By Zhou, ChainCatcher
Over the past few months, the tokenized stock trade has become crowded fast. Issuers are placing products in more venues, crypto exchanges are building their own issuance brands, and broker-linked access routes are coming online one after another.
A tokenized stock usually reaches users through three steps: issuance, distribution, and clearing and settlement. Those functions are separate in theory, but there is no fixed rule on who handles each layer or how many layers one company can take on. On the surface, everyone is chasing the same group of users looking for on-chain equity exposure. The real fight is unfolding between those three layers.
The leaderboard has shifted as newer entrants climb
According to RWA.xyz data cited in the report, the tokenized stock market was worth about $2.5 billion as of Aug. 12. Ondo ranked first with about $866 million and a 34.6% share. Binance’s bStocks moved into second with about $614 million, or 24.53%, ahead of xStocks at $560 million and 22.37%. The top three together controlled about 80% of the market.
That ranking reflects two generations of players. Ondo and xStocks were earlier independent issuers that secured their position by getting products to market first. bStocks, by contrast, is a Binance-built issuance brand. It reached nearly a quarter of the market in less than two months and overtook xStocks despite joining later.
Further down the list, the split is even clearer. Securitize, which listed on the New York Stock Exchange through a SPAC merger in July, ranked fourth with a 10.56% share and was the only public company among the group. Robinhood posted 145.4% growth over the past 30 days, the fastest pace among all platforms mentioned in the report. Figure, meanwhile, saw distributed value fall by more than 60% over the same period, leaving it at 2.89%.
The report breaks the market down by function and looks at how each group of players is trying to capture that demand.
Independent issuers: defend, turn into infrastructure, or add rights
The position of independent issuers is easier to see over a longer timeline.
At the start of this year, the market was still dominated by three firms. Total size stood at $682 million, with Ondo holding 45.51%, xStocks at 26.88%, and Securitize at 19.48%. Combined, the three accounted for more than 90% of the market.
By early June, the market had grown to $1.68 billion, and Ondo at one point controlled more than 60%.
Now the structure looks different. Market size has reached $2.5 billion, while Ondo’s share has fallen from above 60% to 34.36%, and xStocks has dropped to 21.76%.
The sector has nearly tripled in roughly half a year. Independent issuers are still growing in absolute terms, but the market share they gave up has been absorbed by in-house issuance brands launched by exchanges that entered later.
The reason is straightforward. Issuers do not come with built-in users or liquidity. They still need other people’s channels to distribute their products.
Under that pressure, leading firms have chosen very different paths.
Ondo: positioning itself as infrastructure others can plug into
Ondo remains the market leader. Its approach is to become infrastructure that can be widely integrated. Mechanically, it does not rebuild liquidity on its own. Instead, partner U.S.-licensed brokers buy the corresponding real shares, while minting, redemption and arbitrage are used to keep the on-chain price close to the U.S. cash equity price. In practice, that lets Ondo inherit liquidity from traditional markets.
On distribution, Ondo has pushed a multichain strategy across Ethereum, BNB Chain and Solana, using LayerZero for unified cross-chain connectivity. The aim is to make the asset callable in as many places as possible rather than keeping it confined to one platform.
The report points to Dinari as the far end of that model. Dinari eventually focused only on API access and dropped the retail brand route. It is now live in 85 jurisdictions and supports more than 6,000 tokenized assets, yet has accumulated only $9.7 million on its own platform.
That model captured early scale benefits, but it also exposed a weakness. Over the past 30 days, Ondo’s scale has not grown and has instead declined, while the firms behind it have been closing in.
xStocks: keep the brand, widen access, and add missing rights
xStocks has taken a middle course. It has kept its brand while expanding across venues and filling in rights that were previously missing.
On the horizontal side, it keeps adding new distribution venues. On Aug. 10, xStocks added five tokenized U.S. stock products to Hyperliquid. Before that, it had already integrated with Kraken, Bybit and Gate. Each new venue adds another layer to its distribution network.
On the vertical side, it moved to address what had been its biggest weakness. In early August, Broadridge connected its unified governance platform to xStocks, giving token holders the ability to participate in governance voting at the companies they invested in for the first time. Before that, xStocks mainly offered price exposure.
Securitize: focusing on institutions instead of fighting for retail flow
Securitize has chosen not to engage in the same close-range fight. It is the only public company among these players. In the second quarter, its tokenized assets under management reached $4.3 billion, but most of that came from tokenized funds and Treasurys. Within tokenized stocks specifically, it had only $253 million. For Securitize, retail tokenized equities are just one small part of a much larger business, and an institution-first strategy remains viable.
Whether they are building infrastructure for third-party access, expanding venues and rights, or focusing on institutional business, independent issuers still control only the issuance layer. They do not naturally own users or liquidity, and their tokens still have to be sold through other channels such as exchanges, wallets and brokerage apps.
That creates the core risk. Once a distribution channel decides to issue products itself, the issuer moves from being a partner to being a replaceable supplier.
Crypto exchanges are pulling issuance in-house
The clearest example of exchange-led issuance is Binance’s bStocks.
The report makes an important distinction: Binance is running two separate lines in this market. One is bStocks, its in-house tokenized issuance brand, which issues tokens and uses oracle-fed data to track stock prices. The other is direct stock access that lets users buy real U.S. equities with stablecoins through a brokerage channel, where the user receives actual shares.
bStocks rose to the No. 2 position in just two months, and the report attributes that speed to Binance’s existing user base and traffic. Binance co-founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao also said the rapid growth of bStocks benefited from Binance’s user base.
Bitget’s path shows why exchanges move in this direction. Its tokenized stock business launched in September 2025, and early trading was heavily concentrated in Ondo-issued assets. At that stage, Bitget handled distribution while Ondo handled issuance, and Bitget’s share on the Ondo platform once reached 89%.
By June 2026, Bitget launched its own licensed issuance platform, Reality, and started issuing rTokens that were backed 1:1 by real shares held by licensed brokers. Ondo’s role was then replaced.
This is not limited to one or two platforms. Gate has launched gStocks. Robinhood has gone a step deeper by building its own base-layer blockchain to carry its tokenized stock products, extending beyond issuance, distribution and settlement into infrastructure itself.
In substance, in-house exchange issuance means reclaiming a layer that had previously been outsourced to independent issuers.
Broker-linked access: users are paying up for real shares
The user demand behind all this is fairly plain. A typical user wants to buy U.S. stocks in a familiar venue and would rather own something with a real underlying asset than a price symbol with no direct ownership attached.
On that point, broker-connected access to real shares has a built-in advantage. Users receive the actual shares held through licensed clearing brokers, with SIPC protection, dividends and corporate action rights. What they get is ownership.
That stands apart from token issuance models such as bStocks, where holders do not directly own the underlying shares. Binance’s U.S. stock spot product, launched in early June, opened access to more than 7,000 U.S. stocks and ETFs for non-U.S. users. Trades are arranged by broker Nest Trading, while Alpaca handles custody and dividends. Users receive direct ownership of real shares.
The data cited in the report are striking. In the first nine days after launch, Binance’s cash equity product averaged about $143 million in daily trading volume. During the same period, the tokenized spot market peaked at only about $35 million to $40 million on active weekdays. On the same platform, with the same user base, users put three to four times more capital into real shares than into tokenized spot products.
Binance is not alone in this model, and the regulated clearing side is becoming concentrated. Gate launched Gate Stocks on June 1, using Alpaca for self-clearing with SIPC protection, covering more than 10,000 U.S. stocks and ETFs, and becoming the first crypto exchange to directly support Hong Kong and South Korean equities. Coinbase launched stock trading in the U.K. on Aug. 6 under Financial Conduct Authority authorization, with Apex Clearing providing U.S. custody. Crypto.com on Aug. 12 introduced a product tracking 1,500 U.S. stocks, also using Alpaca as the underlying custodian.
The report does not argue that tokenization has no value. Its value sits in areas that direct stock ownership cannot easily offer: self-custody, 24/7 trading, transferability, and most importantly composability. Once xStocks was integrated into Hyperliquid, for example, those assets could be used as collateral for lending, creating an on-chain loop where spot and perpetual products sit on the same chain. Traditional brokerage structures struggle to reproduce that setup.
A different path could reset the whole structure
For now, most of these products, whether tokenized stocks or broker-linked spot access, are still tracking certificates or ownership mappings that bring already listed equities on-chain.
At their core, on-chain assets remain shadows of real shares.
But another route is already being tested. Instead of turning a stock into a shadow instrument, the token could become the registered share itself. The report cites Superstate’s Opening Bell as one example, designed to let listed companies place already registered common shares directly on-chain. Coinbase, meanwhile, has obtained an Abu Dhabi Global Market, or ADGM, license to register and issue securities directly within a regulatory framework.
That path runs on a completely different set of rules from the tracking-certificate model. If it works, the premise behind today’s contest changes. The current struggle over who gets to issue the shadow and who gets to distribute it would no longer define the market in the same way, and the roles of issuers, exchanges and brokers could be reshuffled again.
For that reason, the latest leaderboard, the changing shares and the replacement of one player by another capture only the market structure of this moment. They do not settle what the end state will look like. The real dividing line may still be ahead.