a16z Crypto: Three charts to understand the development trend of tokenized stocks

Tokenized stocks are an entry point for the crypto industry into Wall Street. They are tokens built on blockchains, representing company shares, ETFs, and index products in the real world.

Unlike traditional stocks, tokenized stocks can be self-custodied in wallets, transferred permissionlessly, traded at any time, and used directly as collateral in on-chain finance.

Over the past two months, institutions including Coinbase, DTCC, the NYSE, and Robinhood have all taken actions of varying kinds—some moved trading onto-chain, some formed joint ventures, and some launched their own chain outright.

Grew more than 5x in one year; incremental growth mainly from new issuance

As of the end of June, the total market value of tokenized stocks was about $1.7 billion. A year earlier it was $329 million, representing a gain of more than 5x. Among all tokenized assets (i.e., what’s commonly referred to as RWA), this is one of the fastest-growing categories.

The question is how much of this growth comes from new issuance versus price appreciation of the underlying stocks themselves.

Stablecoin accounting is straightforward: one token equals one dollar, and circulating supply directly reflects demand. Tokenized stocks track the price of their underlying stocks, so the market value number cannot neatly separate “how many new tokens were minted” from “old tokens being repriced.”

Existing evidence points to new issuance. In today’s market cap, more than half comes from assets that weren’t yet on-chain a year ago. The remainder mostly came on-chain only around mid-year, when most of that underlying stock’s year-to-date gains or losses were already largely done.

The structure of tokenized stocks is being reshaped

While the market is new, its internal composition has changed a lot over the past year.

Crypto-related assets used to dominate, with their share of market cap falling from 79% a year ago to 21% in June. Replacing it is the “other” category—an extended tail composed of hundreds of smaller-volume assets—whose share rose from 15% to 35%.

The rest is also moving up. Tech giants with market caps above the one-trillion-dollar level increased their share from 0.6% a year ago to 10.6% in June. Over the same period, ETF and index products rose from 4.5% to 17.3%.

The fastest-growing segment is AI and chips. In June 2025, this category was still under $1 million—just 0.3% of the market. One year later, it had reached 15.5%.

In June, the monthly transfer volume for tokenized stocks hit $9.22 billion; the same period last year was $53 million.

This metric covers all on-chain circulation, including trading, transfers between wallets, and deposits into DeFi protocols as collateral.

Wall Street accelerates onboarding to chain

In the past month, the DTCC completed its first batch of production-environment transactions for tokenized U.S. Treasuries and stocks on Digital Asset’s Canton Network. A more complete tokenization services plan is scheduled to go live in October, at which point Wall Street will have a direct pipeline connected to roughly $1.14 million亿美元 in assets held via DTC custody.

In early July, Robinhood’s own mainnet went live, putting traditional markets, crypto assets, and real-world assets on the same open network.

On June 22, the parent company of the NYSE, Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), announced a joint venture with OKX, planning to offer tokenized NYSE-listed stocks to users, still pending regulatory approval.

A week earlier, on June 16, Coinbase said it would provide 1:1 fully backed U.S. stock tokens to non-U.S. users, complete with dividends, full shareholder rights, and 24/7 trading. A few days before that, Binance had already launched its own version.

Compared with traditional stocks, tokenized stocks are still small in size—the latter’s monthly trading volume is on the scale of tens of trillions of dollars. But the trend is clear: more issuers and platforms are moving stocks onto-chain, and this category is still growing.