Tokenized stocks are coming, whether US regulators like them or not

• Key insight: Foreign investors are gobbling up tokenized U.S. equities while domestic investors remain unable to take advantage of the opportunities such assets offer. U.S. policymakers need to level the playing field.
• What's at stake: The rest of the world is already benefiting from on-chain rails, while the U.S. lags behind.
• Supporting data: In 2025, tokenized stocks grew 3,000 percent, from $32 million to start the year to around $1 billion by year's end.

The growth of stablecoins has been meteoric. Adjusted to control for authentic payment activity, they were responsible for $15 trillion in total volume in the last 12 months alone. That's more volume than Visa processed in 2025. Stablecoins have cemented the U.S. dollar as the default financial product of the digital economy. Now, another wave is coming: The $60+ trillion U.S. equity market is getting tokenized.

The same infrastructure that carried the dollar on-chain is now poised to bring U.S. equities to investors globally. And tokenizing equities does not simply mean putting them on blockchains. This is what investors will be able to do with equities because they are now on blockchains. The composability of blockchains allows equities to be lent, used as collateral, posted as margin, financed against and traded 24/7. These benefits drive better returns and capital efficiency for investors. 

While U.S. Fidelity and Robinhood users, for example, might need some convincing, it's a different story overseas. More than 80% of the world, over 6 billion people, does not have traditional access to U.S. markets. For the first time in history, with stablecoins in hand, global investors sit one-click away from the world's largest equity market.

In 2025, tokenized stocks grew 3,000 percent, from $32 million to start the year to around $1 billion by year's end. And the growth has not slowed down. Ondo Finance, the largest issuer of on-chain stocks, has now tokenized over $1 billion of U.S. equities. That's double the $500 million that Ondo started this year with and is growing faster on a relative basis than stablecoins did over the same stretch.

Across all issuers, the category passed $1.54 billion by late May, spread across nearly 280,000 wallets, with Ondo making up roughly 60%. But the traders are not in New York. The two biggest issuers, Ondo and Kraken's xStocks, operate under Regulation S, a U.S. securities exemption barring American investors. Their users sit in Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Africa and parts of Europe. Every tokenized U.S. stock today is officially owned by an investor outside America.

But the entire category is still a rounding error compared to a U.S. equity market worth roughly $69 trillion. Tokenized stocks currently represent just two-thousandths of one percent (0.002%) of the U.S. market. The growth potential, as it stands, is virtually limitless. 

For most of crypto's history, tokenized assets have been on shaky regulatory ground. And nowhere is that more true than in the United States. But that is changing. The 2025 GENIUS Act gave stablecoin issuers a clear federal framework, and helped birth the $300 billion stablecoin market we have today. GENIUS liberated the U.S. stablecoin market from regulatory uncertainty. Now all eyes are on the CLARITY Act, which, combined with the SEC's Project Crypto "innovation exemption" and the DTCC's tokenization pilot, could enable U.S. traders to access a much broader swath of tokenized assets, including equities.

The rest of the world is already benefiting from on-chain rails, while the U.S. lags behind. On-chain rails unlocks instant settlement, 24/7 liquidity and the ability to use equities as collateral across asset classes. 

Favorable U.S. regulation is not what makes tokenized equities possible. They are moving forward overseas regardless. But clear regulation ensures U.S. institutions, retail investors, and broker-dealers can continue leading, competing, and innovating in the market they built.

While overseas investors are just looking to access U.S. equities, that's not enough for those who already have access via traditional brokerages. Robinhood users, for example, don't care if the stocks are tokenized. For these investors, tokenization needs to unlock something new, and that's where the opportunity is. 

The systems built on top of tokenized stocks are the real innovation. For example, how does a user lend their assets to short sellers and earn yield? How do investors manage their assets overnight, now that trading is 24/7? Or, how do investors build cross-asset portfolios that have historically been operationally difficult and capital-inefficient? 

Tokenizing shares in Nvidia's, for example, turns them into programmable, yield-bearing collateral. Investors can then build custom portfolios of on-chain stocks, gold, corporate bonds, treasuries and crypto. Prior to tokenization, this setup would have required multiple accounts, money movements and minimum investment sizes.

Regulatory clarity on tokenization is only the beginning. It will give builders of noncustodial software the legitimacy and confidence to build the next generation of financial primitives in the United States. In the end, the goal for all regulators should be to enable one open market — permissionless and global — that anyone can access and anyone can build on.

In just a few years, stablecoins have evolved from a niche tool for settling crypto trades into critical infrastructure for global markets. Tokenized equities are next. The market is still early, but the trajectory is unmistakable: Access to U.S. assets is moving on-chain, and the billions of global investors historically locked out of U.S. markets are moving with it. Favorable U.S. regulation will bring domestic institutions, broker-dealers and retail investors into the same market already forming offshore. When that happens, U.S. equities will become as borderless as the dollar already is.