Coinbase to join the tokenized stocks frenzy – Good for Ethereum? 

Key Takeaways

Coinbase will double down on tokenized stocks with a diversified, multi-index covering stocks, crypto, and ETFs. Solana is leading the current wave with the highest on-chain stockholders. 

The tokenized stocks frenzy appears to be far from fading off. Especially since Coinbase now plans to jump on the bandwagon despite opposition from traditional stock exchanges. 

In a statement, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong noted that the move is part of its ‘everything exchange’ vision. 

“We’re launching the first US futures that give exposure to the top US tech stocks and crypto at the same time. We’ll launch more products like this as part of the everything exchange.”

The exchange added that it will be the first to offer a crypto equity index on top of the planned single-stock offerings, to offer more thematic exposure to a wide range of growth assets. 

“Introducing Mag7 + Crypto Equity Index Futures: the first to offer combined exposure to both traditional equities and cryptocurrency ETFs.”

The index will include all the top seven tech stocks, like Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla. On the crypto side, Coinbase’s COIN and BlackRock’s Ethereum [ETH] and Bitcoin [BTC] ETFs will be part of the basket.  

Tokenized stocks explode

However, single-asset category offerings continue to face massive competition and interest. Notably, xStocks, which pioneered the trend into the Kraken and Solana DeFi ecosystem, has announced plans to expand to Ethereum. 

In just a month after debuting on Solana, xStocks, which tracks over 60 equities and indices, including top tech stocks like Amazon and commodities like gold, crossed $300 million in volume. At press time, the products had a total trading volume of $630 million – Underscoring the explosive growth of on-chain stocks. 

Like Solana [SOL], xStocks said that the products will be available to Ethereum aggregators and DeFi platforms. 

At the same time, new players are also making moves on Solana. The latest entrant, Remora Markets, recently announced support for on-chain stocks tracking Nvidia, Circle, and Tesla. 

In fact, most on-chain stockholders, about 59k addresses, were concentrated on Solana. The Ethereum ecosystem, including L2s like Arbitrum and Base, ranked second in adoption. 

Source: RWA

Stocks are just one of the assets being tokenized. Cash has already been tokenized via stablecoins. Debt, commodities, and other real-world assets are also expected to move on-chain under the SEC’s Project Crypto. 

Hence, it is still early to say which network will dominate the narrative. However, the early innings is leaning towards Solana and Ethereum as top settlement layers. 

The ongoing corporate treasury frenzy for SOL and ETH can be viewed as firms front-running to capture this explosive growth. 

Here, it’s worth noting that the World Federation of Exchanges, an umbrella body for traditional stock exchanges, recently requested the Senate to regulate tokenized stocks. It called them ‘mimics’ with no ‘equal rights’ to traditional shareholders.