablecoins to generate interest, static assets in brokerage accounts have, for the first time, turned into productive funds.

Businesses are indeed growing. Boston Consulting predicts that by 2030, the global size of tokenized assets is expected to reach 10 trillion dollars. By mid-2026, the on-chain RWA has surpassed 31.4 billion dollars, nearly five times higher than it was at the beginning of 2025.

A report by Chainalysis also mentioned a surge in the number of new wallets on Ethereum specifically designed to receive RWA tokens. Buying stocks has become the first reason for new money to enter the on-chain world.

The cake is getting bigger, but the knife to cut the cake is not in the hands of the majority.

This industry chain has three layers. At the bottom are public chains and custody, with Ethereum, Solana, and BitGo responsible for letting the assets exist and circulate.

In the middle are issuers like Backed, Dinari, and Ondo, who handle the legal structures to map real stocks 1:1 into tokens. At the top is the distribution interface aimed at users.

The first two layers are becoming increasingly competitive. Users don't care which chain the stock tokens are running on, as long as they are cheap and safe; public chains are turning into utilities. On the issuance side, more licensed institutions are entering, rates are plummeting, and the work is becoming more like that of a factory.

The standard for determining who can take the large share of profits is simple: who controls the button that users click to "Buy".

The person who controls the button can charge the issuer a listing fee, can guide users to their own financial products, contracts, and lending, and holds the lifeblood of secondary market liquidity.

This is also why Kraken directly bought the issuer. Backed reportedly holds about 24% of the compliant tokenized stock market; by acquiring it, they no longer need to worry about being throttled at the entrance.

02 Money votes with its feet

Do you think this is just a narrative? The funds have already cast their votes.

In the first week after Robinhood Chain went live, a meme coin called CASHCAT generated nearly 98 million dollars in trading volume in a single day, with total decentralized exchange (DEX) trading reaching 560 million dollars in one day. It felt a lot like a typical "casino chain".

But looking at the locked asset structure, it tells a completely different story. Out of 100 million dollars in total value locked (TVL), 90 million is sunk in the lending protocol Morpho, supporting about 7% annual returns for Robinhood Earn. Ninety percent of the money is not for betting; it's for saving.

In other words, 27.6 million brokerage accounts are quietly feeding their savings through a pipeline into DeFi.

The irony continues further. For ten years, DeFi has called for the elimination of intermediaries, banks, and brokers; yet the largest incremental entry in 2026 is a licensed brokerage.

The top protocols are lining up to work for it. Lending is handled by Morpho, perpetual contracts are assigned to Lighter, which has signed a 12-year contract for a 50-50 revenue share and has also airdropped tokens worth 11 million dollars to Robinhood users.

Protocols provide technology and subsidies, brokerages provide users, and conveniently leave the riskiest parts on the protocol side.

This chain itself is built on the Arbitrum tech stack, with block confirmation in 100 milliseconds, using ETH for Gas fees. Robinhood has also opened AI trading to eligible US users, letting AI monitor the markets around the clock, executing arbitrage and earning strategies.

The ideal of eliminating intermediaries is not dead; it's just that the brokerages have found a new person to act as the intermediary.

03 Wall Street's entrance, Lagos's chat box

The same business has sprouted completely opposite versions at the ends of the Earth.

Robinhood hides DeFi behind the brokerage interface, while Telegram shoves Wall Street into chat boxes.

In the United States, Robinhood users do not feel the existence of the blockchain. The experience of buying stock tokens is no different from buying stocks; private keys, cross-chain bridges, and gas fees are all welded in invisible places on the front end.

In Lagos or Buenos Aires, the story is reversed. A Nigerian retail investor who wants to buy Apple stock used to face three hurdles: offshore account setup, foreign exchange controls, and high wire transfer fees.

Now he opens the TON wallet in Telegram and buys a tokenized share of Apple just like sending a message to a friend. TON has nearly 100 million wallet users, backed by 1 billion monthly active users, and the xStocks collected by Kraken are precisely paving the way to emerging markets through this channel.

Reports indicate that SK Hynix’s financing record of 26.5 billion dollars for its US listing was also delivered to Telegram users via xStocks.

Stock tokens can even be embedded into mini-applications in group chats for tips and payments. Financial assets have finally found a way for social media-style distribution, completely bypassing traditional gatekeepers.

But despite the excitement, all three companies share a common embarrassment: they cannot enter the American market.

In January 2026, the SEC issued a statement clarifying: tokenization does not change the property of securities, and on-chain stocks still fall under securities law.

Robinhood's stock tokens are issued by a Jersey trust, open only to non-US users; Kraken's xStocks are trapped in the Swiss structure, also circumventing the US.

Kraken has another layer of strategy. It is preparing for a US IPO in 2026, having already spent 1.5 billion dollars to acquire the traditional brokerage NinjaTrader, and bringing the issuer in is a story to tell Wall Street. No matter how well the story is told, if the product cannot enter the domestic market, it remains a fundamental flaw.

On the contrary, a small company called Dinari has honestly obtained a transfer agency license in the US, legally selling tokenized shares backed by real stocks, and has turned this capability into an API to sell to others.

Ondo took another route: underlying stocks remain in the compliant custody chain in the US, only ownership mapping is done on-chain, perfectly aligning with the SEC’s relatively friendly “third-party custody model” mentioned in the statement.

Giants are queuing outside the door, and the key is temporarily in the hands of the small players.

To put it bluntly: the technology story of assets on-chain has been overestimated, while the monopoly value of the entrance has been underestimated.

The standards for stock splits and dividends, oracles, legal structures—these are all important but will be leveled off. What cannot be leveled is the 27.6 million accounts tied to bank cards, and the chat boxes opened daily by one billion people.

The internet did not kill the brokerages; the brokerages learned to operate with zero commissions. DeFi did not kill the brokerages; the brokerages turned DeFi into their own backend.

In the next decade, there will be more and more chains, and assets will become increasingly homogeneous. The truly scarce resource is only one: whose button does the user’s finger fall on.

Users do not need to know what a chain is.