If you hold a batch of US stocks in IBKR (Interactive Brokers) and want to convert to USDT, the standard process in the past was: sell the stocks, wait for settlement, money goes into the bank account, then exchange or find a third party to deposit, and finally transfer to the exchange. Each step had to go through the bank.
Binance now offers another route: directly fill in the account full name, the clearing broker DTC number, and other information in the app to transfer real holdings from brokers like IBKR directly into your Binance account. The official is also offering a funding reward—between August 11 and September 30, anyone transferring US stocks to Binance can share in a pool of 300,000 USDC.
The most direct effect of this path is: the banking step is completely bypassed.
And this is only half of Binance's expansion. The transfer channel is responsible for bringing in real assets, while another front is that Binance, along with almost all major exchanges, is working on—using perpetual contracts to replicate the prices of the global stock market without even needing to hold real assets.
Two fronts, one goal
On August 11, Binance Futures launched perpetual contracts for KUAISHOU (Kuaishou Technology) and MEITUAN (Meituan), along with other leveraged products tracking Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Just days ago, Gate already moved 10 A-share stocks including BOE Technology Group, WuXi AppTec, and Unisplendour onto perpetual contracts, with a leverage of up to 20 times, allowing for both long and short positions.
This is not just about Binance and Gate. OKX launched perpetual contracts for Samsung, SK Hynix, and Hyundai Motors in June this year; Bitget's TradFi product list now includes Tencent, Xiaomi, Meituan, NetEase, SMIC, Sony, and Tokyo Electronics; Hyperliquid uses a permissionless protocol called HIP-3 to allow any team to create stock perpetual contracts, with one contract tracking the Nasdaq 100 index already exceeding $100 million in daily trading volume; Bybit and Coinbase are also continuously expanding similar products. Industry reports predict that starting in the second quarter of 2026, major exchanges will systematically shift towards the Asian market, having now massively covered leading stocks and ETFs from Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong—this market is evolving from a "crypto version of US stock derivatives" to a 24/7 network covering major global stock markets, settled in stablecoins. According to a report released by TokenInsight for the second quarter of 2026, Binance's market share in the overall TradFi perpetual contract market is about 60%, with quarterly trading volume reaching $380 billion; in the category of stock perpetual contracts, Binance's share once surged to 63%.
The transfer channel is responsible for moving real assets while perpetual contracts create price illusions—ultimately, the two paths lead to the same endpoint: exchanges transforming into the sole entry point for "anything that can be bought," leaving banks and traditional brokers out of this path.
Who is being drawn in?
This system may attract not just the original users already on Binance.
Flipping through the trading volume rankings of Binance Futures reveals the trend: on July 21, the perpetual contracts for SNDK, MU, and SKHY saw a trading volume exceeding $1 billion within the past 24 hours, only second to BTC and ETH, leaving mainstream currencies like SOL, ZEC, and HYPE trailing behind. As more exchanges launch stocks, indices, and similar TradFi perpetual products, these assets are becoming a new source of trading volume for crypto trading platforms.
Part of the reason behind this is that crypto assets themselves are cooling down—CoinGecko's crypto perpetual contract report shows that the average monthly trading volume of the top eleven centralized perpetual exchanges has dropped from $71 trillion in 2025 to $47 trillion in 2026. Exchanges need new sources of volatility to sustain fee revenue, and assets like stocks and commodities fill that gap perfectly.
But it's more noteworthy to consider the reverse situation. In the past, wanting to trade US stocks, Hong Kong stocks, and Korean stocks simultaneously meant having to open multiple securities accounts in several countries, going through different KYC processes, and facing various deposit restrictions. Now, one Binance account with a portion of USDT theoretically can cover exposure to all these markets—there is no need to repeatedly open accounts or prepare local currency for each market separately. For users who were originally active in traditional securities markets and had no prior contact with cryptocurrencies, exchanges have instead become the more efficient side.
Exchanges are not only guiding crypto users' funds towards stocks, but are also bringing in stock users' funds and their initial usage habits of USDT into the exchanges.
With a peg, or without a peg?
The first step for stocks transferred to Binance is to become regular holdings in a Binance account—not yet bStocks; this step is purely a transfer of asset custody.
To further circulate, users can convert this holding 1:1 into bStocks—tokenized securities issued by BTech Holdings Limited, a subsidiary of Binance Group, externally provided through an ADGM-approved prospectus. Essentially, it represents "evidence of financial instruments," not equivalent to directly holding shares, but backed 1:1 by real US stocks, with price performance and dividends reflected on the token. As an on-chain token, it can be withdrawn to a self-custody wallet and can flow into DeFi protocols.
This is the essence of what the transfer function truly opens up: transforming stocks from "holdings locked in a certain broker's account" into an asset that can migrate back and forth among brokers, Binance spot, and bStocks on-chain and can be repeatedly used as collateral.
Perpetual contracts for Hong Kong and A-shares operate on an entirely different logic: purely price difference derivatives, settled in USDT, with the exchange holding no underlying stocks, and users having no voting rights or even discussing dividend reinvestment. What users acquire is merely a price curve, with no asset connection to real stocks.
One path has real assets backed 1:1 and can be repeatedly used as collateral; the other is completely "unpegged," simply a contract representing a price curve. Binance is currently doing both simultaneously.
Attempts from five years ago
This path is not the first time someone has treaded here. In April 2021, Germany's BaFin warned Binance that the issuance of stock tokens without a prospectus could violate securities regulations; at the same time, the UK FCA was tightening overall regulation on Binance. Under multiple pressures, Binance voluntarily shut down its entire stock token business in July 2021. Nearly five years later, in February 2026, Binance, through collaboration with Ondo Finance, picked up the tokenized stock business again.
The same risks replayed last year with Robinhood, only on a larger and more public scale. In the summer of 2025, Robinhood launched stock tokenization in the EU, and even tokenized non-listed firms like OpenAI and SpaceX as promotional airdrops. The next day, OpenAI publicly denied that these tokens represented their equity; concerning the SpaceX tokens within the same product batch, Elon Musk responded that they were not real stocks. The Bank of Lithuania subsequently intervened for review, causing Robinhood's stock price to drop in response.
Putting these two past events together highlights one fact: the price of the token can infinitely approach the real stock price, but whether there is real asset backing and who is responsible if issues arise can lead to a change in regulations. What Binance, Gate, OKX, and Bitget are currently doing, with targets changed to Kuaishou, Meituan, and BOE, the scale has far surpassed what any marketing campaign could compare to.
Nasdaq forced to follow suit
It is not just the banks that have been passively responding; Nasdaq is also adjusting passively.
On August 7, Nasdaq obtained approval from the SEC to implement a "23/5" trading system starting December 6, 2026: open five days a week, only closing for one hour each day. There are multiple reasons behind this, and one interpretation suggests that it is somewhat pushed along by the rhythm of crypto perpetual contracts, which have operated 24/7 for over a decade—traditional exchanges find it hard to ignore a market that operates round the clock.
But even if Nasdaq achieved 23 hours, it still cannot operate seven days. The contracts on Binance, Gate, and OKX are still available for order and trading over the weekend. The traditional exchanges, catching up on this lesson, are chasing a target that is still moving.
The price of freedom
Stocks can migrate freely across brokers and platforms, being repeatedly used for collateral and leveraged—this was something that could not even be imagined in the traditional securities account system in the past—stocks, futures, and crypto assets originally belonged to different margin systems, with funds locked within each. Now, the same holding can switch back and forth on-chain, significantly improving capital efficiency.
As efficiency opens up, the layer of regulatory protection once surrounding these assets also loosens. When stocks were still in the IBKR account, asset ownership, investor protection funds, and clearing counterparties were all written within a regulated framework; while bStocks, although defined under the ADGM framework as having clear evidential properties, is currently only approved in certain jurisdictions and explicitly not available for U.S. persons— in other words, the same asset, with a change in identity, can result in a varying degree of protection depending on which jurisdiction you are in. The risks on the perpetual contract side are even more direct—with 20 times leverage, as long as the underlying stock fluctuates 5% in the opposite direction, the position could be liquidated to zero.
The freer the asset, often the further it is from traditional notions of "protection," this calculation needs to be clear in one's mind.
Unanswered questions
The transfer channel has opened the entry point for real assets, while perpetual contracts have opened the entry for synthetic prices; Binance, Gate, OKX, and Bitget have almost simultaneously extended their reach into the A-share, Hong Kong stock, and Korean stock markets, which very few crypto exchanges dared to touch before—not because regulators have permitted it, but because no one has explicitly said "no."
Banks took hundreds of years to establish a globally applicable tracing system for "where money goes." Now, a new fork in this system offers a considerably more efficient path—only this path has been built too quickly, and regulation has yet to keep up.
Ultimately, where this efficiency race will lead is never solely in the hands of Binance; almost all leading exchanges in the industry are accelerating down the same fork. Who sets the rules and when they are set is the truly undecided part of this matter.
*This content is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. The market carries risks, and investment should be approached with caution.
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