Tokenized stocks are no longer just digital stand-ins for shares. Inside decentralized finance, they are becoming liquidity, collateral and even trading pairs for crypto-native markets.
Their total value locked in DeFi protocols jumped 1,961% over the past year to $247.8 million, according to figures published by Token Terminal on Thursday.
Binance Research attributes the expansion to a broader set of onchain infrastructure, where lending protocols, smart contracts and markets built around stocks are giving tokenized equities jobs beyond simply sitting in a wallet.
Tokenized stocks have found a job beyond holding
The money is concentrated across a surprisingly small group of networks. Robinhood Chain accounts for $98.2 million of tokenized stock TVL, followed by Solana with $87.4 million and BNB Chain with $36.3 million.
Together, those three networks represent 89.5% of the total.
Binance Research found a similar surge in active DeFi TVL, which grew from $21.6 million in January to $289.1 million by September 9. Relative to DeFi’s own active market cap, that share increased from 2.2% to 7.2%.
So where is all that value actually going?
Liquidity pools make up 65.4% of activity, while lending markets account for another 28.1%. Yield tokenization represents 5.7%, with the remaining 0.8% spread across other uses.
The figures sit against a much larger market for tokenized stocks overall. RWA.xyz puts distributed value at nearly $2.9 billion at its mid-September peak, covering tokens that can move freely between wallets.
Lending is becoming harder to ignore, too. Data from bStocks shows that outstanding borrowing against bStocks climbed from 5.5% of deposited collateral at the end of June to 46.2% by September 10.
That translates to about $3.1 million borrowed against $6.8 million in collateral. The pool remains small compared with the broader market, but its rising utilization suggests the tokens are increasingly being treated as financial instruments rather than digital replicas.
And then there is the stranger side of the story: meme coins.
Binance Research found that stock-paired meme coin markets generated approximately $2.49 billion in volume on Robinhood Chain and $2.90 billion on BNB Chain between July 26 and September 9.
A sample analyzed by onchain analytics firm SQD showed that $711.2 million, or 32.1%, of cumulative stock-token volume through August 30 came from trades against other tokens, mostly meme coins.
“Tokenized stocks are therefore becoming quote assets for crypto-native trading, which can lift turnover without requiring a proportional increase in buy-and-hold equity demand,” the report added.
That changes the question surrounding tokenized stocks. The industry already has the infrastructure to issue them and move them around. What remains unclear is how much of the roughly $2.9 billion distributed value can develop a meaningful use once it reaches the blockchain.