The Current State Of Tokenization (Part 1) - Tokenized Stocks

The Current State of Tokenization - Tokenization of Stocks

After a detox seasson away-from-writing and posting on Linkedin, for almost the entirety of 2026, due to the regional conflict, forced travels and the saturation I've had after 20 years on social media, I'm back to close the year in high terms. 

With everyone back-to-work and back-to-school, I always say this is the real start of the year, not January 1st. It is a different cycle from the calendar or the fiscal year, and it carries far more energy and intention than a number on a page. With Abu Dhabi Finance Week around the corner and the Token Terminal's August data out, it felt like the right moment to share where the tokenization of everything stand. Starting with one of my favourite, and most controversial one, Tokenized Stocks.

August was a record month. Token Terminal counts 928.4K new tokenized stock holders in a single month. The entire base at the end of July was 771K, so August alone was bigger than everything that came before it, and x3.4 the previous monthly record of 272K, set only in July. That is not a line drifting upward. That is a step change.

A quick reset on what these actually are. A tokenized stock is a token on a blockchain built to follow the price of a real listed share. A broker or custodian holds the stock and mints a token against it. Buying that token does not make you a shareholder. Most of them, Robinhood's included, are debt instruments. You get the price exposure, not voting rights, not dividends by default, and no legal claim on the company. What you get is access. They trade around the clock, settle onchain, and let someone outside the US hold Nvidia, Apple or SpaceX without a US brokerage account. For much of the world, that is the whole pitch.

Who holds it? 

Two chains dominate. BNB Chain has 730K holders and Robinhood Chain 518.8K, about 73% of the market between them. Solana follows at 335K, with Base and Ethereum sharing most of the rest. Robinhood still leads on total holders, but the month belonged to Binance. Its bStocks went from 52.9K holders in July to 464.7K in August and overtook xStocks for second place.

Why? 

Two reasons, and neither is magic. Binance waived maker fees on every bStocks pair for all of August. Robinhood, in its first full month on mainnet, added 100 new stock tokens on August 13th, passing 190 in total, with roughly 28 million brokerage users able to reach them. Free trading on one side, huge distribution on the other. Of course the numbers moved.

Now the part I would ask you to keep in mind. These are wallets, not people. Open three wallets and you count as three holders, which is exactly what fee promotions tend to produce. You see it at the asset level too. SPCXb leads by a mile at 165.8K holders, more than double NVDAx at 66.5K, with QQQb close behind at 65.4K. Everything outside the top ten sits in an "Other" bucket of around 1.1 million, which sounds like broad participation but is really a long tail of thinly held tickers.

On August 28th Binance extended the waiver to September 30th and switched on three trading bots across about 70 bStocks pairs. So the momentum keeps running for another month, mostly on borrowed fuel. Meanwhile the SEC has started asking for proof that the shares behind these tokens actually exist. For an instrument whose value rests entirely on what sits in a custodian's account, that is the only question that matters.

My read going into ADFW: August shows the demand is real, and access is the product. What it does not show is what happens when the fee starts again. That will only show in October numbers. 

So who actually gets something out of this?

Not "can't buy," but "can't practically buy." The access argument is real for a narrower group than the marketing implies. People in Nigeria, Argentina, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, parts of Southeast Asia and Africa, where US brokers won't onboard them, where banking is hard, and even more so USD banking is hard, where capital controls or card restrictions block funding a foreign brokerage, or where the minimum ticket at a broker is a month's salary. For them, a phone, a wallet and $20 of USDT is a real improvement. That's a large population, but it's not the GCC for example. 

Crypto-native capital that doesn't want to leave. Someone holding stablecoins on Binance doesn't want to off-ramp, wire to a broker, wait a day, then reverse it later. Trading Nvidia against USDT in the same account, at 2am on a Saturday, is convenience for money that already lives onchain. This is probably the biggest real driver behind the August numbers, promotions aside.

The exchanges themselves. This is my honest answer to "who benefits." Binance and Robinhood get a new product that captures liquidity already sitting on their platforms, generates trading fees once the waivers end, and keeps users from leaving to a traditional broker. The "fee" is customer acquisition spend, nothing more.

Why people don't care about the missing rights. Because most retail investors never exercise them anyway. Nobody buys 3 shares of Nvidia to vote at the AGM. CFDs are enormous outside the US for exactly this reason: price exposure is the product, and this is essentially a CFD that settles onchain, trades 24/7, can be moved wallet to wallet, and can be posted as collateral in DeFi. The composability piece matters more than it sounds. A share stuck at a broker does nothing; a token can be lent, borrowed against, or used in a structured product.

A chunk of the "caring" is manufactured: Zero fees + trading bots + wallet counting = inflated numbers.

Here is my long-term thesis, and the reason why serious people pay attention rather than just Binance users. If the rights eventually get attached (registered shares on a transfer agent, which a few issuers like Dinari and Superstate are already trying), then this stops being a retail toy and becomes a settlement infrastructure upgrade for equities.

That's the bet. August's numbers don't prove it, October onwards will.

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They prove that free trading and 28 million users move a metric.