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The UK’s home for tokenised equity. Independent news, insight and resources for founders raising capital, investors deploying it, and the firms supporting both — as the regulation, infrastructure and opportunity converge.

Tokenised Stocks Market Hits 2.2 Billion Dollar Record

  • Writer: Shawn Jhanji
    Shawn Jhanji
  • Jul 23
  • 2 min read

The market for tokenised stocks has reached an all time high of 2.2 billion dollars, according to data published this week by Token Terminal, with tokenised US Treasuries built on Circle and Securitize infrastructure on BNB Chain now sitting at a separate 4.6 billion dollars. The milestone lands alongside an unusually candid admission from inside one of the sector's biggest platforms about which technical approach to tokenised equity is actually winning.


Jesse Pollak, the founder of Coinbase's Base network, publicly acknowledged this week that Robinhood Chain's approach to tokenised stocks has pulled ahead of Base's model in the market, despite Coinbase's scale and resources. The distinction matters for anyone trying to understand how this infrastructure will mature, because the two platforms have taken genuinely different technical routes to the same goal.

Robinhood's tokenised stocks are structured as derivatives that track the price of the underlying share without the platform holding the actual security one for one. Base's approach, in keeping with Coinbase's broader positioning on regulatory compliance, has favoured fully backed tokens where each one corresponds to a real share held in custody. The fully backed model is generally seen as the more conservative and, in principle, the more defensible one if regulators start asking hard questions about what a tokenised share actually represents. Robinhood's derivative model has been faster to market and, on this week's numbers, faster to attract volume.


For UK founders and investors watching this space rather than participating in it directly, the lesson is not that one model is right and the other wrong. It is that the market is actively pricing the trade off between speed and structural conservatism, and for now speed is winning the volume race even though it is not obviously winning the trust race. Regulators in the UK, through the FCA and the Bank of England's ongoing tokenisation work, have consistently signalled more comfort with structures that map cleanly onto existing securities law, which points toward the fully backed model being better positioned for the kind of regulated UK equivalent this publication expects to emerge from PISCES and the wider tokenisation taskforce work.


The growth in tokenised US Treasuries alongside tokenised stocks is also worth noting on its own terms. Treasuries have been the easiest asset class to tokenise because they carry minimal credit risk and clear legal precedent, and their continued growth suggests the infrastructure underneath both asset classes, custody, settlement and now governance tooling, is maturing in parallel with the more contested equity side of the market.


Key Takeaways


  • The tokenised stocks market has hit an all time high of 2.2 billion dollars, according to Token Terminal data published this week.

  • Tokenised US Treasuries on BNB Chain, built on Circle and Securitize infrastructure, have reached 4.6 billion dollars separately.

  • Base founder Jesse Pollak has publicly conceded that Robinhood Chain's derivative based tokenised stock model has pulled ahead of Base's fully backed approach.

  • The two models represent a genuine trade off between speed to market and structural conservatism, one that regulators including the FCA are likely to weigh differently than the market currently does.

  • Continued growth in tokenised Treasuries suggests the underlying custody and settlement infrastructure is maturing alongside the more contested tokenised equity market.


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