Behind the US stock market is on the chain: The narrative is very lively and the market is deserted. Can new wines in old bottles become the second curve engine of the bull market?

Author: Frank, PANews

The launch of the US stock market has become a hot topic in the recently deserted market.

On March 8, Swiss tokenization issuer Backed launched Coinbase stock token wbCOIN on the Base chain. Users can trade in USDC through CoWSwap and claim that it anchors the value of $COIN stock 1:1 and has legal claims. Although Backed emphasized that it has no official connection with Coinbase, this move has sparked heated discussions in the community: Will the tokenization of US stocks usher in a new growth cycle? In the face of the continued sluggish market, can stock tokenization become a new narrative for building the bottom?

Narratives come first, value later: hot and cold contrast between

tokenization of US stocks

With the pro-crypto-Trump administration coming to power, the litigation relationship between the US SEC and Coinbase ended. In early 2025, Jesse Pollak, head of the Base Agreement, said on X that Coinbase is considering introducing tokenized $COIN stocks into the Base network for US users. But it will take some time for Coinbase to launch this business in compliance.

Backed's quick action took the lead. According to official information, Backed was established in 2021 and received investment support from institutions such as Gnosis and Semantic in the early stage. Backed's headquarters and operations are mainly aimed at the global market. Its products are issued under the EU regulatory framework, comply with MiFID II compliance requirements, and have passed the EU prospectus.

However, wbCOIN is not Backed's first stock tokenization product. As early as July 2024, Backed jointly launched NVIDIA's tokenized stock trading with INX. In addition, Backed has also launched tokenized products with a variety of stock assets such as S&P 500 and Tesla. However, when these products were launched, the focus of the market was not on the topic of securities tokenization, and today's market urgently needed some reasonable narrative reconstruction of confidence.

However, it is not just because Backed's products cannot be targeted at the US market or the market is sluggish. The trading popularity after wbCOIN was launched is obviously not as popular as the topic. As of March 11, wbCOIN's TVL was about $4.42 million.

According to Aerodrome data, its trading volume is only $3,352. It is even less popular than a newly issued MEME coin.

This downturn is not just because wbCOIN is launched for a short time -another product, BNVDA, launched earlier, has a trading volume of only $113, which is also unwilling to be concerned.

Despite the hot concept, the current US stock tokenization market is still in its early stages, with very limited scale and activity. Perhaps, tokenized products from Coinbase may trigger greater trading popularity.

Tokenized US stocks: Old bottles of new wine, compliance is the primary

threshold

In fact, moving the US stock market to blockchain is not a completely new idea. Before this recent wave of attempts, the crypto industry and traditional financial institutions had already explored, but most of them ended in failure.

The FTX Exchange, which was once the most popular, also provided US stock tokenized trading services including Tesla and GameStop from 2020 to 2022. However, the crash of FTX in 2022 brought this business to an abrupt end. Afterwards, there were rumors questioning whether FTX's stock tokens held the corresponding stock in full, further undermining the market's trust in the issuance of tokenized stocks on the exchange.

In 2021, Binance also tried to launch tokenized stock products corresponding to US stocks such as Tesla, Coinbase, and Apple. Users can purchase fragmented shares of these stock tokens. However, the regulation of various countries is pressing forward. Within weeks of Binance's launch of stock tokens, financial regulators in the UK and Germany have successively warned that these products may violate securities regulations. In less than three months, Binance announced the removal of all stock tokens.

In addition, Bittrex Global, an exchange that once features to provide tokenized stock trading, also chose to close the trading platform and conduct bankruptcy liquidation after experiencing regulatory pressure and SEC litigation.

From this we can see that in the last round of attempts, compliance barriers were the main reason for the failure of the exchange's tokenization of US stock issuance. Now that the market is re-advancing the tokenization of US stocks, there are the following factors:

1. With the Trump administration's emphasis on and support for cryptocurrency, tensions between cryptocurrencies and regulation have also eased.

2. The market has entered a period of weakness, and the market needs some narrative return with real value support.

3. The technology and compliance solutions are more mature. Compared with previous wild growth, today's crypto market pays more attention to compliance design and technical guarantees. Take Backed as an example. Each of its tokens is approved by the EU before issuance, clarifying the interests of token holders in the target stock. In terms of technology, the performance of oracles and public chains has been improved by an order of magnitude.

One-thousandth of share and trillion-dollar expectations: the real

dilemma of tokenized stocks

Despite the impressive growth rate, the actual market size of tokenized stocks is still a huge gap with institutional forecasts. In essence, whether it is tokenized in US stocks or tokenized in other securities products, they can be classified as RWA asset types. However, cryptocurrencies and US stocks are both highly volatile and liquid financial assets, and the transaction scale and capital volume of US stocks, as well as the high-quality fundamentals of US stock assets are what the crypto world desires.

The industry has extremely optimistic expectations for the future of stock tokenization. Some authoritative institutions predict that the tokenized asset market can reach trillions of dollars around 2030: For example, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimates that global tokenized assets can reach $16 trillion in 2030. The Security Token Market report even predicts that $30 trillion of assets will be tokenized by 2030, with stocks, real estate, bonds and gold being the main drivers.

As of March 11, the total global RWA assets were about US$17.8 billion, of which the total value of stock assets was about US$15.43 million, accounting for less than one thousandth of the proportion, and the transaction volume for the whole month was only US$18 million. Obviously, in the RWA track, stock tokenization is still an immature market.

However, from the perspective of growth rate and risk resistance, tokenized stocks still have certain competitiveness. In July 2024, the total on-chain value of tokenized stocks was only about US$50 million, an increase of about three times in half a year. This growth rate is significantly higher than the increase in funds of other counterfeit assets during the same period.

Recently, the crypto market has ushered in a sharp pullback, with Bitcoin falling below 80,000. The market value of the entire crypto market has been pulled back to the level in the first half of 2024, with a decline of 30% in the past three months. However, tokenized stocks performed significantly better during the same period and remained at historical highs. It can be seen that the overall fluctuations of the US stock market are much less affected by a single asset than the crypto market. The fluctuations of different categories of assets are not synchronized, resulting in the overall market looking more stable. This also provides a new value anchor for tokenized stocks.

For current investors, tokenization of US stocks is neither a savior of the bear market nor a flash in the pan. It is more like a seed that needs patience to break the ground - supported by the triangle of compliance, technology and market sentiment, whether this seed can grow into a towering tree may be hidden in the next policy release of SEC, Coinbase's next compliance action, or the flow of funds between retail investors and institutions in the next bull market. The only thing that is certain is that the experiment is far from over.