Do Stocks Matter More Than Crypto?

Bitcoin finished 2025 in the negative zone. This would make it the fourth negative year since 2012, although at only a low single-digit loss compared to -50.2% in 2014, -72.1% in 2018 and -62% in 2022. At times like this it is worth remembering what is the single core element that drives Bitcoin’s value beyond its scarcity and “digital gold” narrative.

That core Bitcoin idea is that trust is not necessary to coordinate value. After all, Bitcoin’s fixed supply (scarcity) of 21 million coins is only value-boosting to the extent that no trusted party can change it. Despite naysayers from the Bitcoin camp, the wider altcoin ecosystem carries the same spirit of trustlessness:

• Smart contracts as trustless execution of agreements.
• Decentralized Finance (DeFi) as trust-minimized lending trading and derivatives.
• Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) as trust-minimized coordination and governance.
• Tokenisation as the trust-minimized representation of assets. 

In other words, just as the internet made it silly to send letters, blockchain is making it silly to have trusted intermediaries in finance. As such, DeFi’s ambitious goal has always been to recreate all of finance on-chain. But what advances have actually materialized in this direction?

According to Siblis Research as of September 2025, the entire U.S. equity market is worth $67.76 trillion. This makes the tokenisation of stocks the clearest metric of progress. After nearly a decade of experimentation, most DeFi primitives remain financial self-reference: crypto lending crypto, trading crypto and leveraging crypto.

Let’s examine what progress has been made in making blockchains stop mirroring finance and start interfacing with it.

Notable Tokenisation Milestones in 2025

To even gain a traction of traffic that exists on stock exchanges, blockchains have to interface with heavyweights – crypto exchanges. In late June this year, Kraken launched xStocks on the Solana blockchain due to its low latency and high throughput. Jersey-based Backed Assets was the key facilitator on the technical side as an issuer of tokenised stocks and ETFs as SPL (Solana Program Library) tokens.

While Backed Assets custodies and issues these SPL tokens, Kraken updates their prices, mirroring their real-time price on the stock market. If dividends are in play, they are automatically reinvested – highlighting how tokenised equities still rely on traditional return structures such as capital gains or dividend income. However, because Kraken is a regulated exchange, 60 available xStocks are still not available in the US, Australia, Canada and the UK.

The rigidity of the EU regulations also necessitates that users use exclusively fiat currency (not stablecoins) in the European Economic Area (EEA).  

Around the same time in late June, Robinhood launched tokenised stocks as well, at an even greater number of 200. This was a huge deal, as Robinhood pioneered commission-free trading and massively popularized retail trading. However, limitations are present with this launch as well, limited only to EEA clients through Robinhood Europe app.

Robinhood picked layer 2 solution for Ethereum – Arbitrum – for the same reasons Kraken picked Solana. Interestingly, Robinhood plans to issue tokenised stocks on its own proprietary L2 chain similar to Coinbase’s Base, also attached to Ethereum as an optimistic rollup scaling solution. 

In addition to georestrictions, both Kraken and Robinhood offer tokenised stock 24/5, with future 24/7 support still in the works. Speaking of Coinbase, the largest US crypto exchange also plans to launch its own tokenised stock offering but the effort is stalling due to the lack of regulatory clarity.

Lastly, California-based Dinari launched the Dinary Financial Network mid-August, which is the company’s layer 1 blockchain built on the Avalanche (AVAX) platform. This was a reasonable choice given that Avalanche enables the creation of independent L1 chains, while also providing compatibility with Arbitrum, Base, Solana and other chains. 

As other tokenised stocks, Dinari’s dShares are backed 1:1, with the backed assets being held by a third-party brokerage. Dinari offers over 100 dShares but also lacks availability to US retail investors despite securing broker-dealer registration from the SEC in June.

What Needs To Happen for Real Tokenisation

While the aforementioned milestones are important, it is clear that today’s tokenisation is still distribution-first, not integration-first. These tokens exist on various chains, but the trust anchors remain firmly off-chain: custodians, brokers, exchanges, issuers and regulators.

In other words, blockchain merely settles, as an alternative, rather than being the originator. For real tokenisation to occur, three structural pillars must be erected:

1. Securities law must change to reflect the engineering progress in cryptographic proof-of-reserve and standardized redemption rights encoded into smart contracts. Thankfully, the US SEC Chair Paul Atkins is favoring this direction, having issued a no-action letter this December to Depository Trust Company (DTC) for the purpose of tokenised securities pilot programs.
2. Existing blockchains must become compliance-native without becoming outright permissioned. In a way, compliance has to become an on-chain primitive. Otherwise, tokenised finance is to remain fragmented and geo-locked.
3. Trading itself has to be complemented by usage, such as collateral for mortgages and real-world treasury management. Such flexibility, inherent with smart contracts, would greatly increase the adoption of tokenised assets. Of course, this loops back to the first pillar as the foundation.

Fortunately, it appears that these pillars are being erected, as evidenced by the rapid adoption of stablecoins.

Critical Stablecoin Integration

As we’ve mentioned multiple times previously, the main reason why the USD-based Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) was canceled in favor of stablecoins is to further entrench the dollar as the world reserve currency. A CBDC would’ve been far too controversial and suspect as a perceived surveillance token.

Consequently, there is an ongoing spree in USD-tokenisation as a credible, liquid and compliant on-chain dollar. This is the prerequisite for all tokenised finance – the cash leg. Otherwise, stablecoins’ legal ambiguity would topple all other cogs built.

In this light, it is then clear why EEA has fiat-only requirements as regulatory constraints instead of technological. After all, in late November, the European Central Bank (ECB) explicitly expressed concerns that USD-based stablecoins could effect a drain from retail deposits from euro zone banks.

Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL), issuer of USDC/EURC stablecoins and headed by Jeremy Allaire, advanced the stablecoin cause the most in the US on the regulatory front, although still overshadowed by Tether (issuer of USDT stablecoin) by volume.

Having gone public in early June, Circle acts as the facilitator and coordinator, establishing partnerships with Fiserve’s digital banking network, Kraken, Fireblocks, FIS, Deutsche Börse Group and Robinhood. Recently on the Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast, Allaire expressed confidence in the future of tokenised finance.

In addition to issuing USDC which then circulates in the wider DeFi ecosystem, Circle is also developing its Arc L1 blockchain. With backing from Amazon, Visa and Blackrock, Arc is positioned less as a competitor to existing DeFi and more as a compliant settlement layer for tokenised finance at institutional scale.

It is for this reason that exposure to Circle stock, either CRCL or tokenised CRCLX on exchanges like Gate.io, should be considered. According to the Wall Street Journal’s analyst forecasting consensus, CRCL’s average price target is now $138.29 against its current price of $82.64, suggesting an impressive 67% upside potential during 2026.

The Bottom Line

Despite the best efforts of cypherpunks who launched Bitcoin and the entire blockchain ecosystem, it has become increasingly clear that any meaningful adoption of tokenised finance will have to come from the top.

Again and again, we’ve seen that most people respond to institutional legitimacy, which is itself derived from political power. That is not to say that DeFi protocols are defunct, but they are beneficiaries of large players such as Kraken, Circle, Robinhood and others. As they become compliance-native, so too will DeFi have to follow up.

One could even say that Bitcoin’s lackluster performance this year is a result of this dynamic. The market is no longer awarding premiums for novelty but waiting for legal and technical “trust anchors”. Case in point, as soon as the Bitcoin corporate treasury narrative lost steam, so did the BTC price.

At the end of the line, tokenised stocks – not crypto-native assets – are emerging as the clearest bridge between blockchains and TradFi through stablecoins. This reveals that adoption will be driven less by ideological purity and more by integration with existing markets.