Author: TT3Labs

For many digital nomads, money is usually kept on-chain, moving between time zones and countries with no fixed base. I am one of them. With tokenized US stocks, you can buy tokens of Apple or Tesla with stablecoins, keeping money on-chain and trading 24/7. Since our money is already on-chain and opening a US stock account isn't easy, this product sounds tailor-made for us. The official introductions from platforms repeatedly use the word 'inclusion.' But who exactly does this inclusion benefit? The more I look into it, the more I feel it isn't that useful for people like me; instead, the exchanges promoting it are quietly transforming their business.

In June, ahead of SpaceX's listing, Binance, Bybit, Bitget, and MEXC launched a subscription-style sale, letting users pre-order with stablecoins and receive tokens based on their allocation when the listing went live. Binance alone collected about $557 million from nearly 27,700 wallet addresses. But on listing day, almost none of these exchanges could get enough shares from the subscription, forcing mass refunds and leaving many hopeful users disappointed.

These exchanges didn't hold SpaceX shares themselves. They collected user funds first and then commissioned xStocks, an intermediary, to buy shares on the market. As the biggest IPO in history, SpaceX drew global attention, demand far outstripped supply, the intermediary couldn't buy enough shares, and the exchanges had nothing to deliver. In fact, it wasn't just crypto users who missed out—Fidelity and Charles Schwab clients also received only a small allocation, but they got something because they sourced directly from underwriters. The crypto exchanges relied on an offshore intermediary, and when that link broke, they had to return the money.

But the failed subscription shortcut didn't mean SpaceX tokens were unavailable. Once SpaceX officially listed and shares began trading publicly, the issuer could buy real shares on the market and mint tokens as usual.

Looking back, RWA (real-world assets) was made for institutions from the start

In 2022, Terra subsidized yields close to 20%, pulling massive funds into its stablecoin UST. But the returns had no real source and were only propped by subsidies. When confidence shook, UST depegged, and its sister coin LUNA hyperinflated to zero in days. Terra, once a top project, collapsed almost instantly. This taught the market that pure subsidy-driven high yields are unsustainable, and money began seeking real, non-speculative returns. The safest yield in financial markets is US Treasuries, but on-chain money couldn't access them due to traditional finance's account-opening and custody hurdles. In this context, RWA was born to bridge that gap—tokenizing assets like Treasuries so on-chain capital could earn interest without leaving the chain.

From day one, it served institutions. In 2024, BlackRock launched BUIDL, a tokenized Treasury fund with over two billion dollars in size but held by just over a hundred holders, with a minimum subscription of five million dollars. That's the starting point of RWA: serving big money.

Now, how big is RWA, especially the tokenized US stock market? No one has a very clear picture. Ondo once claimed to be the largest issuer of tokenized equities, saying it surpassed one billion dollars in scale less than eight months after launch. But for the entire RWA space, even figures from the same data source on the same day can differ by a factor of ten or more.

In June 2026, Citi Institute, the research arm of Citi, released a report forecasting tokenized assets could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030, within a range of $2.7 to $8.2 trillion. But that's a long-term projection built on assumptions: it assumes 10% of US short-term debt and 3% of the stock market will be moved on-chain by 2030.

Pegged to stocks doesn't mean owning stocks

The biggest difference between tokenized US stocks and ordinary crypto tokens is whether the price is backed by an entity. Ordinary tokens rely on sentiment and consensus; tokenized US stocks are pegged to a real US stock.

But being pegged to a stock doesn't mean you own the stock. What you hold is a certificate tracking the stock price, which may reflect price and dividends, but it's not the stock itself and usually carries no voting rights. Mainstream issuers are offshore: Ondo in the British Virgin Islands, xStocks in Jersey, none registered with the SEC, thus locking out users from the US, UK, and other jurisdictions. Your counterparty is an offshore company, not the listed firm itself. Whether it's useful to you depends on whether you can legally buy US stocks.

For those who can open an account with a regulated broker, tokenized stocks may not be the best option. The often-touted advantage is the low barrier: a few dollars can buy a fraction of a high-priced stock. But that's no longer exclusive—Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and Interactive Brokers all support fractional shares, with Interactive Brokers starting at one dollar. The remaining conveniences are 24/7 trading and keeping funds on-chain, but the trade-offs are real: you give up actual equity, the safety net of licensed brokers and investor protection, and swap a regulated institution for an offshore company as your counterparty. Convenience may improve the experience, but it hardly justifies buying an asset.

The real stage where tokenized stocks shine is for people whose local access to US stocks is blocked. In regions with foreign exchange and policy controls, ordinary people face exchange quotas and account-opening restrictions when trying to buy US stocks through formal channels. Tokenized US stocks let them gain exposure to US stock movements with stablecoins—something previously hard to achieve. It doesn't solve the issue of buying a specific stock but bypasses the original restricted purchase, allowing participation in the swings of the world's most regulated market.

Exchanges gain a new growth curve, but they may also lose something.

In the past, many assets traded on crypto exchanges had no fundamentals. A token's price depended on sentiment and consensus, meaning it could go to zero overnight or multiply in days. That extreme uncertainty was both the risk and the appeal of this market.

Tokenized US stocks put assets with fundamentals onto the shelf, letting buyers—perhaps for the first time—know with some clarity what they're buying.

The nature of the exchange business is changing. When a growing share of an exchange's revenue comes from products backed by real assets, it starts to look more and more like a blockchain-based brokerage. A brokerage is stable and long-lasting, but its returns are constrained by real-world yields; nobody describes it with boundless imagination. The business shifts from emotion-driven, narrative-fueled, and highly volatile to something grounded in real assets, comprehensible, and more stable. More stable, but no longer sexy.

The SpaceX episode earlier this month was a signal. The ones that successfully delivered tokens were those with their own sourcing capability, directly connected to underwriters. Those that stumbled had outsourced to intermediaries without such infrastructure. Whether exchanges need to grow the bones of a broker themselves—this was an early stress test.

As the business changes, so do the people needed. An exchange increasingly resembling a brokerage needs people who understand securities, compliance, and risk management, rather than primarily crypto natives who entered the industry out of passion. These two types of people are now housed in the same company, and the traditional gap between traditional finance and crypto is thinning. These changes are something industry professionals should pay attention to.

RWA was born as a tool to connect institutional on-chain capital to real yields. Retail was never its target audience. For those who can legally buy US stocks, it's not necessarily the best choice. For those blocked by rules, it offers a channel previously hard to access. It hasn't brought much that's new to ordinary people.

The market's fervor is gradually overshadowing virtual currencies, but as exchanges come to rely on this business, their allure may also fade, and this industry will no longer produce new stories of sudden wealth.

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