Robinhood Chain, BNB Chain, and Solana handled most tokenized stock trading last week, Grayscale said in a research note published Thursday. Weekly spot volume for the sector peaked near $3 billion in early August.
Those numbers show tokenized equities have found buyers. Almost none of that money, however, does anything else on-chain once a trade settles.
Tokenized Stock Trading Runs Ahead of Onchain Utility
Tokenized stocks are blockchain tokens that track a listed share price without handing the buyer the share itself. Trading them is easy. Doing anything else with them is not.
About 5% of the tokenized equity market is put to work in on-chain finance, according to the note. Grayscale research head Zach Pandl tied that to what investors actually want, which is round the clock trading and access from anywhere.
Value locked in tokenized stocks passed $110 million in late August, Grayscale said in a post citing on-chain data from Allium. That sits far below the billions changing hands every week.
Lending is starting to catch up. Holdings inside Kamino and Jupiter, two Solana lending protocols, have grown roughly tenfold in a year.
BeInCrypto reported in July that Robinhood leads tokenized stock platforms by holder count, while meme coins rather than equities drive most traffic on Robinhood Chain, the network the brokerage launched on Arbitrum earlier this year. Grayscale’s data points the same way.
Regulation Decides What Comes Next
US regulators have discussed an innovation exemption, a carve out that would let tokenized securities trade under safeguards such as verified participants and compliance ready token standards.
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officials have separately argued that tokenization makes shares easier to pledge as collateral. An SEC advisory committee also backed settling stock and payment in a single transaction, which removes the risk that one side fails to deliver.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has pressed a similar case about the US tokenized stock gap. Meanwhile, the wider tokenized asset ownership problem still leaves holders with exposure rather than shares.
The gap matters because collateral use is what would pull institutional balance sheets onchain.
The named chains drew mixed price action on Friday. Solana (SOL) traded near $101.76, down 3.2% on the day, while BNB held around $718.84.
Volume alone will not turn tokenized stocks into collateral. Rulemaking will, and US regulators have not finished the job.
Bitrue