CoinW Research Institute
On August 25, Coinbase announced the launch of the first batch of tokenized U.S. stocks on Base, covering Apple, Nvidia, Meta, and Alphabet. The products adopt the B20 standard added in the Beryl upgrade of Base, with the underlying stocks held one-to-one by the regulated Alpaca, allowing qualified non-U.S. users to trade on Aerodrome around the clock. At the same time, Solana began preparing to enter the mainnet with Alpenglow. According to the schedule announced in August, Agave 4.3 is planned to gradually expand mainnet adoption in September, with relevant functions tentatively scheduled to be activated by the end of September, and the complete switch may extend to the fourth quarter, with specific timing still subject to adjustment.
The two developments connect the front and back ends of real assets entering on-chain finance, with B20 standardizing the issuance, management, and application access of stock tokens. Alpenglow is expected to compress the waiting time for Solana transactions to reach final status from approximately 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds, reducing the capital required for market making and settlement. After the issuance, trading, and settlement are interconnected, real assets may transition from holding to trading, collateralization, and financing. However, whether the market can generate a sustained trend as a result still depends on whether the quantity of assets, trading depth, and lending demand can expand in sync.
Coinbase Adopts B20 to Drive U.S. Stocks into the Base Financial Ecosystem
What Did the Beryl Upgrade Solve?
To understand B20, we need to first look at the Beryl upgrade. Beryl is the second network-level upgrade for Base following Azul, which has already entered the mainnet operational phase. It includes three key changes. The first is the addition of the B20 native token standard, allowing stablecoins, stocks, and other real-world assets to directly utilize the issuance and management capabilities built into Base nodes. Unlike the previous reliance on third-party RWA protocols and smart contracts to achieve asset issuance, permission control, and lifecycle management, B20 integrates these capabilities directly into the underlying network; the second change reduces the common waiting time for withdrawing assets to Ethereum mainnet from seven days to five days, improving cross-chain capital turnover efficiency. The third change upgrades node software to Reth V2, reducing data storage pressure and allowing for future expansion of network processing capacity.
Thus, Beryl represents a comprehensive infrastructure upgrade for the entire network. B20 is the most market-focused asset issuance module among the three changes, while the other two serve capital withdrawal and network expansion. Viewed together, Base’s goals are very clear: it aims to simultaneously address asset supply, capital turnover, and carrying capacity to prepare for larger-scale on-chain financial activities.
What Exactly is B20?
B20 is a set of native token standards defined as unified rules for issuing and managing assets. It itself has no independent price, total issuance, or investment returns, nor is there a separate concept of buying and selling B20. Issuers can create stablecoins, tokenized stocks, fund shares, or other on-chain assets according to this format. B20 is fully compatible with Ethereum's general token interface, so existing wallets, trading platforms, data tools, and decentralized finance protocols can recognize and invoke it.
The difference in B20 mainly lies in its operational mode; ordinary tokens typically write rules in separately deployed smart contracts, while B20 places core logic into Base node software for direct execution by the network. This reduces the costs for each issuer to develop modular components repeatedly and minimizes compatibility issues arising from different assets adopting a single set of rules. B20 provides functions such as role permissions, minting and burning, pausing trading, transfer restrictions, freezing, and transfer notes, and is divided into general assets and stablecoins versions. For regulated stocks and funds, these capabilities help handle identity requirements, judicial freezes, redemptions, and corporate actions.
Unified Standards Bring Tokenized U.S. Stocks into On-Chain Trading
On August 25, the first batch of tokenized U.S. stocks launched by Coinbase brought this set of standards into actual business. Coinbase is responsible for issuance, institutional market makers purchase the corresponding stocks, and Alpaca holds them one-to-one in a regulated structure that isolates the assets from Coinbase. Token holders gain direct beneficial rights to the underlying stocks and, upon completing the required identity verification and ownership conditions, can also exercise shareholder rights such as voting and redemption. Dividends and stock splits are adjusted through on-chain ratios, and wallet balances do not need to change repeatedly with corporate actions.
Apple, Nvidia, Meta, and Alphabet are the first four stocks to be launched. Currently, only non-U.S. persons located outside the United States and whose regions meet the access requirements can trade these tokens. Ordinary users can hold tokens in self-custodied wallets and trade 24/7 through on-chain platforms like Aerodrome. B20 token transfers do not set a wallet whitelist, which means users may not need to complete Coinbase's KYC in advance when trading in the secondary market; however, users who have not passed identity and eligibility verification can only hold and transfer tokens, obtaining economic rights related to the performance of the underlying stock prices but cannot exercise voting and redemption rights. In the future, Coinbase also plans to gradually increase more stocks and other real asset products. Since B20 is compatible with existing wallets and DeFi protocols, stock tokens can also be used for lending, collateralization, and automated investment strategies. For example, after purchasing stock tokens, users can collateralize them to borrow stablecoins and then allocate these funds to other on-chain products, creating multilayered needs for trading, financing, and asset allocation.
However, currently, technical connections do not mean that stock tokens can directly become collateral for protocols like Aave. As of now, Aave's fourth version deployed on Base is still under governance discussion, and each stock must pass legal rights, price source, trading depth, and settlement risk reviews. Meanwhile, whether tokens can be smoothly redeemed, whether the underlying stocks remain sufficiently held in custody, and whether prices can be updated in a timely manner will all affect collateral limits and borrowing costs. Therefore, B20 addresses the issue of missing standards; the next step is to see whether the types of stocks, secondary market liquidity, lending scale, and real income can grow in sync.
Alpenglow Upgrade Approaches, Solana Accelerates On-Chain Stock Settlement
Solana Accelerates Progress on Alpenglow Upgrade
Alpenglow is the new generation consensus mechanism Solana plans to enable, mainly responsible for coordinating validators across the network to form a unified judgment on transaction states, determining when a transaction takes effect and is finally confirmed. Its first phase, Votor, primarily handles validator voting and transaction final confirmation functions, serving the entire Solana network. Since on-chain stocks have high demands for transaction timeliness, settlement certainty, and capital turnover efficiency, they have become one of the applications that can best reflect the value of this upgrade.
Currently, Alpenglow is still in the testing and preparation phase before formal deployment. The mechanism entered community cluster testing in May, some preliminary functions were enabled in July, and the Agave 4.3 client with related functions also began entering the testnet and development network in August. According to the existing plan, the mainnet candidate version will be launched in September, and the adoption rate of Agave 4.3 in validating nodes will gradually increase; relevant functions are tentatively scheduled to be deployed to Solana's existing mainnet by the end of September, with complete switching possibly extending to the fourth quarter.
150 Milliseconds Final Confirmations Aim to Shorten Market Making and Settlement Cycles
Solana currently typically completes the preliminary confirmation of transactions in about 350 to 400 milliseconds, but it still takes about 12.8 seconds for a transaction to reach a nearly irreversible final status. Votor aims to compress this final confirmation time to about 150 milliseconds by transmitting votes directly among validators and aggregating a large number of votes into a unified proof, thereby narrowing the time difference between preliminary confirmation and final settlement.
This change primarily impacts market making, hedging, and capital turnover efficiency for the stock token market. After market makers complete on-chain transactions, they usually still need to establish reverse positions in traditional markets. The longer the waiting time for final confirmation, the higher the risks associated with price fluctuations, hedging deviations, and margin occupation during that time. With the reduction of final confirmation time, market makers can quickly adjust their inventories, release margins, and complete the next round of quotes, potentially narrowing the bid-ask spread. Meanwhile, stock tokens and stablecoins can simultaneously complete delivery in the same transaction, keeping asset transfer and capital payment aligned, thereby reducing settlement risks that arise when one side has performed while the other has yet to complete payment.
Faster Settlements Must Align with Compliance and Real Demand
The restrictions on stock token holders, transfer pauses, management permissions, and synchronous delivery functions are primarily achieved through Solana’s token extension capabilities and the issuance side applications; Alpenglow is responsible for shortening the time required for transaction confirmation and final settlement. Only by combining both can Solana meet the technical conditions for higher frequency, around-the-clock stock trading. However, Alpenglow primarily addresses the issue of settlement efficiency; asset custody, confirmation of legal rights, and issuance reviews still rely on off-chain systems and compliance frameworks.
As of now, data from RWA.xyz indicates the scale of non-stablecoin real-world assets on the Solana chain is about $4.05 billion, with approximately 370,000 holding addresses. In the second quarter, Solana accounted for about 95% of the global on-chain tokenized stock trading volume, with a cumulative transaction volume exceeding $10 billion in June. However, from the perspective of asset utilization efficiency, only about 9% of tokenized real assets have entered liquidity pools or have been used for lending and collateralization; this proportion is about 16% when excluding unreleased reserves held by issuers. Therefore, whether the improvement in settlement speed can translate into actual value still depends on whether stock tokens can enter trading and lending markets such as Jupiter and Kamino, thereby generating ongoing demands for buying, selling, collateralization, and financing. Only when asset liquidity and application scenarios can expand in sync can faster settlement efficiency further drive stablecoin inflows and translate into protocol revenue.
Issuance and Settlement Improvements, Will the Market Welcome a New Inflection Point?
Technical Progress is Translating into Actual Trading Activities
After Coinbase launched tokenized U.S. stock products, projects in the Base ecosystem such as Aerodrome quickly gained market attention. As the scale of real assets on the Solana chain expands and Alpenglow gradually approaches mainnet deployment, related applications for trading, lending, and more have re-entered investors' horizons. The secondary market has already begun reflecting expectations of asset on-chaining and improved settlement efficiency, layered with the overall recovery of the crypto market. However, market attention can rise rapidly in the short term, but the accumulation of trading demand and protocol revenue requires longer time.
Solana’s tokenized stock transaction volume rapidly grew in the second quarter, yet the current trading enthusiasm for stock tokens has not fully translated into ecological income, and relevant products on Base also currently lack sufficient continuous data. Therefore, assessing whether the trend can continue requires a comprehensive observation of product quantity, market depth, collateralization rates, stablecoin borrowing scales, and actual protocol fees. Only when asset supply can lead to sustained trading, and trading further generates lending demand and protocol revenue, can technical advancements be deemed to have truly translated into growth at the operational level.
The Growth Potential of On-Chain Stocks Needs Layered Assessment
According to RWA.xyz, the total value of tokenized stock-like assets recorded worldwide is approximately $2.56 billion, an increase of about 35.4% from about $1.89 billion at the end of July, showing that the issuance and on-chain deployment of related assets are accelerating. However, from the perspective of asset supply, the current tokenized stocks are still mainly concentrated among a few issuance platforms, large U.S. tech stocks, and mainstream index funds, with coverage far below that of the traditional stock market.
In the future, the expansion of tokenized stocks will rely more on synchronized improvements to regulatory rules and traditional market infrastructures. The U.S. SEC's "Project Crypto" regulatory plan has entered the phase of rule interpretation and pilot advancement, and in March 2026, it approved Nasdaq to trade tokenized securities under the tokenization pilot framework of DTCC's DTC, allowing eligible Russell 1000 constituent stocks and major index ETFs to be traded in tokenized form on the existing order book; the New York Stock Exchange has also established corresponding pilot rules and is creating a platform that supports 24/7 trading of U.S. stocks and ETFs, stablecoin deposits, and instant on-chain settlement. However, DTCC’s tokenization services are still in the preparation phase, and the SEC's innovations aiming at open-chain trading exemptions and the NYSE's independent platform have not yet fully materialized. With the gradual perfection of legal rights, asset custody, subscription, redemption, and professional market-making mechanisms, stocks, ETFs, and bonds, along with their corresponding trading, custody, and lending services, still have substantial expansion space. Even if the market scale grows tenfold from the current base to about $25.6 billion, it remains limited compared to the global scale of traditional securities that can be tokenized, and the industry as a whole is still in the early stages of development.
The value of on-chain stocks to the crypto market cannot be measured solely by asset scale. Its more significant role is to bring traditional assets and external funds on-chain and further create demands for stablecoin settlements, secondary trading, asset custody, and collateralized lending. When trading volume, liquidity depth, collateralization rates, stablecoin borrowing, and protocol revenue grow in sync, the expansion of stock tokens will translate into a sustainable capital cycle. If newly added assets primarily remain with issuers or in user wallets, their impact on on-chain liquidity and ecological income will still be limited. Thus, on-chain stocks are expected to be a new source of growth for the crypto market, but the actual impact will depend on the trading activity levels, fund retention, and utilization efficiency of assets after they enter the chain.
Whether the Market Can Sustain Depends on Whether Real Demand Can Form a Closed Loop
The next phase of the on-chain stock market primarily depends on whether asset supply and real liquidity can continue to expand. Coinbase needs to further expand from the initial four U.S. stocks to more stocks, index funds, and bonds; Solana needs to consolidate its existing market share and introduce more products that meet regulatory requirements. Meanwhile, the confirmation of legal rights, independent asset custody, smooth redemption, and professional market-making mechanisms also need to be improved synchronously, allowing round-the-clock trading to translate from product functionality to relatively stable market demand.
A more critical growth driver may come from the integration of stock tokens with the lending market. Users first use stablecoins to purchase stock tokens and then use those stock tokens as collateral to borrow stablecoins, deploying the borrowed funds for new trades or investments, resulting in cycles of assets, credit, and protocol revenue. As the collateral assets increase, the demand for stablecoin borrowing, trading volumes, and interest income may also expand in sync, turning stock tokens from merely held assets into productive assets that can participate in on-chain financial activities.
Among them, the value transmission paths of different networks also vary: Base does not have a native network token, so new value may first flow to infrastructures such as Aave, Morpho, stablecoins, and oracles. The growth in usage of the Solana network is more likely to transmit to SOL and related ecological applications. Therefore, the issuance scale of assets, growth of protocol revenue, and value of ecological tokens still need to be assessed separately, rather than being seen as changing in sync.
In summary, B20 supplements standardized issuance and asset management capabilities, and if Alpenglow goes live as planned, it is expected to further shorten settlement waiting times. Together, these two advancements increase the possibility of on-chain stocks becoming market catalysts, but the perfection of infrastructure alone cannot directly create a sustained market trend; the key still lies in whether real assets can continually attract external capital and generate stable demands for trading, collateralization, and credit. If collateral ratios, stablecoin borrowing scales, and actual protocol revenue rise in sync, the market’s pricing of on-chain stocks will gradually shift from technical expectations to verifiable financial activities. If most assets remain long-term in wallets lacking transactions, lending, and capital circulation, their price performance will still mainly be influenced by market sentiment. Therefore, the core of this direction lies in whether on-chain stocks can continuously create new funds, fee income, and real demand.
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