Key points:

Tokenized stocks have been a red-hot topic in DeFi so far in 2026. Just within the past 2 weeks:

Figure held the first-ever blockchain-native stock offering, raising $150M for FGRD shares.

Kraken and Coinbase launch 24-hour tokenized stock trading.

The total value of tokenized stocks crossed $1B for the first time.

Superstate is enabling tokenized IPO allocations for users of the Backpack wallet app.

And those are just a few of the big headlines surrounding this rapidly-growing space.

Right now, financial institutions are realizing the inevitability of tokenization. While this technology has typically been used on US Treasuries and private credit, stock tokenization is quickly becoming a key part of DeFi as well. 

Let’s dive into why this matters!

Whenever anything is tokenized, it’s a good idea to question why. 

There must be a valid reason, and it must improve the underlying product in a material way. After all, not everything necessarily has to be onchain.

However, one of the most obvious use cases for blockchains is financial activity. That’s why over $33T worth of stablecoin transactions was settled onchain in 2025, and it’s why the future of tokenized assets and onchain markets is so bright.

You’ve probably heard the main benefits of onchain finance before:

These are common talking points, mostly referring to payments. But the benefits actually extend far beyond this. 

Blockchains serve as a superior network for financial activity because of three properties. No other type of open, global network has all three.

They’re permissionless.

Not only can anyone in the world use onchain apps for trading, borrowing, earning yield, and more, but they can also build on them. 

If you see an app that you think could benefit from extra features, you can directly build on top of it. This has been done countless times, but some notable examples include:

They’re composable.

Composability means that onchain products can easily integrate with one another. This is possible in DeFi because (mostly) everything is built using smart contracts that are compatible with one another.

The above examples show the benefits of permissionlessness and composability – not only are people allowed to improve existing platforms, but they can do so by building their own app, and “plugging it in” to the original. 

One of the most recent DeFi trends that showcases composability is onchain stock lending, where tokenized stock exchanges can easily integrate with onchain lending platforms. 

They’re programmable.

In other words, DeFi is fully customizable – everything from privacy to fee distribution to strategy management and more can be designed to fit any need.

Specifically for onchain stocks, the flexibility of smart contracts enables them to track their offchain counterparts 1:1, while also factoring in dividend payments, stock splits, and more.

Essentially, the combination of permissionlessness, composability, and programmability create the perfect environment for innovation. People can build what they want, how they want, and integrate with existing apps/products to improve them.

All of that is to say – there’s a reason (actually, there are three) that DeFi, including onchain stocks, are more useful than traditional financial services on traditional financial networks.

The convergence of two factors – RWA adoption and onchain asset management – makes this an ideal time to bring new use cases to tokenized finance. 

The size of the broader RWA market is growing rapidly. 

Since the beginning of 2025, the value of tokenized assets has grown from $5.7B to $26.9B, or 372%.

If you take out tokenized Treasuries, the growth is even steeper: $1.8B to $16B, or 889%!

And now, we’re entering a new era of tokenization.

Until recently, tokenized assets couldn’t “do” anything.

They earned native yield from their backing assets (e.g. BlackRock’s BUIDL token earns yield from money markets) – but if that’s all there is to offer, why not just keep them in a traditional money market account?

Now, DeFi builders are tapping into the unique benefits of blockchains, allowing RWAs to be used more efficiently. 

As new onchain capabilities are being realized, the attention around tokenized stocks has never been higher. This is arguably also driven by external factors such as:

As a result, tokenized stocks are among the fastest-growing products in DeFi. 

The two leading platforms, Ondo and xStocks, had zero tokenized stocks until last June. Since then, they’ve tokenized a combined $833M worth of over 200 different tickers – giving them a combined market share of ~83%. 

Onchain asset management has also seen a significant rise due to increased demand for sustainable yield.

This has, in turn, driven demand for liquid, battle-tested DeFi applications such as lending and derivatives markets – specifically, perpetual futures and principal tokens/yield tokens (commonly known as PTs and YTs, such as those offered on Pendle Finance)

Lending markets serve as the foundation of many strategies developed by “vault curators” (aka onchain asset/risk managers), who currently manage a combined ~$6B in onchain capital. 

Perps have been the chief source of basis trade strategies, as their funding rates provide a way to earn yield while remaining hedged to the underlying asset. This has become a common strategy to generate yield on stablecoins, which I covered in this article. 

PTs and YTs are also widely used, as PTs resemble zero-coupon bonds with predictable yields, and YTs offer attractive returns by speculating on future rate movements, similar to traditional interest rate markets.

All three of these markets will soon benefit from the integration of tokenized stocks. As we’ll see, DeFi users now have the ability to not only trade stocks onchain, but borrow against them and trade derivatives of them. 

Specifically, stock perps serve two core functions for traders and curators:

To recap, DeFi is currently experiencing a “perfect storm” of institutional-grade developments:

We’re currently in the early stages of a tokenized stock adoption cycle with the following 4 steps:

There are several key players in this process, which can be split into tokenized stock issuers, lending platforms, and derivative platforms. Of course, as the market for tokenized stocks grows, more types of players will become involved.

While Ondo has captured more attention recently due to their tokenized stocks, its initial products were stablecoins. 

Specifically, Ondo offers 2 stablecoins: 

Both tokens are backed by liquid assets such as short-term Treasuries via institutional money market funds run by BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, and more.

While the assets backing these stablecoins are very similar, the key difference is their regulatory treatment. 

OUSG adheres to the relatively-strict US-based compliance standards, enabling qualified investors within the US to purchase tokens. 

On the other hand, USDY is offered under regulation S exemption, which means it can be created and managed in the US, but can only be offered to investors outside the US. While USDY is targeted towards a global investor base, regulations in some jurisdictions may still prohibit ownership.

Ondo’s Global Markets platform is where users can access hundreds of individual tokenized stocks and ETFs. 

Their tokenization process converts demand into tokenized assets in real time via RFQ (request-for-quote) trading infrastructure. 

Here’s how it works:

So far, Global Markets has attracted over 70,000 individual asset holders around the world. 

While the platform is not yet accessible in the US, Ondo recently filed a registration statement with the SEC, which would make Ondo Global Markets tokenized stocks and ETFs the first of such assets to meet SEC requirements. This would enable investors in the US and other prohibited regions to have access to Ondo products for the first time.

As stock tokenization becomes more pervasive, we’re starting to see the first signs of onchain public offerings. That’s where Ondo Global Listing comes in. 

The Global Listing platform enables tokenization of newly-listed stocks on their IPO day, bringing immediate access to blockchain users around the world. A recent example of this was demonstrated with the BitGo IPO; tokenized shares were seamlessly available for trading on Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain.

Euler Finance

Morpho

Before xStocks came about, BackedFi had been attempting to break into the tokenization space since 2021. Their initial products included short-term government debt from the US and Eurozone, which peaked at a combined $62.3B in February 2024. 

Their breakthrough moment came in June 2025 with the launch of xStocks.

Just 9 months ago, the concept of a tokenized stock exchange was still extremely new. Other early platforms like Dinari and STOKR existed, but hadn’t gained meaningful traction; their combined AUM was only ~$31M. 

xStocks was able to achieve instant success by being the first projects to launch a retail-focused platform where users around the world could buy tokenized shares (backed 1:1 by actual shares). The fact that xStocks was the first such app to launch on Solana – one of the fastest, cheapest, and most popular blockchains in the industry – also helped gain traction early on.

Less than 6 months after xStocks launched, its parent company, BackedFi, was acquired by Kraken. Not only does this show that large crypto exchanges see significant demand for tokenized stocks, but it also gives Kraken’s 5M+ funded accounts direct access to xStocks.

Despite having a lower AUM than Ondo Global Markets, xStocks has generated more than twice the volume ($26B+ to $12B+) and have more unique holders (84K+ vs 70K+). 

A key reason for this outperformance is their focus on Solana, which has a massive base of active traders.

The process of trading xStocks works the same way as Ondo Global Markets; users can enter an order for a wide variety of stocks, that order gets routed to a market maker, who then fills the order in live stock market trading. The market maker sends the traditional shares to a custodian, and an equivalent amount of tokenized shares are minted for the xStocks user.

Kraken

Kamino

Falcon Finance

PiggyBank

The unique combination of permissionlessness, composability, and programmability make blockchains a perfect place to not only trade stocks, but also use them in lending, customized strategies, and more.

In recent months, not only have stocks become able to trade onchain, but new use cases are already beginning to emerge – and there’s still a long way to go! Pioneers like Ondo and xStocks are leading the pack early on, and it will be interesting to see how the space evolves from here.

While this is still an extremely new and small portion of DeFi, it’s exciting to see the growth in such a short period of time, and with $1B worth of stocks already tokenized, it’s clear that tokenized stocks are rapidly gaining momentum in DeFi.