Everyone’s a Stock Exchange Now

Coinbase put thirteen US stocks onchain, Binance built its equity business on the same infrastructure and a tokenised-stock market worth $2.5 billion took shape. But nearly all of it runs through one custodian and settles offshore, which tells you where the real contest is.

Executive Brief

This was a week when tokenised equities took a meaningful step forward, out of press release novelty and into the realm of being a market. Coinbase launched tokenised versions of thirteen US stocks natively on its Base blockchain - from Apple, Nvidia and Meta to Tesla, MicroStrategy and Circle - each backed one-to-one by a real share held in regulated custody. Binance, the largest exchange in the world, deepened its own equity push through the same infrastructure partner. The tokenised-stock market now stands at roughly $2.48 billion across 2.1 million holders, and Citigroup’s estimate that it could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030 is the number the industry is now organising around.

The surface story is competition: Coinbase joining Kraken, Binance, Ondo and Backed in a race to bring equities onchain. The more useful story is concentration. Nearly every one of these products, Coinbase’s new tokens, Binance’s bStocks, Ondo’s and Backed’s offerings, depends on a single broker-custodian, Alpaca, which holds roughly 94% of the market for tokenised US stock and ETF custody. The venues proliferate, the plumbing does not and almost all of it is issued offshore. Note that Coinbase’s venue sits under Abu Dhabi rules, available only to non-US investors, because the domestic regulatory framework that would let this happen at home does not yet exist.

That combination - many front-ends, one custodian, all offshore - is the real state of tokenised equities today and it frames the question that is pertinent for institutions. The retail-facing launches are the visible layer, but the decisive developments are happening underneath; in who controls custody and settlement, and whether the incumbent US market infrastructure comes online to bring this business onshore. On that second question, the most important date this autumn is in October, and it belongs to an institution that has said little while everyone else launched products.

Key Developments

A. Tokenised Markets

1. Coinbase puts thirteen US stocks onchain and the market reveals its shape

What happened: Coinbase launched tokenised US equities natively on Base, its layer-2 blockchain, on 24 August. The initial roster runs to thirteen names, including Apple, Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, MicroStrategy and Circle, issued under Base’s B20 token standard with Chainlink providing price data across roughly 50 Base applications. Each token represents a direct claim on the underlying share, not a synthetic derivative: institutional market makers buy the real shares, which Alpaca Securities, an SEC-registered broker-dealer, holds in a bankruptcy-remote structure, with tokens issued through a Coinbase SPV incorporated in Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and offered only to eligible investors outside the US under Regulation S. The broader tokenised-equity market has reached roughly $2.48 billion in value across 2.1 million holders, with Ondo, Backed’s xStocks and Binance’s bStocks together controlling around 77% of it. Citigroup has estimated the tokenised-securities market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030.

Our View: Two things about this launch matter more than the tickers. First, the structure is the product: a token that is a direct, custodied claim on a real share, composable across onchain applications, is a genuinely different instrument from the synthetic price-exposure products that came before, and it is the model the market is converging on. Second, and less remarked, Coinbase entered this market fourth and offshore. The largest US-regulated crypto exchange could not launch this product to US customers, so it built it under Abu Dhabi rules for non-US investors, because Base itself has drawn the parallel to the 2018 launch of USDC, a product that also began at the regulatory margin before becoming core infrastructure. The strategic read is that tokenised equities have clearly arrived as a market, but they have arrived in the wrong jurisdiction for the institutions that will ultimately drive them, and the gap between where the product is and where the regulated capital sits is the defining feature of the sector right now.

2. The hidden concentration: one custodian behind most of the market

What happened: Binance advanced its tokenised-equity business, bStocks, built on the brokerage infrastructure of Alpaca, the same custodian behind Coinbase’s new tokens and behind Ondo and Backed’s xStocks. Alpaca holds approximately 94% market share in the custody of tokenised US stocks and ETFs. Binance has disclosed a minority equity stake in Alpaca alongside a revenue-sharing arrangement, and bStocks, launched only in July, has already attracted 300,000 users and $14.7 billion in trading volume. Binance brings more than 300 million users to the segment.

Our View: This is the structural fact the individual launch announcements obscure. A market that looks like vigorous competition at the front-end, Coinbase versus Binance versus Kraken versus Ondo, rests on a single custody provider holding 94% of the underlying share custody. For institutions assessing tokenised equities, that concentration is the risk that should be noted, and it is invisible if you read each launch in isolation. It creates a single point of operational and regulatory dependency beneath a market being announced as decentralised and diversified. Binance taking an equity stake in Alpaca is the tell that the sophisticated players understand where the value and the leverage actually sit: not in the consumer-facing token brand, but in the custody and brokerage layer connecting onchain distribution to real securities. The venue is a commodity; the custodian is the choke point. When institutions eventually enter this market at scale, the concentration question, and the search for regulated alternatives to a single offshore-adjacent custodian, will be near the top of their diligence.

B. Stablecoins & Payments

3. Revolut and Standard Chartered take opposite routes into bank stablecoins

What happened: Two contrasting bank-linked stablecoin moves landed in the same week. Revolut is preparing EURR, a euro-denominated stablecoin issued under MiCA through Stripe-owned Bridge, to be integrated directly into its retail app for its 80 million-plus customers and supported across external wallets, with wider European Economic Area availability planned for later in 2026. Separately, Standard Chartered became the first bank to distribute HKDAP, the Hong Kong dollar stablecoin issued by Anchorpoint, a Standard Chartered joint venture, under Hong Kong’s new licensing regime. In the US, the Stripe-owned Bridge also launched FedNow offramps in beta, enabling instant 24/7 payouts to eligible bank accounts.

Our View: These are two distinct playbooks for the same conclusion - that regulated banks intend to issue rather than cede stablecoin ground. Revolut’s is a distribution play: a euro stablecoin pushed to 80 million existing retail customers inside an app they already use, betting that reach beats being first. Standard Chartered’s is an infrastructure play: a licensed HKD stablecoin built through a joint venture, aimed at the institutional and market-infrastructure use cases Hong Kong is courting, following the same pattern we noted with its Euroclear and Swift work. The common thread is that the stablecoin market’s next phase is non-dollar and bank-issued, and the competitive question is whether distribution scale (Revolut) or regulatory and institutional depth (Standard Chartered) proves the more durable advantage. Bridge, quietly powering both EURR and US FedNow rails, is the infrastructure winner regardless of which bank model prevails.

4. World Liberty Financial’s USD1 launches natively on Canton

What happened: World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin, with a supply of around $4 billion, launched natively on the Canton Network, positioning it as a cash leg for atomic settlement of tokenised assets, derivatives collateral and lending on the network. Canton is a blockchain designed for regulated institutional finance, with privacy controls that let counterparties transact without exposing positions to a public ledger.

Our View: Set aside the issuer, whose political associations are not something we assess, and the mechanism warrants attention: a multi-billion-dollar stablecoin deploying as the settlement cash leg on an institutional network is a different proposition from a retail payment token. Canton’s value proposition is precisely atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement with counterparty privacy, the requirements institutional funding and collateral markets have and public chains struggle to meet, and a large stablecoin providing the cash side of that equation is a necessary piece of the infrastructure. It is a further data point in a theme we have tracked: high-value, privacy-sensitive institutional settlement activity is increasingly landing on purpose-built networks rather than public chains, even as the retail-facing tokenisation covered above proliferates on Solana, Ethereum, Base and the rest. The two layers are diverging by design, but this remains one of the most interesting angles to follow in the institutional digital asset adoption curve.

C. Market Structure

5. BitGo acquires NYDIG’s institutional trading business

What happened: BitGo acquired NYDIG’s institutional trading business, adding derivatives, structured products, financing and capital-markets capabilities to its existing custody, settlement and wallet infrastructure. The acquisition follows BitGo’s recent expansion of its regulated custody and staking footprint.

Our View: This is consolidation toward the integrated model we have flagged as the winning shape in institutional digital-asset services. BitGo is assembling custody, settlement, staking and now trading, derivatives and financing under one regulated roof - the same convergence logic behind Citi’s integrated custody launch last week. Institutions do not want a separate counterparty for each function; they want custody, execution and financing from a provider that already holds their assets under a single set of controls. Each acquisition of this kind narrows the field toward a small number of full-stack institutional providers and raises the competitive bar for anyone offering custody alone. The direction is clear: the standalone custody business is becoming a full-service prime brokerage business, and the firms that get there first will hold the institutional relationships.

Focus Signal: The market is offshore. In October, the onshore layer switches on.

Everything in this week’s tokenised-equity story shares one characteristic that should shape how institutions read it: it is happening offshore, or at the regulatory margin, because the core US market infrastructure for tokenised securities is not yet live. Coinbase issues from Abu Dhabi to non-US investors. The dominant custodian sits at the edge of the regulated perimeter. The products are real and growing, but they are being built around the absence of domestic institutional infrastructure, not through it. That is about to change, and the change is the most important near-term development in this theme.

In October, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, the entity that clears and settles the overwhelming majority of US securities trades and custodies over $114 trillion in assets, is scheduled to launch its tokenisation service into broader production. This follows a live pilot on 15 July in which the DTCC processed real production trades of tokenised stocks, ETFs and US Treasuries: JPMorgan converted Invesco QQQ holdings into tokenised form and used them as collateral to meet CME margin requirements, and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF was tokenised during the event. The service operates under an SEC no-action letter granted in December 2025, tokenises assets already held in DTC custody while preserving their existing legal ownership rights, and has been developed with a working group now exceeding 100 firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. It is worth noting that the July pilot ran conversions across both a private network and Canton, the same institutional network appearing elsewhere in this week’s coverage.

The contrast with the retail tokenised-equity market is the strategic point. The offshore products put a claim on a share into a wallet. The DTCC’s service puts tokenisation inside the settlement layer that the entire US securities market already runs through, which makes a tokenised asset fungible with the conventional market rather than a parallel product beside it. One is a new venue; the other is an upgrade to the plumbing. For institutions, the practical implication is that the tokenised-equity activity generating headlines today - offshore, single-custodian, non-US - is the early and less consequential half of the story. The half that determines whether tokenised securities become genuine institutional infrastructure is whether the incumbent settlement system brings the capability onshore, at scale, with existing legal protections intact. That test begins in October. The DTCC’s launch, and the early evidence of which assets and which firms actually transact on it, should be treated as a more important signal of institutional tokenisation than any number of exchange product launches. The exchanges are competing for the retail investor, while the DTCC is deciding whether tokenisation enters the core of the US market at all.

One caution worth holding: the DTCC’s own pilot terms have been deliberately narrow, with tokenised entitlements initially not counting for collateral or settlement purposes at DTC during the earliest phase, so the October launch is a beginning rather than a finished market. The direction matters more than the first day’s scope. -but the direction is the focal point.

Yield & Staking Watch

A standing section tracking where institutional yield is actually being built.

Tokenised credit reaches new collateral markets. Bybit expanded its RWA Earn platform with nOPAL, a Plume-based tokenised credit product giving USDC holders access to Brazilian credit-card receivables. This continues the pattern of tokenisation moving up the risk and complexity curve, from Treasuries and money-market funds toward structured credit and emerging-market receivables, where the yield is higher and the diligence burden is correspondingly greater. The standing question applies: the yield on tokenised emerging-market consumer credit is real, but so is the credit risk, and the wrapper does not change the underlying exposure.

Coinbase’s tokens gain collateral utility. Coinbase’s new tokenised stocks integrate Chainlink price feeds specifically to enable future use as collateral across Base’s DeFi applications, where holders could borrow against equity positions. This is the same collateral-mobility argument that gives tokenised assets an advantage over their conventional equivalents, now extended to individual equities. It is also where the risk compounds: a tokenised stock posted as DeFi collateral combines equity price risk, smart-contract risk and the single-custodian dependency noted above. The functionality is genuinely new; the risk stack is genuinely deeper.

A DeFi exploit, as a reminder. An attacker drained roughly 2,843 ETH and 1.68 million USDC from a Term Finance vault, about 68% of its assets, prompting the protocol to shut the product and remove governance permissions. As institutional interest in onchain yield grows, incidents like this are the standing reminder that smart-contract risk is not a tail risk in this market but a recurring operational reality, and that the yield premium on many onchain products is partly compensation for exactly this exposure.

The Scorecard

We keep score on our own calls. Recent positions, updated:

Tokenised equities as a maturing market(tracked as launches accumulated through the summer): Now unambiguous. A $2.48 billion market across 2.1 million holders, with the largest US and global exchanges all live, confirms tokenised equities have crossed from experiment to market. Our added observation this week: the market’s competition is at the front-end while its dependency is concentrated in a single custodian.

The incumbents absorbing tokenisation through existing infrastructure(a standing thesis, reinforced by Euroclear, Swift and Citi last week): On track for its most important test. The DTCC’s October launch is the clearest instance yet of tokenisation entering incumbent settlement infrastructure rather than running beside it. See Focus Signal.

Non-dollar, bank-issued stablecoins as the next frontier(noted with Anchorpoint and others): Confirmed and broadening. Revolut’s MiCA euro stablecoin and Standard Chartered’s HKD stablecoin in the same week show banks pursuing non-dollar issuance through both distribution-led and infrastructure-led models.

Consolidation toward integrated institutional providers(flagged with Citi’s integrated custody): Continuing. BitGo acquiring NYDIG’s trading business is another step toward a small number of full-stack custody-to-financing providers.

What We’re Watching

• The DTCC tokenisation service launch in October, and specifically which assets and which firms transact on it in the first weeks, as the real test of onshore institutional tokenisation
• Whether the single-custodian concentration beneath tokenised equities draws regulatory attention or prompts institutions to seek regulated custody alternatives
• Uptake of Revolut’s EURR across its retail base, and whether distribution scale or regulatory depth proves the stronger stablecoin advantage
• Adoption of USD1 and other stablecoins as settlement cash legs on Canton, as a measure of institutional-network traction
• Further consolidation among institutional custody-and-trading providers following BitGo’s NYDIG acquisition
• Whether the US regulatory framework for tokenised securities advances enough to let offshore-issued products come onshore

The Institutional Digital Assets Weekly is produced by Giltspur Research from our proprietary research engine and intelligence platform, drawing on verified regulatory, institutional and market sources.

Giltspur is a London-based research and advisory firm specialising in the institutional adoption of digital assets and distributed ledger technology. We provide independent advice, research and education to financial institutions at every stage of their digital asset journey. For enquiries: info@giltspur.co.uk

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Originally published on Substack