The tokenization train isn't waiting for the U.S.

The tokenized stock market has surpassed $3.7b on Token Terminal, and about 95% of it tracks U.S. listed stocks and ETFs.

Yet very little of it is issued in the U.S. Issuers incorporated outside of the U.S. account for 90.4% of the market cap of tokenized stocks, spread across several jurisdictions. This dynamic shows how issuers launch wherever the path to market is fastest, which in our view means that tokenization will accelerate regardless of where any single regulator stands. When one country says no, the activity moves to one that says yes.

Using new data on each issuer's domicile, the country where it is incorporated, the five charts below measure that across (1) market cap, (2) holders, (3) DeFi use, and (4) trading, then reveal (5) the silent winner underpinning most of the market.

1) Market cap by issuer domicile

• Entities incorporated outside the U.S. issue 90.4% of the $3.7b tokenized stock market, led by Jersey (28.9%), Abu Dhabi (27.4%), and the British Virgin Islands (26.3%). In other words, exposure to U.S. stocks comes mostly from issuers that will not deal with U.S. residents directly. Even U.S.-based companies like Coinbase and Robinhood issue from abroad. No single jurisdiction dominates, so a ban in any one of them would move issuance rather than stop it.

2) Holders by issuer domicile

• Tokenized stocks issued outside the U.S. account for 97.8% of the 5.0m holders, against 2.2% for U.S.-issued ones. Jersey issuers xStocks and Robinhood have 2.4m holders combined, Abu Dhabi issuers Binance bStocks and Coinbase have 1.5m, and British Virgin Islands issuers Ondo and Backpack have 894.7k, with fewer but larger holdings on average. The demand for tokenized U.S. stocks is there, and offshore issuers are the ones meeting it.

3) DeFi use by issuer domicile

• Tokenized stocks issued outside the U.S. account for 90.4% of the $271.7m deposited in DeFi lending markets, vaults, and DEX pools. Jersey issuers xStocks and Robinhood together account for $176.9m of it, or 65.1%, while Ondo, the largest British Virgin Islands issuer at $951m in tokenized market cap, has only about $3.0m in DeFi, so a large market cap does not guarantee DeFi use. The first wave of issuers turning tokenized stocks from idle assets into productive ones is issuing from outside the U.S.

4) Trading by issuer domicile

• Tokenized stocks issued outside the U.S. account for 99.3% of the $14.4b traded onchain over the past 30 days. Tokenized stocks from Jersey issuers xStocks and Robinhood traded a combined $6.7b, those from Abu Dhabi issuers Binance bStocks and Coinbase $6.0b, and U.S.-issued ones $104.5m, despite U.S. issuers holding 9.6% of market cap. If you trade a tokenized U.S. stock onchain today, you are almost certainly trading one issued offshore.

5) The silent winner

• Alpaca is named as the custodian holding the underlying shares for 83.5% of tokenized stock market cap. Ondo, xStocks, Binance bStocks, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Reality issue from four different countries under different laws and regulators, yet all of them name Alpaca, a U.S. broker-dealer, as custodian. Most tokenized stocks are issued offshore, and so are most of the tokenized stocks people hold and trade, but the underlying shares sit in the U.S., which makes Alpaca the silent winner of tokenized stocks so far. It also means much of the market sits with one firm, a position competing custodians may look to challenge.

This could change quickly. The SEC’s recent Innovation Exemption is an early sign that the U.S. is opening up to tokenized stocks, and issuer activity could move to the U.S. just as fast, following the pattern of tokenization going wherever it can reach the largest market first. As issuers spread across more jurisdictions and structures, following them requires more than market data alone. The datasets in this newsletter are the first step in expanding Token Terminal’s coverage to stay ahead of this fast-moving space.

Tokenized assets

• Listed Ondo's OpenAI Exposure Note (OPAIPon), the first pre-IPO asset from Ondo Private Markets, on Ethereum, with circulating asset market cap of $19.1 million. Learn more on the asset's fact sheet.

• Listed Ripio's Brazilian real stablecoin (wBRL) on Ethereum, Celo, HyperEVM, Base, World Chain, BNB Chain, Arc, Polygon and Gnosis, with circulating asset market cap of $3.3 million. Learn more on the asset's fact sheet.

• Listed 12 Securitize tokenized stocks on Solana, including Apple (AAPL), NVIDIA (NVDA), Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX (SPCX), with circulating asset market cap of $0.6 million. Learn more on the issuer's project page.

• Listed 14 Coinbase tokenized stocks on Base, including Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.Bc), Galaxy Digital (GLXYc) and Western Digital (WDCc). Learn more on the issuer's project page.

• Listed 1,420 wrapped xStocks on X Layer, including the S&P 500 ETF (wSPYx), SpaceX (wSPCXx) and NVIDIA (wNVDAx), with circulating asset market cap of $9.8 million. Learn more on the issuer's project page.

• Listed Stove's 2,455 tokenized stocks on BNB Chain and Arbitrum, covering U.S., Hong Kong and Korean equities. Learn more on the issuer's project page.

Interested in getting listed? Read more here.

Query the Token Terminal data warehouse with Claude

Customers can access Token Terminal datasets directly through BigQuery and Snowflake. The data catalog shows how our data is structured, how datasets relate to each other, and what is available across the different layers of our data warehouse.

Connect Claude to your BigQuery project through the Google Cloud BigQuery connector in Claude’s connector directory, and you can work with those datasets in natural language. Claude can:

• Find the right Token Terminal datasets for your question

• Inspect table schemas

• Write and run SQL queries directly in your BigQuery environment

Explore the catalog at tokenterminal.com/docs/catalog.