The following is a guest post and opinion from Jamie Elkaleh, CMO at Bitget
In Hong Kong, hours before the New York open, an investor buys a $1 slice of Tesla directly from a self-custody wallet. No broker, no FX spreads, no trading window. Thanks to tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs offered through Ondo Global Markets and integrated into wallets like Bitget, Wall Street is quietly becoming a 24/7, on-chain market.
Within a few years, wallets—not brokers—will be the default portal to U.S. equities for non-U.S. investors.
From Synthetic Failures to Real Backing
Tokenizing real-world assets (RWAs)—securities, funds, and bonds represented digitally on a blockchain—has been discussed for over a decade. Early attempts included synthetic models where tokens tracked stock prices via oracles but conferred no ownership rights (like Synthetix and Mirror), CFDs (contracts for difference) where brokers issued exposure contracts, and fully backed tokenized securities that represented claims on real shares held with a regulated custodian under bankruptcy-remote structures (meaning assets remain safe even if the issuer goes bankrupt).
But fully backed securities are where progress is accelerating. Galaxy Digital became the first U.S.-listed company to tokenize its own common stock in August 2025, using Superstate and Solana. Nasdaq has since filed a proposal with the SEC to enable trading of tokenized securities on its main market by 2026. Kraken launched “xStocks,” offering tokenized Apple, Tesla, Nvidia, and 50+ others backed one-to-one by shares held with Backed Finance. Robinhood entered Europe with 200+ tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs—though its tokens are contracts, not shares, raising issuer concerns.
The Stablecoin Precedent
Stablecoins showed how quickly traditional assets could migrate on-chain. By exporting the U.S. dollar to blockchains, stablecoins grew into a $160 billion+ market and became the reserve currency of crypto, powering remittances, payments, and DeFi lending.
The parallels to equities are clear. Just as stablecoins extended dollar liquidity worldwide, tokenized equities could extend Wall Street’s reach. Instead of only holding dollars in wallets, users may soon hold fractional shares of Apple, Tesla, or the Nasdaq index—assets priced in dollars but tradable 24/7, outside U.S. trading hours.
RWA markets already reflect this trend, with tokenized Treasuries and cash equivalents topping $7.4 billion, and overall RWA supply on-chain surpassing $25 billion in 2025, up from just $100 million five years ago.
Wallets as Financial Gateways
For decades, access to U.S. markets required intermediaries like brokers, bank accounts, and jurisdictional approval. Today, the entry point is a crypto wallet.
Wallets are evolving into financial gateways, combining payments, savings, and investments. A worker in Lagos or Manila can receive a stablecoin remittance, pay bills, and allocate leftover funds into tokenized S&P 500 shares—all inside the same app.
Bitget Wallet’s integration with Ondo Finance is one example. Users can access 100+ tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, settled on-chain. The UX mirrors mobile money’s leapfrogging of traditional banking in Africa and Asia. Wallets could now leapfrog brokers, bringing low-barrier access to capital markets.
Liquidity, Regulation, and the Roadblocks Remaining
Liquidity has long been the breaking point for tokenized assets. Early experiments failed less from lack of interest than from shallow trading depth. New models seek to solve this by linking on-chain tokens directly to traditional market liquidity. Whether that scales remains uncertain.
Regulation is equally unresolved. Access today is mostly limited to non-U.S. users and often requires KYC or eligibility checks. Investors should confirm how dividends, splits, and voting rights are handled, and which custodian safeguards the underlying shares.
Tokenized assets still face structural frictions like custodial centralization, whitelisting requirements, valuation opacity, and limited decentralized venues. Tokenized stocks total just a $420 million market cap today—a fraction of the broader $28 billion RWA market, reflecting how early the sector remains.
Three Takeaways
The transformation boils down to three key shifts.
Tokenized equities are creating always-on access to Wall Street, extending traditional markets into a 24/7 trading environment.
We’re witnessing the rise of wallet-first investing, where wallets are evolving into the default gateway that seamlessly combines payments, savings, and equity investments in one interface.
Compliance will determine scale—the speed of adoption ultimately depends on how quickly regulators clarify eligibility requirements, custodianship standards, and voting rights for tokenized securities.
The Next Layer of Finance
Finance is moving toward a faster, borderless model. Stablecoins proved it with dollars; tokenized securities are now testing it with stocks.
The endgame may be simple: a paycheck arrives as stablecoins, a portion auto-swaps into a tokenized S&P 500 index, and everything sits in a wallet—dollars, equities, and crypto—coexisting in the same digital environment.
Wall Street won’t disappear, but its clock is being reset. The opening bell is giving way to a 24/7 on-chain economy.
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