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(7 Day Change as of July 3, 2025 1:50PM ET)
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Bitcoin Price: $109,621
2.11%
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DeFi Total-Value-Locked: $116.9B
5.70%
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Ethereum Price: $2,578
6.15%
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Crypto Market Cap: $3.38T
3.68%
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Bitcoin Range: $105,419 - $110,365
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TKN.U Close: $18.24 (as at July 2, 2025)
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Ethereum Range: $2,392- $2,631
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Bitcoin Dominance: 64.50%
(0.77%)
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An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again): The Tokenization Tipping Point?
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It’s been a big few weeks for tokenization—and for those of us who’ve been banging the drum for years, it feels like things are really starting to happen: Robinhood, Kraken, Gemini, Coinbase and others are all leaning hard into bringing real-world assets (RWAs) like stocks, bonds, options and ETFs onchain.
It’s the clearest sign yet that tokens, those programmable, digital containers for value, are emerging as the new medium for how we move, store, and transact in anything of value.
Let’s start with the news:
- Robinhood, at its "To Catch a Token" event in France unveiled tokenized versions of over 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs. These live on Arbitrum for now, but will migrate to Robinhood Chain, their in-house Ethereum Layer 2 optimized for RWA tokenization. Dividends paid directly in-app. 24/5 trading.
- Kraken, through its partnership with Backed, launched tokenized U.S. equities on Solana. These xStocks can be traded on Kraken or withdrawn to self-custody wallets, unlocking DeFi functionality.
- Gemini listed its first tokenized U.S. stock via Dinari's dShares. Dinari also secured broker-dealer registration in the U.S.—a major regulatory milestone for tokenized equities.
- Coinbase has nothing live yet. But their Chief Legal Officer called tokenized equities a "huge priority.”
Just as ETFs democratized access to bonds, commodities, and a wider array of investment strategies, tokens can democratize access to anything of value: stocks, bonds, funds, art, IP, collectibles, and private market assets that historically have been harder to access for most investors.
Tokens are programmable, widely accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and (mostly) borderless – though in the case of some of these corporate initiatives such as Robinhood’s tokenization efforts, geofenced to certain markets until there is regulatory clarity.
They can enable 24/7, global capital markets, bringing finance one step closer to internet speed.
Stablecoins—the first killer app for tokens—have already transformed how we access to U.S. dollars. Their market
has grown from under $1 billion in 2018 to $240 billion today, processing trillions in payments and giving potentially billions of people a frictionless way to hold dollars. And with foreign buyers shunning U.S. debt, they
may even act as the funding source for U.S. debt.
What’s more, what worked for dollars can work for other assets: treasuries, private credit, commodities—and increasingly, stocks and funds. This is already happening and it is accelerating. The tokenized RWA market (ex-stablecoins)
is now $25 billion, up 120% year-over-year and 270x over five years. Private credit ($14.2B) and U.S. Treasuries ($7.4B) lead the pack. Tokenized commodities like gold are now $1.6B and growing fast—daily volumes have surged in 2025, thanks to macro tailwinds. The tokenized stock market, still small at $340M, has grown 750x year-over-year.
A Burning Platform
Incumbents may not realize it yet, but they are standing on a burning platform. Tokenization threatens to upend the traditional business of finance—custody, settlement, payments, and intermediation—as assets increasingly move onchain. The risk of disintermediation is real. But so is the opportunity for reintermediation. By leaning into these innovations, incumbents can streamline operations, add value, and serve a global, always-on marketplace. But to do that, they may first need to disrupt themselves—something large, regulated institutions have historically struggled to do.
Take a cue from BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, who has
called tokenization "the future of markets." He’s not just talking—he’s acting. BlackRock now manages the world’s largest Bitcoin ETF and, more importantly, is actively tokenizing funds and investing in the underlying infrastructure.
The tokenization of everything may feel inevitable, but the path is not without obstacles: fragmented blockchain networks, inconsistent technical standards, regulatory gaps between major markets like the U.S. and Europe, and clunky user experiences that keep most mainstream users on the sidelines. But these are implementation challenges—not reasons to dismiss the idea altogether.
At the end of the day, tokens are simply a better, faster, cheaper, more programmable medium for value—just as the internet became a better, faster, cheaper medium for information. Tokens are double-entry bookkeeping for the digital age.
Most breakthrough technologies start out looking like toys. The web, the PC, the car, even stablecoins—all began as niche products beloved by a savvy community of early adopters but that few took seriously in the mainstream (at least initially). Over time, they evolved, improved, and reshaped entire industries. The same may happen here. Tokenization may still feel like a work in progress, but its potential to transform financial markets is undeniable—and the incumbents who ignore it do so at their peril.
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THIS WEEK ON DEFI DECODED
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With DeFi Decoded off this week, we’re sharing a timely throwback that ties into this week’s tokenization theme. Back in 2016, Alex gave a TED Talk predicting how blockchain would eat Wall Street. It’s since racked up nearly 1,000,000 views across platforms, and it’s more relevant than ever. At the time of the talk, the entire crypto market was worth just $10 billion. Today, it’s grown 340× to $3.4 trillion. Enjoy the watch!
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By: Jake Moodie
, Analyst, Digital Asset Group at Ninepoint Partners
Robinhood Goes All In on Crypto with Major Suite of New Crypto Products Including Robinhood Stock Tokens, Robinhood Chain, Perpetual Futures, and Crypto Staking
On Monday, Robinhood
unveiled a major suite of new crypto products at its
To Catch a Token event in Cannes, France, stating that they are “laying the groundwork for crypto to become the backbone of the global financial system.” First up was Robinhood Stock Tokens, tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs now available to their customers in the EU. Until now, Robinhood’s European app only supported crypto trading, but this launch transforms it into a full-service investment platform. Users can trade over 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs as tokens, receive dividend payouts directly in-app, and access the market 24 hours a day, five days a week. Second, Robinhood announced the upcoming launch of Robinhood Chain, its own Ethereum L2 network built specifically for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization. Initially, Robinhood Stock Tokens will launch on Arbitrum but will eventually migrate to Robinhood Chain. Third, Robinhood said that crypto perpetual futures with up to 3x leverage are coming to its EU app by the end of summer. Fourth, Robinhood is bringing crypto staking to U.S. customers, starting with Ethereum and Solana, both of which are already available in the EU. While many still think of Robinhood as a low-cost stock trading app, they’ve quietly built out a serious Robinhood Crypto division and have become a dominant leader in the space. In June 2024, Robinhood
acquired Bitstamp, the world’s longest-running crypto exchange, for $200 million. The deal gave them entry into the institutional market and access to over 50 licenses and registrations across the EU, U.S., U.K. In November 2024, Robinhood
joined forces with Anchorage Digital, Bullish, Galaxy Digital, Kraken, Nuvei, and Paxos to launch the Global Dollar Network and the USDG stablecoin. In May 2025, Robinhood
launched its own prediction markets hub, allowing users to trade event contracts. They
also acquired Canadian crypto platform WonderFi Technologies for $180 million to expand their presence in the country. So, when will tokenized equities be made available to U.S. individuals? While there’s no clear answer yet, this is something the industry is strongly advocating for. This month, news
broke that Coinbase is seeking SEC approval to move forward. And in April, Robinhood
submitted a nine-page report to the SEC outlining the benefits of tokenization and why the U.S. should embrace it. Once the regulatory green light comes, we expect the tokenized RWA market to grow significantly. This was something we explored in last week’s
quantitative section of
Digital Asset Digest.
Kraken Launches Peer to Peer Global Payments App Built on Public Blockchain Rails to Take On Traditional Incumbents Like PayPal, Venmo, and Cash App
Kraken has announced the
launch of Krak, a peer-to-peer global payments app built on public blockchain rails to compete with traditional players like PayPal, Venmo, and CashApp. According to the press release, Kraken wants to fix the broken financial system where 1.4 billion adults are still unbanked, people lose 2–3% on card fees, and sending money across borders often costs more than 6%. They want to make sending money globally as easy as sending a text, instant and nearly free. With Krak, users can send, save, and spend over 300 cryptoassets, stablecoins, and fiat currencies in more than 160 countries. Bank transfers are free, users earn 4.1% rewards on USDG stablecoin balances, and each individual gets a custom payment handle, called a KrakTag, to remove the complexities of wallet addresses. Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi said they built Krak because “the financial system has been stuck in the past,” and this is just the start of how people will manage their money going forward. This launch follows a string of big moves from Kraken in recent months, including the launch of
their Ethereum L2 Ink, NinjaTrader
acquisition, rolling out trading support
for stocks and ETFs, and
unveiling tokenized equities via xStocks by Backed. It’s all part of a broader trend that we’ve discussed: exchanges are actively evolving to become one-stop-shops for financial assets and activities. Kraken, Coinbase, and Robinhood are currently leading the frontier on this. This also comes at a time where Kraken is one of the strongest candidates to potentially IPO, and with the success of Circle’s, we believe that moment may be near.
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Chart 1:
Bitcoin and Crypto-Related Stocks are Surging, But What's Going on with Altcoins?
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With Bitcoin up 15% YTD and crypto-related equities starting to catch a major bid, many investors are wondering what is going on with altcoins. Defined as any cryptoasset that is not Bitcoin or stablecoins, and for the purposes of this analysis excluding Ethereum as well, altcoins have historically rallied late in market cycles as investors rotate profits into higher beta tokens in search of outsized returns. At the start of the year, the total altcoin market cap
was $720 billion, but it has since dropped 16% to around $600 billion. The only meaningful altcoin rally this cycle came in November when Trump won the election, with the market jumping from $410 billion to $950 billion in less than 30 days. That rally was short lived, and altcoins have since materially underperformed. Still, even after the recent pullback, the altcoin market is up 76% Y/Y from $340 billion. As we have noted in recent newsletters, this cycle feels different from previous ones, which has influenced altcoin performance. Two major factors behind this shift are the growing number of tokens diluting investor attention and the large amount of capital now locked in ETFs and public companies. These structural forces have redirected both capital and focus away from altcoins. Looking at the table, the average drawdown from all time highs across the ten largest altcoins by market cap is 51%. If crypto equities continue to perform well, that could trigger a further reflexive selloff in altcoins. We covered this topic in a recent
episode of DeFi Decoded, where we asked whether crypto stocks are becoming the new altcoins.
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Chart 2: Investment
Funds & Public Companies Own the Lion’s Share of BTC Held by Entities
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In January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin,
said in an email, “it might make sense just to get some in case it catches on,” while discussing the release of Bitcoin v0.1. Today, more than sixteen years later, Bitcoin
is the seventh-largest asset in the world, with a $2.1 trillion market cap, and is more widely held than ever before. To help illustrate how ownership has grown across different types of entities, we put together the following chart. The trend has clearly moved up and to the right, especially over the past five years. The total Bitcoin held by tracked entities
has grown from 814,000 in 2020 to 1.8 million in 2024, and now sits near 3.5 million BTC, representing roughly 17% of total supply. The two biggest drivers of this growth have been investment funds and public companies. Bitcoin investment funds have pulled in nearly $15 billion in net inflows YTD, after attracting close to $40 billion last year. These products now collectively hold 1.4 million BTC, up 82% Y/Y. The largest contributor in this category is BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), which launched in January 2024 and
already holds $75 billion in AUM, equivalent to 692,000 BTC. That accounts for half of all Bitcoin held by funds. Public Bitcoin treasury companies have also seen significant growth. This group has doubled its holdings over the past year and now owns 840,000 BTC. A major share of this comes from Strategy, the original Bitcoin treasury company led by Michael Saylor. With 597,000 BTC, MicroStrategy holds 71% of all Bitcoin owned by public companies. Looking ahead to the second half of 2025, investment funds and public companies are likely to remain the largest and fastest-growing holders of Bitcoin, supported by strong market activity and continued investor demand.
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July 3, 2025
