Author: TT3Labs

For many digital nomads, their money is often kept on the chain, and they move between different time zones and countries all year round, without a fixed destination. I am one of them. After the emergence of tokenized U.S. stocks, you can use stablecoins to buy Apple and Tesla tokens. The money does not leave the chain and can be traded 24 hours a day. The money is already on the chain and it is not easy to open a US stock account. This product sounds like it is prepared for us. One word appears repeatedly in the official introductions of each platform, inclusive. Who exactly does this inclusive benefit benefit? But the more I look at it, the more I feel that it is not that useful to people like me. On the contrary, the business of the exchanges that promote it is quietly changing.

Before SpaceX went public in June, Binance, Bybit, Bitget, and MEXC launched a new type of subscription, allowing users to place orders in advance with stablecoins, and when they go public, they will issue you corresponding tokens according to the newly acquired quota. Binance alone has collected approximately $557 million from nearly 27,700 wallet addresses. As a result, on the day of listing, almost none of these companies were able to get sufficient goods from Daxinli, and a large number of subscriptions were refunded, leaving many users who were looking forward to Daxinli in vain.

These exchanges do not own SpaceX stocks themselves. They first collect money from users and then entrust an intermediary, xStocks, to buy them on the market. As the largest IPO in history, SpaceX attracted global attention. There were too many people and too little food. The middlemen did not buy enough goods, and the exchanges had nothing to issue. In fact, it’s not just crypto users who can’t buy it this time. Fidelity and Schwab customers also only got a small part, but they got it at least because they got the goods directly from the underwriters; there was an offshore middleman between these companies. If this link couldn’t be supplied, they had to refund their money.

But what failed was only the shortcut of creating new products, not that SpaceX tokens could not be purchased. After SpaceX is listed normally and its stocks are publicly traded, the issuer can mint tokens as usual if it buys real stocks in the market.

Looking back, RWA (Real World Assets) was originally built for institutions

In 2022, Terra used subsidies to support a high interest rate of nearly 20% and attracted a large amount of funds into its stable currency UST. However, this set of income had no real source and was supported by subsidies. When the confidence was shaken, UST was unanchored, and the sister currency LUNA was issued additionally to the price of zero within a few days. Terra, a project that was at the forefront at the time, collapsed almost instantly. This incident made the market understand that high returns based solely on subsidies are unreliable, and money began to want real returns that did not rely on speculation. The safest income in the financial market is U.S. Treasury bonds, but the money on the chain cannot reach it, and it is separated by traditional financial account opening and custody. In this context, RWA was born to break through this wall, turning assets such as U.S. debt into on-chain tokens, so that the money on the chain can get interest without leaving the chain.

From day one, it was about serving institutions. BlackRock will issue BUIDL in 2024. This tokenized U.S. bond fund has a scale of more than 2 billion US dollars, but it is only distributed in the hands of about a hundred holders, with a minimum subscription of US$5 million. This is where RWA started, for big money.

No one has a clear judgment on how big RWA is now, especially how big the market size of tokenized US stocks is. Ondo once claimed to be the largest issuer of tokenized stocks. It said that it exceeded one billion US dollars in less than eight months after its launch. If you look at the entire RWA, even the numbers given by one data source on the same day can be more than ten times different.

In June 2026, Citi's research organization Citi Institute issued a report predicting that tokenized assets will reach US$5.5 trillion by 2030, ranging from 2.7 trillion to 8.2 trillion. However, this is a forward projection based on assumptions: it assumes that by 2030, 10% of U.S. short-term debt and 3% of the stock market will be moved onto the chain.

Anchoring stocks does not mean owning stocks

The biggest difference between tokenized U.S. stocks and ordinary cryptocurrencies is whether there is an entity behind the price. Ordinary tokens rely on emotions and consensus, while tokenized U.S. stocks are anchored by a real U.S. stock.

But anchoring a stock does not mean you own that stock. What you get is a certificate that tracks the stock price, can correspond to the price and dividends, is not a stock itself, and usually does not have voting rights. Mainstream issuers are all offshore. Ondo is in the British Virgin Islands, and xStocks is in Jersey. They are not registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, thus blocking users from the United States, the United Kingdom and other places. Your counterparty is an offshore company, not the listed company itself. Whether it is of use to you depends on whether you can buy US stocks legally

For those who can open an account at a regular securities firm, using it may not be the best choice. The often-cited advantage is that the threshold is low and you can buy a small block of high-priced stocks for a few dollars, but this is no longer unique to it. Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and Interactive Brokers all support odd lots, with IB starting at one dollar. The remaining convenience is nothing more than trading around the clock and keeping money on the chain, but the price is very real: giving up real equity, giving up the protection of licensed brokers and investors, and changing the counterparty from a regulated institution to an offshore company. Convenience can make the experience smoother, but it is rarely a reason to buy an asset.

The stage where its value can really be demonstrated is actually for people who are blocked from buying U.S. stocks in their local area. In areas with foreign exchange and policy controls, ordinary people buy U.S. stocks through formal channels and are subject to restrictions on currency exchange quotas and account opening qualifications. Tokenizing U.S. stocks allows them to use stablecoins to obtain the rise and fall of U.S. stocks, which is not easy to obtain originally. But what it solves is not that a certain stock cannot be bought, but that it bypasses the originally restricted purchasing behavior and participates in the ups and downs of the world's most regulated market.

Exchanges have gained a new growth curve, but may have also lost something.

Many of the things traded on crypto exchanges in the past had no fundamentals. How high a token can rise depends on emotion and consensus. It may return to zero overnight, or it may increase several times in a short period of time. This huge uncertainty is both a risk and the attraction of this market.

Tokenized U.S. stocks put fundamental things on the shelves, and for the first time, buyers can know more clearly what they are buying.

The nature of the exchange business is changing. When more and more of an exchange's revenue comes from products backed by real assets, it becomes more and more like a brokerage operating on the chain. Securities companies are stable and long-term, but their returns are limited by the real-world rate of return, and no one can describe it with unlimited imagination. This business has shifted from relying on emotions and narratives, with huge fluctuations, to one that is backed by real assets, understandable, and more stable. More robust, but no longer sexy.

SpaceX actually gave a signal at the beginning of the month. Those who normally issue tokens on the same day are those who have the ability to obtain goods themselves and directly interface with underwriters; those who fail are those who outsource the supply of goods to middlemen and do not have such capabilities themselves. Whether the exchange needs to grow the bones of a brokerage firm on its own, this time is an early stress test.

As the business changes, so do the people who want it. An exchange that is becoming more and more like a securities firm needs people who understand securities, compliance, and risk control, rather than crypto natives who mainly rely on their emotions to enter the industry. These two kinds of people are now packed into the same company, and the barrier between traditional finance and encryption is thinning. Such changes deserve more attention from practitioners.

RWA was born as a tool for institutions to connect money on the chain to real returns. Retail investors have never been the target of its service. For those who can legally buy U.S. stocks, it may not be the best choice; for those who are blocked by rules, it provides a channel that is not easily available. It doesn’t bring much new to the average person.

The hot sentiment in this market is gradually overshadowing the popularity of virtual currencies. When exchanges gradually rely on this business, the charm of exchanges may gradually fade, and there will never be a new richest man story in this industry.