ChainCatcher reported that Decentralised.co, in a discussion of pathways for equities to move on-chain, said traders and investors now hold more than $6 billion in on-chain stock exposure through tokenized products and synthetic perpetual contracts.
The report said the total market capitalization of stock tokens across chains stands at $3.21 billion, up 10% over the past 30 days. Open interest in stock, index, and ETF perpetual contracts on trade.xyz was listed at $3.01 billion, or 94% of the entire stock-token market.
Four stages for equities moving on-chain
Decentralised.co divided the process into four stages. Most products on the market today are still offshore wrapped certificates. The next stage is for those assets to be used as collateral. After that, brokers would tokenize shares that users already hold. The final stage would be companies registering the shares themselves on-chain.
The article said most stock tokens do not carry voting rights or legal ownership of the shares, and are better understood as debt instruments.
How the Robinhood structure works
Using Robinhood as an example, the piece said an affiliated entity purchases the shares and a custodian holds them, after which users are issued a debt security corresponding to one share. Dividend reinvestment and stock splits would adjust the number of shares represented by that security.
If the issuer cannot perform, a security agent would sell the shares and pay holders. Authorized minters can maintain the price through arbitrage only during limited windows.
Address growth and holdings distribution
Among the top 100 tokenized stocks, market size rose from $2.09 billion to $3.03 billion over 90 days. The number of holding addresses increased from 417,000 to 4.21 million, with Binance and Robinhood accounting for 86% of the new addresses.
About 97.5% of addresses hold less than $100, while exchanges and large wallets account for most of the value.
Borrowing rates against tokenized stock collateral
Borrowing rates against related stock-token collateral on Kamino, Jupiter Lend, and Ether.fi were about 4% to 5.75%.