Convinced someone who's been trading US stocks for 6 years to try out DeFi on bStocks, and now he's super intrigued. A couple of days ago, I showed bStocks to a friend who trades Hong Kong and US stocks. His first reaction was confusion -> shock -> 'WTF, you can do this?! Why doesn’t Futu have these features?' Stocks can be converted into on-chain assets, traded on weekends, and once they're on-chain, you can even use them for DeFi yield farming. Borrowing rates are negative. These things have been normal for us for years, but to him, it was like seeing the future for the first time. After researching for 10 minutes, he said, 'Teach me how to play this, ASAP.' I quickly told him to calm down and listen to the differences first before jumping in. His excitement was making me a bit nervous. 1. There are two ways to transition from traditional US stocks to Binance. Stocks and ETFs from external brokers can be transferred via Binance Stocks; or you can use stablecoins to buy individual stocks. Supported stocks can also be swapped 1:1 with bStocks according to the rules. 2. bStocks are tokenized securities on-chain. The order placement fee is 0, and there’s no minimum commission like traditional brokers charge per trade. However, there’s still a spread when bStocks are actually traded. You can use the 0 order fee to do grid trading, which is hard to pull off in US stocks because of per-order fees. 3. What got him most excited was DeFi. bStocks can be moved on-chain, with most annualized yields showing above 50%. Pledging stocks for loans might even result in short-term negative borrowing costs. Compared to the ~5% financing fees typical of traditional brokers, this is super appealing. But the rates fluctuate, pool capacity is limited, and you have to deal with risks like contracts, protocols, and liquidity. 4. For people who trade US stocks, the downsides are also obvious. Currently, bStocks doesn’t have a wide range of assets, no options, and the spot depth isn’t as good as major traditional brokers. The 24/7 trading is an advantage, and stock contract liquidity is relatively decent. Some companies can even be traded before they go public, but these are high-leverage, high-complexity products. Names like Yushu and Changxin sound exciting, but I honestly suggest you don’t touch them yet. Otherwise, you’ll definitely blame me later, and I’m not taking the heat for that. In the end, I gave my friend just one piece of advice: start small and test the waters first. If he dumps all his stocks into this, there’ll be nothing left for us to eat, and there are plenty of pitfalls. Go through the process of transferring, swapping, withdrawing, and selling once. There are risks on-chain too—you have to accept the spreads, on-chain risks, and market-making losses. He was totally confused listening to this. DeFi does add a new layer of infrastructure to US stocks, but the current infrastructure isn’t mature enough yet. If stock traders jump in now, they’re bound to feel out of place. I didn’t expect DeFi to have such a big impact on stock traders.