On June 12, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at $135 a share, valuing the company at ~$1.8 trillion.
On June 12, SpaceX went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at $135 a share, valuing the company at ~$1.8 trillion. It is the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever recorded.
But the more interesting part happened off the exchange. The same day, a tokenized SPCX went live on Solana, issued by Backpack and redeemable for the underlying shares.
On Gate, the tokenized SpaceX product cleared more than $100 million on day one. Before its first Nasdaq trade, more than $270 million had already moved through SPCX perpetual futures on Hyperliquid.
For years, the on-chain casino ran on altcoins. Lately, a chunk of that energy has swung toward stocks.
Red Light, Green Light
Back in 2020, Terra's Mirror Protocol let people trade synthetic versions of Tesla, Apple, and the S&P 500 as "mAssets." By May 2022, it had all unwound: Terra collapsed, Mirror got drained by a $90 million exploit, and the SEC came knocking over unregistered securities.
Despite clear demand, the industry stopped dead. Builders didn't want regulators breathing down their necks.
That changed in mid-2025, when SEC chair Paul Atkins dropped the Gensler-era habit of regulation by enforcement.
In March 2026, the agency joined the CFTC on a token taxonomy that placed only tokenized securities under SEC oversight, and by April the agency was floating an "innovation exemption" that would allow platforms to trade tokenized stocks without broker-dealer registration.
Read more: SpaceX IPO Blasts Off as Bitcoin ETF Selling Eases — Did Crypto Markets Bottom?
How a Stock Actually Gets Tokenized
Not all tokenized stocks are the same.
The dominant model is asset-backed. A regulated custodian holds real shares 1:1 and issues tokens against them through a special purpose vehicle (SPV). Backed Finance's xStocks works this way and dominates the market, with tokens on Solana, Ethereum, and other chains.
Ondo Finance takes a different route, structuring its tokens as debt instruments with a legal redemption right. Synthetic tokens, by contrast, track a price through oracles with no shares behind them—the approach Mirror took, which is now mostly out of favor. Perpetual futures, like those on Hyperliquid, are derivatives that never touch a share.
A few rules hold across most of these. You get no voting rights. Dividends rarely arrive as cash; instead, the token rebases, so your balance grows to reflect the payout. And redemption depends on the issuer: some pay cash, while a few, like Backpack's SPCX, hand back the actual shares.
That access is spreading to the wallets people already use. Trust Wallet just added Binance's bStocks, letting users swap into tokenized NVDA, TSLA, and others and put them to work across BNB Chain DeFi.
Tokenized stocks are turning up across the rest of the stack too: Kraken and Bybit list dozens of xStocks for spot trading, lending markets like Kamino take them as collateral, and perp venues like Aster accept them as margin.
And the biggest US exchange is stepping in. In mid-June, Coinbase unveiled its own tokenized stocks, backed 1:1 by real equities with automatic dividends, which CEO Brian Armstrong called real on-chain ownership, not a derivative or IOU.
So, Are Stocks Winning?
By the numbers, not yet. Individual tokenized stocks are still niche on-chain.
The most popular names do upwards of $10 million a day, though most trade a few million or less. By 24-hour volume, the top tokenized stocks barely crack the top 100 altcoins, and only about 40 of the roughly 200 trade in meaningful size.
Source: Tokenized Stocks Page (Sorted by 24h Volume)
On June 1, Binance opened real US stock trading. Not tokenized, just 7,000-plus actual shares through a regulated broker, settled in stablecoins and BNB. Within nine days, it was turning over around $143 million a day, several times the entire tokenized-equity spot market.
Tokenized equities are scaling fast, though. Their combined market cap has climbed from about $20 million in late 2024 to roughly $1.4 billion, up 114% in the last six months alone.
Daily trading volume hit a record $5.16 billion in June, mostly on Binance and Hyperliquid, and not just spot tokenized stocks, according to data from The Block.
Three of every four new real-world asset wallets opened this year went to tokenized stocks, now the largest RWA category by wallet count.
Source: CEX.io
Meanwhile, the ‘Others’ market cap (all altcoins excluding ETH) has shrunk from a peak of over $1 trillion in late 2024 to $433 billion as of writing. It is down 31.6% in the last year alone.
Source: CoinMarketCap Charts
The Altcoin Season Index sits at around 46 out of 100, well short of the 75 that signals a real altseason.
The Line Blurs Both Ways
Hyperliquid has become the main venue for trading stocks on-chain, with equity and commodity perps now about 35% of its volume and each builder that lists new markets locking up 500,000 HYPE (currently ~$37 million).
Around 99% of trading fees go to buying back HYPE, with more than $2 billion worth in cumulative token buybacks so far—enough to push the token into the top 10 by market cap. It is essentially equity in a decentralized exchange that increasingly runs on stocks.
Venice's VVV funds a similar buyback from subscription revenue. Both are valued on the cash they throw off, a sign that tokens with real revenue are starting to be judged like stocks.
Meanwhile, a few stocks now chart like meme coins. SanDisk has run up more than 700% this year to a record high above $2,000, driven by WallStreetBets crowds and leveraged single-stock ETFs. It is also one of the first names in Binance's bStocks, which launched this month.
But neither side is eating the other. Tokenized stocks hand crypto users 24/7 access to real companies; that same competition is pushing altcoins to back their valuations with revenue instead of vibes, and a handful of stocks are picking up crypto's worst habits in return. The two markets are converging.
Read more: The Pre-IPO Market, On-Chain by CoinMarketCap Research
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