A Digital Nomad's View on Tokenized US Stocks

For a lot of digital nomads, the money lives on-chain, and life is spent moving between time zones and countries with no fixed base. I'm one of them. So when tokenized US stocks showed up, you could buy a token tracking Apple or Tesla with stablecoins, money never leaves the chain, trade around the clock, and it sounded like it was built for us. The pitch from every platform leans on one word: inclusion. But who exactly is being included? The more I looked, the more I felt it wasn't all that useful for someone like me. What's quietly changing is the business of the exchanges that push it.

Right before SpaceX listed in June, Binance, Bybit, Bitget and MEXC opened a pre-IPO-style subscription, letting users put in stablecoins ahead of time and get the matching token once trading began. Binance alone took in around $557 million from nearly 27,700 wallet addresses¹. Then on listing day, almost none of them got enough of the actual shares, and the subscriptions were refunded, leaving a lot of hopeful buyers with nothing².

These exchanges didn't hold any SpaceX shares themselves. They took users' money first, then relied on a single middleman, xStocks, to go buy the shares. As one of the largest IPOs ever, SpaceX drew enormous demand, too many buyers and not enough supply, so the middleman couldn't get enough stock, and the exchanges had nothing to hand out. It wasn't only crypto users who got squeezed: clients at Fidelity and Schwab also received only a fraction of what they asked for. But they got something, because they source shares straight from the underwriters. The crypto platforms had an offshore middleman in between, and when that link couldn't deliver, all they could do was refund³.

What fell through was only the pre-IPO shortcut, not the token itself. Once SpaceX was listed and trading openly, issuers could buy the real shares on the market and mint the tokens as usual.

RWA was built for institutions from the start

To see what tokenized stocks really are, you have to go back to where RWA came from. In 2022, Terra propped up a near-20% yield with subsidies and pulled huge sums into its stablecoin, UST. The yield had no real source. It ran on subsidies. Once confidence cracked, UST lost its peg, its sister coin LUNA was minted into oblivion within days, and Terra, one of the top projects at the time, collapsed almost overnight⁴. That taught the market that yield built on subsidies alone doesn't hold, and money started wanting real, non-speculative returns. The safest such return sits off-chain, in US Treasuries, but on-chain money couldn't reach it, blocked by the accounts and custody of traditional finance. RWA, real-world assets, was built to break through that wall: turn assets like Treasuries into on-chain tokens so on-chain money could earn the yield without ever leaving the chain.

From day one, it served institutions. BlackRock's BUIDL, launched in 2024, is a tokenized Treasury fund holding over $2 billion, yet spread across only about a hundred holders, with a $5 million minimum⁵. That's where RWA starts: built for big money.

How big it is now, and how big tokenized stocks are specifically, nobody really has a clean read on. The "past $1 billion" milestone you keep hearing is the size of one platform, Ondo, which says it crossed $1 billion in under eight months on the market⁶. Look at RWA as a whole and the same data source, on the same day, can give numbers that differ by more than tenfold.

That trillion-dollar forecast everyone cites has a clear origin. In June 2026, Citi's research arm, the Citi Institute, put out a report projecting tokenized assets reaching $5.5 trillion by 2030, in a range of $2.7 to $8.2 trillion⁷. But it's a long-range projection built on assumptions. For instance, that 10% of US short-term debt and 3% of the public equity market get tokenized by 2030⁷.

Tracking a stock isn't owning it

The biggest difference between a tokenized stock and an ordinary crypto token is whether there's something real behind the price. An ordinary token runs on sentiment and consensus; a tokenized stock is anchored to a real US share.

But being anchored to a stock isn't the same as owning it. What you hold is a certificate that tracks the share price. It pays out price moves and dividends, but it isn't the stock itself, and usually carries no voting rights. The major issuers are offshore: Ondo in the British Virgin Islands, xStocks in Jersey, neither registered with the US SEC, which is why they shut out users in the US, the UK and elsewhere⁸. Your counterparty is an offshore company, not the listed firm. That SpaceX refund earlier this month is what it looks like when that relationship breaks.

Whether it's useful to you depends on one thing: can you legally buy US stocks

For anyone who can open an account at a regulated broker, it's mostly not the optimal choice. The usual selling point is the low bar. A few dollars buys a sliver of an expensive stock, but that's no longer unique. Fidelity, Schwab and Interactive Brokers all support fractional shares, with IBKR starting at one dollar⁹. What's left is round-the-clock trading and keeping money on-chain, against very real costs: giving up actual equity, giving up the backstop of a licensed broker and investor protection, and swapping a regulated counterparty for an offshore company. Convenience makes the experience smoother, but it's a thin reason to buy an asset.

Where it actually earns its place is for people whose legal route to US stocks is blocked. In places with currency and capital controls, buying US shares through proper channels runs into conversion limits and account restrictions. Tokenized stocks let those people get US-stock exposure with stablecoins, which isn't easy to get otherwise. But be clear about what it does: it doesn't solve some stock being unavailable. It routes around a purchase that was restricted in the first place, getting you into the swings of the world's most regulated market.

Exchanges got a new growth curve, and may have lost something

A lot of what used to trade on crypto exchanges had no fundamentals. How far a token could run had no anchor in earnings or cash flow; the price ran on sentiment and consensus, which meant it could go to zero overnight or multiply in a short stretch. That huge uncertainty is the risk, and also exactly the appeal.

Tokenized stocks put something with fundamentals on the shelf. For the first time, the buyer has a fairly clear idea of what they're holding.

So the nature of the exchange business shifts. As more of an exchange's revenue comes from products backed by real assets, it looks more and more like a brokerage that happens to run on-chain. Brokerages are steady and durable, but their returns are capped by real-world yields, and nobody describes them with limitless imagination. The business moves from running on sentiment and narrative, with wild swings, toward something asset-backed, legible and sturdier.

That SpaceX episode this month was already a signal. The ones that shipped tokens on the day were the platforms that can source shares themselves and deal with underwriters directly; the ones that stumbled had outsourced sourcing to a middleman and lacked that capability. Whether an exchange needs to grow its own brokerage backbone, this was an early stress test of exactly that.

When the business changes, so do the people it needs. An exchange that increasingly resembles a brokerage wants people who understand securities, compliance and risk control, not mainly the crypto natives who came in on conviction. The two now sit inside one company, and the wall between traditional finance and crypto is getting thinner. That's the shift worth watching if you work in this field.

RWA was born as a tool for moving institutional money on-chain into real yield; retail was never who it was for. For those who can legally buy US stocks, it may not be the optimal choice; for those locked out by the rules, it offers access that's otherwise hard to come by. It doesn't hand ordinary people much that's new.

What it does rewrite is the exchange business. The market's heat is starting to overshadow crypto itself, and as exchanges come to lean on this line of business, their old allure may fade with it. This industry won't be minting any more overnight-billionaire stories.