Tokenised stocks: a $3.91B market built on foreign demand for US equities
3 min read
- Finance
- Data
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Tokenised stocks were worth $3.91B on 30 Sep 2026, up +842% year on year1. No other tokenised asset class came close. Over the same year, tokenised commodities grew +267%, tokenised funds +97% and stablecoins +4%1.
A tokenised stock is a digital token, recorded on a blockchain, that tracks the price of a listed share or ETF. The Hybrid Finance Q3 2026 Update, produced by CoinShares with Token Terminal, finds that these tokens serve demand that already exists. Of the market's total value, 87.2% tracks US-registered shares and ETFs, and 85.4% is issued under terms that exclude US persons1. The typical buyer is an investor outside the US who wants exposure to US equities. Foreign investors already hold $24.3T of US equities2, and tokenised stocks equal just 0.016% of that amount.
The market is also spreading out:
Since September 2025, the number of issuers holding more than $1M of tokenised stocks has risen from 10 to 25.
Over the same period, the number of underlying shares and ETFs above $1M has gone from 83 to 1721.
Onchain holder positions reached 4.88M, 8.5x the level at the end of June1. Custody is the exception.
One US broker-dealer, Alpaca Securities LLC, holds the shares behind 81.3% of the market, down from 94.6%1. The report names this as the market's largest single point of failure.
The report's main argument is about policy. The US has the most influence, but no single country's decision is likely to stop the market growing. If US regulators support tokenisation, issuance can move into the US. The SEC's March 2026 approval of tokenised trading on Nasdaq points that way. If they do not, issuers in Jersey, the British Virgin Islands and the UAE already serve investors outside the US. If the US blocked tokens backed by US shares, demand would probably move to derivatives. Perpetual futures on US stocks traded on Trade.xyz already have $1.51B of open interest, the value of outstanding contracts1. Most tokens are backed by shares bought in the US, so Washington has an economic reason to prefer them over derivatives. For comparison, a BIS working paper finds that inflows into stablecoins lower 3-month US Treasury bill yields by 2.5 to 3.5 basis points3.
Download the full report in PDF for the complete data, the breakdown by issuer and the risk indicators. If you would rather explore the charts yourself, the interactive version is at coinshares.research.tokenterminal.com.
