Behind the Tokenization of U.S. Stocks: A Return to a Narrative, or a Signal for the Evolution of Web3 Financial Structures?

Recently, when I opened Twitter, the screen was full of U.S. stock tokenization. It's no exaggeration to say that if you've not been discussing this for the past few days, it probably means that you have lost touch with the market.

"U.S. stocks on the chain" is the biggest hot spot in the market this week. Robinhood launched a stock tokenization service in Europe, while xStocks also launched on Kraken and Bybit. Solana DEX and the Arbitrum ecosystem began to list AAPLx, TSLAx and other trading pairs, and a new set of narratives such as stock tokenization was quickly rolled out.

But if you only see the heat and don't understand the structure, then you may become a leek in this narrative.

In my opinion, stock tokenization is not essentially a "token", but a stress test of on-chain finance:

Can the Web3 world really host the issuance, trading, pricing, and redemption of mainstream financial assets?

It's not a heat, it's a structural stress test of on-chain finance

From my perspective, our industry narrative is constantly evolving in cycles. As early as 2019, both Binance and FTX tried to tokenize U.S. stocks, but both were eventually shut down by regulators. Mirror Protocol, which used synthetic assets to simulate U.S. stock prices, also died with the Terra crash and SEC regulation. This is not a new thing, but the industry was not very mature at that time.

And today's stock tokenization is not a reckless experiment, but a compliance path led by licensed institutions such as Robinhood and Backed Finance. This is a critical watershed.

Taking Robinhood as an example, the stock tokenization service it launched in Europe this time has taken an unprecedented closed-loop path of "broker-owned + on-chain issuance".

Instead of simply listing a price on the chain, Robinhood is licensed in the EU on its own, buying real US stocks, and issuing 1:1 mapped tokens on-chain. From custody, issuance, to clearing and settlement, and user interaction, the whole process is connected, and the trading experience is basically close to the combination of securities account + wallet.

In the early stage, they deployed these tokens on Arbitrum to ensure that the speed and cost of on-chain transactions were controllable, and later they planned to move to the self-built Robinhood Chain, which means that the entire infra should also be controlled by themselves.

Although the voting rights cannot be opened yet, because it is necessary to avoid governance supervision, the overall structure can already be seen in the prototype: it is like establishing an almost independent "on-chain securities trading system" at the structural level.

For the crypto industry, this is the first time to see a traditional online brokerage, not only has autonomy on the issuance side, but also has carried out a deconstruction of the on-chain structure of assets.

From reckless trials to compliance closures

This round of stock tokenization is not accidental, as I have repeated before. Essentially, several core variables resonate at the same point in time. The so-called right time, place and people, probably that's it.

First of all, there is the loosening of the regulatory level and the clarity of the direction. For example, MiCA in Europe has officially landed, and the SEC in the United States has stopped blindly firing the hammer and has begun to release some signals that "can be talked about and can be done".

Robinhood was able to launch its stock token service in the EU so quickly because of its securities license in Lithuania; The fact that xStocks is connected to both Kraken and Bybit is also inseparable from the compliance structures it has built in Switzerland and Jersey.

At the same time, since the funds on the chain are indeed looking for new assets to export, the structure of the funds in the market has changed. The gap between traditional financial markets and crypto non-MEME markets is only going to get smaller.

Looking at the present, there are a bunch of projects on the chain that have no fundamentals but have ultra-high FDV, and there is no place for liquidity to go there, and stable funds have also begun to find "anchor and logical" asset allocation outlets. At this time, regular armies such as Robinhood and xStocks come in with compliant structures and trading experiences, and stock tokens become attractive. It's familiar, it's stable, it has a narrative space, and it's also tied to stablecoins and DeFi.

The combination of TradFi and Crypto has gone deeper and deeper. From BlackRock to JPMorgan Chase, from UBS to MAS, traditional financial giants are no longer standing on the sidelines, but are really building chains, running pilots, and doing infrastructure. As the most mainstream and recognizable asset, stocks will obviously become the preferred choice for tokenization.

Is the on-chain of traditional assets an opportunity for crypto or a threat to projects?

Jiayi's subjective view:

Looking ahead, stock tokenization will most likely not be an explosive growth curve, but it has the potential to become a very resilient infrastructure evolution path in the Web3 world.

The significance of this narrative lies in the fact that it leverages two important structural changes: first, asset boundaries have begun to truly migrate on-chain, and second, the traditional financial system is willing to use on-chain methods to organize part of the transaction and custody process. These two things, once established, are irreversible.

So, is it good or bad for stocks to rush for Crypto project liquidity?

In my opinion, this is a typical double-edged sword. It brings higher quality assets, but it also subtly rewrites the flow structure of funds on the chain.

From the Front:

1. The entry of "blue-chip assets" in traditional finance has given new places for on-chain funds, and has also added some options for the allocation of "stable assets". In a market where the narrative rotates too fast and funds move for a long time, this kind of assets with a clear structure and realistic anchor points are actually helping liquidity regain the basic coordinates of "where to allocate and where to match".

2. At the same time, this will also bring about the "catfish effect". As soon as the strong narrative asset of U.S. stock tokenization came up, the benchmark of the entire chain was raised, which will inevitably push the overall quality of Web3 projects to go up. Let's just let the garbage project be eliminated from the market, in my heart.

3. Crypto players can directly buy stocks in the form of Cypto Native, which reduces the liquidity sucking of the large pool of Crypto by US stocks

But look at it the other way around:

1. It also puts pressure on crypto-native projects. Not only will the narrative be robbed, but the capital structure and user preferences on the chain will also be slowly reshaped. Especially when tokenized stocks become liquid and start running perp, lending, and portfolio allocation, it will directly compete with native assets for stablecoin traffic, mainstream users, and on-chain attention.

2. For the project party: it will be difficult to obtain financing. When there is AAPLx, TSLAx, and in the future, tokenized private equity from OpenAI or SpaceX appear in the on-chain asset pool. Investors and users' intuitive judgments about "what is worth investing in" and "what has a pricing anchor" will migrate.

Stock tokenization makes us rethink: Is Web3 a system that can carry mainstream assets and real trading behavior? Can we use an open financial structure to rebuild a securities system with lower friction and greater transparency than the traditional market?