Tokenized stocks and pre-IPO equity trading are becoming a larger part of the crypto market, pulling in centralized exchanges, onchain perpetual futures platforms and newer venues such as trade.xyz. These platforms increasingly sit at the intersection of a trading gateway and a liquidity hub, taking on functions that look partly like a traditional exchange and partly like a brokerage.
Still, after speaking with front-line operators, Odaily came away with a more cautious conclusion: onchain brokerage is not an easy business.
Getting into the business involves far more than putting stocks onchain
Odaily interviewed StableStock founder Zixi and other industry participants, and placed several points at the top of its report. A deep grasp of the business logic, the application for and maintenance of compliance licenses, and the ability to win user trust through the full product process all stand out as basic entry barriers.
Zixi said many people still assume an onchain brokerage mainly “packages stocks and securities onto the blockchain,” but the real operating framework is much more involved.
He said the first idea took shape in 2021 while he was studying at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, when he began thinking about buying stocks with stablecoins. After several years of preparation, and with external timing and personal resources in better shape, the team formally launched StableStock in 2025.
He described StableStock not as a traditional “onchain brokerage” or “stablecoin brokerage,” but as a new trading platform combining offchain asset packaging and settlement, onchain tokenized asset trading, and rate-arbitrage wealth products. On the securities side, clearing is handled by licensed partners. In his view, that places the company somewhere between traditional financial services and a crypto exchange.
At the operating level, Zixi said the first hurdle is understanding that the business can follow different paths. Packaging offchain stocks into onchain stock products is one route. Moving stablecoins from onchain markets into offchain settlement and then buying stocks is another. He said the team went through a series of attempts before settling on its current model, which he called “half-onchain assets plus half-offchain settlement,” a structure closer to TradFi and meant to balance efficiency with asset variety.
That choice, he said, is also why StableStock is positioned more as a long-term asset-allocation service than as a platform built primarily to earn from high-frequency user trading or liquidations.
Licenses are the first hard threshold, and maintaining them is costly
On compliance, Zixi divided the relevant qualifications into two broad groups.
- The first covers securities licenses approved by major regulators in core markets such as the United States, including SEC-registered broker-dealer status through Form BD and FINRA membership after review. These tend to support a broader business scope.
- The second includes registration-type qualifications from local regulators in places such as the United States, Australia and New Zealand, including financial service registrations and banking fiat on-ramp and off-ramp permissions.
He said StableStock has already completed U.S. MSB, or Money Services Business, registration and New Zealand FSP, or Financial Service Provider, registration. He also stressed that these are registration-type qualifications covering money services and financial services, not securities trading licenses. According to him, the team has consistently made that distinction clear to users and partners.
On securities-related approvals, he said StableStock is still working to secure higher-level compliance licenses in major markets including the United States, and will disclose confirmed progress when there is something definite to share.
The cost of compliance goes well beyond filing fees. Zixi said expenses include both external legal counsel and internal compliance staff. The former is usually paid upfront and generally runs from hundreds of thousands to several hundred thousand U.S. dollars. The latter is ongoing, with monthly costs commonly ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Another unnamed industry participant told Odaily that, in a sense, the underlying asset base is the premise on which spot-oriented tokenized stock businesses stand, including onchain brokerages that deal in U.S. equities. Derivatives businesses face looser requirements on that front. Whether the sector can stay active over time, that source said, depends on each platform’s commercial model and ability to generate its own cash flow.
Two broad models are taking shape: charging traders, or trying to earn with them
For these platforms, the central question is no longer just user education or customer growth. It is where lasting revenue will come from.
Odaily grouped the answers into two loose categories.
The first is the fee model that remains dominant among centralized exchanges and onchain perpetual futures platforms. The structure is simple: more users and more trades mean more fees.
The second is the value-added services route, which StableStock says it prefers. Revenue in that model can come from trading fees, foreign-exchange fees, interest on leveraged trading, liquidation fees and wealth-management charges. The report added that some platforms are borrowing from traditional brokerages and plan to charge for services tied to upstream assets, liquidity and user trading demand, including financing interest, spreads on idle cash, securities lending, derivatives, paid memberships, wealth management, credit cards and payments. In that sense, the approach resembles the business models used by brokerages such as Robinhood and Futu.
Even so, the line between the two is not clean.
Zixi said StableStock’s recent focus has centered on two areas. One is to keep broadening its product lineup and gradually add more quality assets from major capital markets, including South Korean and Japanese equities. The timing and scope of future listings, he said, will depend on regulatory requirements in each market and on user demand.
The second is a final round of internal testing and evaluation for what the report called a “rate-arbitrage wealth product.” If that product is cleared for launch, it will first be opened to institutional clients and later expanded to compliant, qualified retail users.
He said the product is built on a relatively mature industry mechanism that captures rate differentials across platforms, combined with StableStock’s proprietary trading strategies. The team intends to improve capital efficiency while keeping leverage size and leverage ratios under strict control, with the goal of letting both the platform and its users benefit.
For now, he said, the real work for an onchain brokerage platform is still in the basics: trading, fiat in and out, asset supply, clearing and settlement, custody and user rights. Longer term, the harder question is whether a platform can keep user capital on the platform and meet broader asset-management and financial-service demand.
Odaily’s summary was blunt. In the short run, many platforms still resemble a “casino versus customer” setup where the venue lives on transaction fees. Over time, the relationship needs to move toward finding quality assets together and sharing the returns.
CEXs, onchain perps and brokerage-style platforms are already splitting into different roles
Even though tokenized securities trading is still in its early phase, market participants are beginning to separate into distinct camps.
Binance, Bitget, Gate and Bybit are described as incumbents in transition, pushing from crypto exchange businesses toward RWA exposure and U.S. stock trading.
Hyperliquid, Aster and ecosystem projects such as trade.xyz are framed as players that rose with the momentum. Thanks to the flexibility and efficiency of derivatives, they have gathered liquidity and attention quickly, and are now competing with traditional financial markets in price discovery and in the race to set prices for quality assets.
Platforms such as StableStock look more like native RWA entrants. They are trying to expand both asset coverage and trading categories while also searching for growth through wealth yields, trading strategies and extra services.
Zixi said Hyperliquid’s diluted fee burden is lower than Binance’s, and the funding charge cycles are different as well. Odaily noted that Hyperliquid charges the relevant funding on an hourly basis, while Binance charges every eight hours at a higher rate. Because the user base is also different, he said, liquidity and profitability differ to some extent. But in terms of competitive edge, he does not see a fundamental divide between the two.
Where he does see a major divide is in unit economics. “Brokerage profits are very thin. You need to scale trading volume and scale AUM to make money. Exchanges are different. User trading, whether buy or sell, or even forced liquidation and position closing, can all contribute to profit. The business logic is completely different,” he said.
Asked which model he favors over the long run, Zixi said he is relatively more optimistic about crypto exchanges and their survival prospects. Brokerage models carry higher compliance costs and demand more capital and fundraising strength. He added one condition: that the crypto industry is still around five years from now and still bringing in a steady flow of new users.
Odaily also cited another industry participant who argued that CEXs already hold visible advantages in product updates, asset packaging, profitability and brand recognition. That person said CeDeFi could still remain the mainstream route because distribution and user accumulation matter more than small differences in protocol design. The report drew a comparison to the DeFi Summer era, saying many onchain perps and trading platforms today do not have large structural differences from one another. What matters is who controls the user entry point and who has more users.
That, the source said, is one reason many startups are focusing on the front-end application layer.
At the same time, the report said that KYC requirements and tax-related compliance under CRS 2.0 still leave room for platforms that offer anonymity, deeper round-the-clock liquidity and always-open access. For some users, those traits remain highly attractive.
The main pressure points are compliance, volatility and liquidity
Based on the interviews, Odaily highlighted three principal sources of pressure on onchain brokerages and related trading platforms.
Compliance comes first
Industry participants told the publication that any spot-oriented onchain brokerage involving underlying assets needs a licensing plan in place to reduce the risk of severe regulatory action. Zixi called compliance the “number one challenge” in the startup process, not only because of license applications and maintenance, but also because of the lasting cost of running internal and external compliance teams.
Market swings can hit both users and platform deposits
The second factor, which the report says many people overlook, is market volatility. It pointed to recent sharp corrections in South Korean and U.S. equities, saying repeated declines and prolonged turbulence have already hurt user assets on many platforms and, in turn, affected the amount of capital parked there.
From the perspective of global capital markets, the report described the recent equity drawdown as highly unusual, with volatility that can be compared with 2015-2016 and even the 2008 financial crisis. In that kind of market, platforms still have to search for new paths in user growth, asset expansion and monetization.
Liquidity remains the condition for survival
The third pressure point is liquidity, which every market and every platform depends on. Whether it is the upstream side supplying underlying assets and liquidity, or the after-hours market-making quote mechanism and the broader price-discovery process, sufficient depth is essential.
One industry participant told Odaily that over the next three to five years, traditional equity assets are likely to undergo a gradual reconstruction into onchain trading environments, with round-the-clock trading becoming a shared industry direction. That would place heavier demands on liquidity and oracle or pricing systems. To reduce the risk of abnormal price moves during low-liquidity hours, the source said, incentives for market makers outside regular trading sessions will be critical.
A real trend, but not an easy business
Odaily’s author said he had previously been highly optimistic about onchain brokerages and believed there was meaningful room in localized capital markets such as Southeast Asia, Europe and Australia, as well as in onchain derivatives and pre-market asset trading. After speaking with experienced industry participants, he said that optimism has become much more restrained.
In the current market, the report argues, onchain brokerages and, more broadly, tokenized stock trading platforms and onchain derivatives venues are hard to call good businesses. Profit structures are relatively narrow, profitability is weak by comparison, and competition from traditional brokerages and crypto exchanges is intense. In the short term, pressure shows up in wealth-creation potential, business design and user growth, while licensing and oversight from major capital-market regulators remain a serious obstacle.
One of the industry participants cited in the piece said startup teams looking to enter the space may be better off beginning with perpetual-contract products similar to trade.xyz, though that route still requires solving liquidity incentives.
Even so, the report does not dismiss the direction entirely. It says onchain brokerage, or more broadly, round-the-clock trading in onchain assets, still looks like a long-term trend. Traditional brokerages such as Futu and Robinhood are unlikely to build full end-to-end systems on their own, in Odaily’s view. A model built around holding the relevant licenses at the access layer while connecting to external onchain liquidity may emerge as a mainstream structure. Over a longer horizon, platforms that already have mature account systems and deep liquidity are also likely to remain the easier choice for users.
The final point is that the real competition is still over users and capital liquidity. Both will gather around product experience, asset variety and the promise of returns. Brokerage margins may be thin, but that does not rule out a business mix with multiple revenue streams.