On June 1, Binance officially launched its long-anticipated stock trading service, opening over 8,000 U.S. stocks and ETFs to non-U.S. users with zero-commission fractional shares starting at just $5, payable in USDC, USDT, or BNB. Behind this headline-grabbing move, one crucial detail caught the industry’s attention—Binance’s brokerage partner was not a traditional Wall Street giant but a U.S. compliant platform called Alpaca, responsible for asset custody, dividend distribution, and corporate action processing. In reality, Alpaca’s footprint in the stock tokenization space is far larger than most realize: Bitget, Gate, Ondo, xStocks, and other leading crypto players are all already its clients.
Major Exchanges and DeFi Protocols Rally Behind Alpaca, Commanding 94% Market Share
On the same day as Binance’s announcement, Bitget and Gate revealed their own progress. Bitget unveiled its stock token platform Reality, issuing rTokens pegged 1:1 to underlying stocks; Bitget’s Chinese spokesperson Xie Jiayin confirmed that the brokerage layer is Alpaca. Gate launched actual stock trading services, allowing users to directly buy U.S. stocks and ETFs with USDT, and Gate official Godot also confirmed that Alpaca is its brokerage partner. The DeFi side tells the same story: Ondo, the dominant player in stock tokens, partnered with Alpaca as early as last September to tokenize U.S. equities and ETFs; its direct competitor xStocks, backed by Kraken, announced a collaboration with Alpaca last December to accelerate global distribution. According to Alpaca’s own disclosure, it has captured 94% of the tokenized U.S. stock and ETF market, essentially serving as the foundational infrastructure for the entire sector.
From Quant API to “Brokerage-as-a-Service”: Alpaca’s Evolution
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in California, Alpaca was co-founded by former Lehman Brothers employee and serial entrepreneur Yoshi Yokokawa (CEO) and engineer Hitoshi Harada (CPO). The company operates a globally distributed remote team of over 250 employees across 25 countries. Initially, Alpaca focused on financial databases and machine learning, providing trading APIs to quantitative traders. As its business expanded, it evolved from a pure interface vendor into a full-scale financial infrastructure provider, now covering stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrencies, along with market data, securities lending, high-yield cash accounts, and 24/5 U.S. trading. Since 2019, Alpaca has raised over $320 million from backers including Y Combinator, Spark Capital, Portage Ventures, Tribe Capital, and SBI Group. To date, it serves hundreds of financial institutions and fintech companies across more than 40 countries, helping open over 7 million brokerage accounts.
Unlike traditional brokers that serve end investors, Alpaca’s core customers are developers, fintech firms, and other licensed institutions. Its Broker API enables partners to rapidly build a complete securities trading system—covering account opening, KYC, order execution, clearing, settlement, and market data. For platforms like Binance or Bitget that want to offer stock trading, obtaining a brokerage license, navigating compliance, and setting up custody and clearing systems is costly and complex. Alpaca’s API-based solution turns these backend capabilities into a “one-click integration.” This model is often referred to as “Brokerage-as-a-Service,” allowing platforms to focus on user acquisition while Alpaca handles all the connections to real-world securities markets.
API-First Philosophy and First-Mover Edge: Why Crypto Firms Choose Alpaca
The U.S. financial market has no shortage of broker-dealers; thousands are registered with FINRA, and giants like Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers, and Fidelity far surpass Alpaca in brand and assets. So why has Alpaca come to dominate the stock tokenization wave? The answer lies in the fact that Alpaca was never a traditional brokerage—it was built for developers, not retail investors. Its product design is almost entirely API-centric, allowing developers to access account opening, KYC, order execution, clearing, and settlement through simple API calls. This “API First” ethos perfectly aligns with crypto platforms that need to embed securities trading into their own interfaces or protocols. Additionally, while many traditional institutions were cautious about crypto, Alpaca was among the earliest U.S. licensed brokers to actively embrace digital assets and tokenization, establishing ties with the crypto industry long before stock tokenization became a hot narrative. That combination of early mover status and deep industry fit is the core reason Alpaca seized its current market position.
Network Effects Deepen the Moat
As more CeFi and DeFi players adopt Alpaca’s infrastructure, the network effects accumulated around the platform are strengthening its competitive barriers. For latecomers, choosing Alpaca means the fastest time-to-market and the most mature compliance path, fueling a virtuous cycle: more platforms lead to more accounts and trading volume, driving Alpaca to further refine its products and infrastructure, which in turn attracts even more platforms.
Stock tokenization is an unstoppable trend. While it remains unknown how many Binances or Ondos will emerge in this rapidly expanding sector, one pattern is becoming increasingly clear: as more platforms rush into the stock token market, the company selling the “shovels” to all participants is positioned as the biggest winner of this race.
With its 94% market share and hard-to-replicate network effects, Alpaca is quietly reaping the growth dividends of the entire track as the ultimate infrastructure provider.