a16z: Understanding the Tokenization of Stocks in Three Charts

Jul 21, 15:08

Original Article Title: 3 Charts on the Tokenized Stocks Boom
Original Article Authors: Robert Hackett, Ryan Holloway, a16z
Original Article Translation: Chopper, Foresight News

Tokenized stocks (or more commonly known as tokenized securities) vividly demonstrate the ongoing penetration of Wall Street by cryptocurrency. These blockchain-based tokens represent traditional securities such as stocks of companies like Apple and Tesla, ETFs, and index products.

Unlike traditional stocks, tokenized stocks can be stored in a digital wallet for self-custody, transferred freely without permission, traded 24/7, and used directly as collateral for various on-chain DeFi activities. In just the past two months, institutions such as Coinbase, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the New York Stock Exchange, Robinhood, and others have actively entered this space, ranging from on-chain transaction processing to establishing new joint ventures and introducing new blockchains.

The heat of the race is fully reflected in the data. As of the end of June, the global market capitalization of tokenized stocks was approximately $1.7 billion, compared to just $329 million in the same period last year, representing a fourfold increase in size and becoming one of the fastest-growing categories in the Real World Assets (RWA) sector.

Market Cap of Tokenized Stocks Increased 45x in the Past Year

Is this growth being primarily driven by a large number of new token issuances or by the rise in the underlying stock prices? The circulation of stablecoins directly reflects market demand, with 1 stablecoin pegged to 1 U.S. dollar, making the logic very simple. However, the price of tokenized stocks is related to the price movements of their underlying stocks, and the total market value cannot clearly distinguish between the two major influencing factors of "newly minted tokens" and "price increase of existing tokens."

Existing data is sufficient to prove that the core driver of growth comes from new token issuance. Over half of the current market capitalization consists of assets that were not on-chain a year ago; the remaining existing assets mostly came online in the middle of this year, after the primary bull and bear market trends in underlying U.S. stocks had played out.

Although the tokenized stock market is still in its early stages, the internal structure of the past year has undergone a revolutionary transformation:

Categories of Tokenized Stocks Have Surpassed the Cryptocurrency Realm

Cryptocurrency-related products once dominated the market, but their market share has dropped from 79% a year ago to the current 21% (as of June). They have ceded market dominance to the "Other" category — a long tail category containing hundreds of small products — which currently holds a 35% market share, up from 15% a year ago.

The Other category is also on the rise. As of June, the share of giant tech companies with a market cap of $1 trillion or more has reached 10.6%, up from 0.6% a year ago. Meanwhile, the market share of ETFs and indices has also grown to 17.3%, up from 4.5% a year ago.

As expected, the fastest-growing sector is the artificial intelligence and chip industry. This industry had a market cap of less than $1 million in June 2025 (accounting for only 0.3% of the total market cap at the time) and skyrocketed to 15.5% a year later.

On-chain transfer activity is also steadily increasing. In June, the monthly on-chain transfer volume of tokenized stocks reached $9.22 billion, compared to only $53 million in the same period last year, representing a growth of over 170 times. This metric tracks all on-chain asset movements, including secondary market transactions, wallet transfers, deposits into DeFi protocols as collateral, and more.

Monthly On-Chain Transfer Volume of Tokenized Stocks

Institutional infrastructure is being widely adopted, and in just the past month, infrastructure breakthroughs in the industry have been concentrated. The DTCC completed the first batch of real-time trading of tokenized government bonds and stocks on Digital Asset's Canton network. A broader tokenization service is scheduled to launch in full in October, allowing Wall Street direct access to around $114 trillion in assets held by DTC. Earlier this month, Robinhood launched its own chain on the mainnet, integrating traditional markets, cryptocurrency, and real-world assets into an open network. On June 22, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange announced a joint venture with OKX to offer users tokenized NYSE-listed stocks pending regulatory approval. On June 16, Coinbase announced it would offer non-U.S. users tokenized U.S. stocks with 1:1 support, providing dividends, full shareholder rights, and around-the-clock trading. Binance also launched a similar product in the preceding days.

Compared to the traditional stock market with monthly trading volumes in the tens of trillions of dollars, the current volume of tokenized stocks is still very small. However, the trend is clear, with more issuers and trading platforms launching tokenized stock products as the racing scale continues to expand rapidly.