#Gate携手Alpaca链接数字资产与股票金融交易

Alpaca, what exactly is it?
Founded in 2015, Alpaca is headquartered in California, USA. Its founders are former Lehman Brothers employee and serial entrepreneur Yoshi Yokokawa (currently CEO) and engineer Hitoshi Harada (currently CPO). Alpaca adopts the common remote, distributed work model in the crypto industry, with over 250 employees across 25 countries. Initially, Alpaca was a startup focused on financial databases and machine learning, dedicated to developing technology capable of running and processing large market data sets for prediction.
In the early days, Alpaca’s main product was a trading API aimed at quantitative traders. But as the business expanded, the company gradually evolved from a simple trading interface provider to a comprehensive financial infrastructure provider. It now supports trading of stocks, ETFs, options, cryptocurrencies, and other asset classes, while also offering market data, securities lending, high-yield cash accounts, 24/5 US stock trading, and more. According to FundBet data, since 2019, Alpaca has raised over $320 million in total funding, with investors including Y Combinator, Spark Capital, Portage Ventures, Tribe Capital, SBI Group, and other well-known institutions.
Completed seed funding in 2019;
Raised $10 million in Series A in 2020;
Completed two consecutive Series B rounds in 2021 and 2022;
Raised $52 million in Series C in 2025;
Secured an additional $150 million in Series D at the beginning of 2026, with a valuation of approximately $1.1 billion.
According to official disclosures, Alpaca currently serves hundreds of financial institutions and fintech companies in over 40 countries and regions, helping partners open more than 7 million brokerage accounts.
A more precise positioning: “Brokerage as a Service”
Unlike traditional brokerages that directly serve end investors, Alpaca’s core clients are developers, fintech companies, and other brokerage institutions. Alpaca’s Broker API helps partners quickly build complete securities trading systems, including account opening, KYC, account management, order execution, clearing and settlement, and market data services.
In simple terms, if Bn, Bit, Gate, or Ondo want to enable their users to trade US stocks, they theoretically need to solve issues like brokerage licenses, compliance review, stock custody, clearing and settlement, market data, order routing, and more. These tasks are expensive and complex. Alpaca offers a comprehensive API-based solution, allowing developers to simply call interfaces and integrate these complex backend capabilities with “one click.” In a sense, this is more like a “Brokerage as a Service” model.
With Alpaca’s path support, platforms like Gate and Ondo only need to handle traffic and users, while all backend work connecting to real-world securities markets can be delegated to Alpaca.
First-mover advantage and network effects
At this point, you might wonder, why do crypto institutions favor Alpaca? Can’t other brokerages do the same?
Indeed, the US regulated financial market is not short of brokerages. According to FINRA data, there are thousands of registered brokerages in the US, with traditional giants like Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers, and Fidelity holding far greater brand influence and asset size globally than Alpaca. However, when the wave of stock tokenization began to rise, it was not these Wall Street old-timers that dominated, but rather Alpaca, which was founded just over a decade ago. The reason may be that Alpaca was never a traditional brokerage from the start. For traditional brokerages, clients are investors; for Alpaca, clients are developers. Alpaca’s product design is almost entirely API-centric, allowing developers to quickly access full capabilities like account opening, KYC, order execution, clearing and settlement, and market data through simple API calls. This “API First” philosophy aligns well with platforms like Gate and Ondo that want to embed securities trading functions into their own trading platforms or protocols.
Compared to many traditional financial institutions that are cautious about the crypto industry, Alpaca was one of the earliest licensed brokerages in the US to actively embrace digital assets and tokenization narratives. Even before stock tokenization became a market hot topic, Alpaca had already begun establishing connections with the crypto industry and exploring ways to integrate securities markets with blockchain technology. This first-mover advantage, combined with industry fit, is the core reason Alpaca has secured its current market position. Today, as more CeFi and DeFi players choose Alpaca’s infrastructure, the network effects built around Alpaca are further strengthening its moat. For newcomers, choosing Alpaca means the fastest onboarding and the most mature compliance pathways, creating a virtuous cycle: more platforms connect to Alpaca—bringing more accounts and trading volume—driving Alpaca to further improve products and infrastructure—attracting more entrants to connect… Stock tokenization is clearly the trend of the future.
Within this track, it’s still uncertain how many Gate or Ondo-like platforms will emerge, but one thing is becoming clearer: as more platforms compete for the stock token market, the biggest beneficiary in this race might be the one selling “shovels” to all platforms.