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Adena Friedman wants you to think about trapped capital. Not in some abstract sense — she means tens of billions of dollars sitting locked up as collateral, moving slowly, costing everyone.
Why It Matters
The push for tokenization by major financial leaders like Nasdaq's CEO highlights a growing recognition of blockchain technology's potential to revolutionize capital markets. By addressing the inefficiencies associated with traditional asset management, tokenization could unlock significant liquidity, enabling faster transactions and potentially reshaping investment strategies. As the market increasingly embraces digital assets, the implications for trading infrastructure and regulatory frameworks will be profound, influencing how financial institutions operate and compete in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Friedman, Nasdaq’s CEO, made the case for tokenization at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, and she didn’t pull punches. The pitch was simple: represent stocks, bonds, and other financial assets as digital tokens on a blockchain, and suddenly collateral moves faster, cheaper, and more freely. Tokenizing assets like Treasurys and equities could make the whole plumbing of global finance significantly more fluid. Institutional interest, she said, has surged over the past year — and that momentum helped push the GENIUS Act through in the U.S., a piece of legislation that now gives stablecoins a proper regulatory framework for the first time. That’s not nothing. A federal framework for stablecoins was a long time coming, and its passage is probably the clearest sign yet that Washington is starting to take digital asset infrastructure seriously.
Retail investors, Friedman added, have actually been ahead of institutions on one specific demand: 24/7 trading. People want to trade at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. They’ve wanted that for years. The traditional financial system, built around market hours and settlement windows, can’t deliver that right now. Getting there would require massive upgrades to existing infrastructure — and that’s where artificial intelligence comes in. Friedman sees AI as a core part of managing real-time risk in a world where markets never close. It’s a reasonable argument. Real-time risk management at that scale, without AI, is basically impossible.
Kraken Co-CEO Flags Global Demand for U.S. Markets
Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Kraken, brought a different angle. He pointed out that companies outside the U.S. are increasingly hungry to access American capital markets — and tokenization is probably the most direct path to making that happen at scale. It’s not just a domestic story. There’s genuine international appetite here, and tokenization could open doors that traditional market structures have kept shut for years.
The numbers back that up. Tokenized stocks have grown 473% this year. The market cap now sits at $3.75 billion. That’s a real number, not a rounding error.
Who’s Leading the Tokenized Stock Race
The biggest players right now: Ondo at $980 million, xStocksFi at $954 million, and Binance bStocks at $877 million. Those three alone account for the bulk of the market. Then there’s Securitize, which has issued $341 million in tokenized equity — its SECZ token is the largest single instrument at $328 million.
On the network side, BNB Chain hosts the highest value of tokenized stocks at $1.19 billion. Ethereum and Solana follow behind. And Securitize recently launched Securitize Stocks on Solana, which brings 1:1-backed on-chain entitlements for major U.S. stocks — think Apple, Amazon — directly onto the blockchain. The idea is more transparency, more accessibility, fewer intermediaries. Whether that vision fully plays out is unclear yet, but the infrastructure is being built.
It’s worth stepping back for a second. The tokenized stock market didn’t look like this two years ago. The growth from a niche concept to a $3.75 billion market cap is fast, even by crypto standards. And it’s happening while traditional financial institutions are still figuring out their response. Detailed implementation plans from major banks? Not really out there yet. The industry’s big players are watching, probably running internal pilots, but public commitments remain scarce.
That gap — between where the market is heading and where legacy infrastructure actually sits — is the central tension in all of this. Continuous trading sounds great until you ask who’s managing settlement risk at 3 a.m. when something breaks. AI is the answer Friedman gives, and it’s probably the right one in principle. But deploying that at the scale of global equity markets is a different beast entirely.
Securitize keeps pushing forward regardless. Launching on Solana is a deliberate move — the network is fast, cheap, and has become a serious venue for tokenized real-world assets over the past couple of years. By putting major U.S. stock entitlements on-chain there, Securitize is betting that accessibility and speed will win over institutional hesitation. Maybe it’s right.
The 473% growth in tokenized stocks is the kind of stat that gets people’s attention in boardrooms. Ondo, xStocksFi, Binance bStocks — these aren’t fringe projects anymore. They’re running real money on real infrastructure. And with Kraken’s Sethi flagging international demand and Nasdaq’s Friedman pushing the regulatory narrative forward, the tokenization story has more institutional credibility behind it now than it did even twelve months ago.
BNB Chain’s $1.19 billion in tokenized stock value is the current leader. Ethereum and Solana are close behind.
Hub: BNB price, news, and analysis
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman say about tokenization at TOKEN2049?
Friedman said tokenization could unlock tens of billions of dollars in trapped capital by making collateral movement more fluid, and linked growing institutional interest to the passage of the GENIUS Act in the U.S.
How large is the tokenized stock market right now?
Tokenized stocks have grown 473% this year to a market cap of $3.75 billion, with Ondo at $980 million, xStocksFi at $954 million, and Binance bStocks at $877 million among the top issuers.
