The Bright Side: Tokenized Equities Tokenization was the most talked-about topic at TOKEN2049 (full recap). From crypto natives to the CEO of Nasdaq, and policy to execution, it was the use case driving the most tangible innovation in finance. Equities drew the most attention among RWA assets. Commodities and bonds came on-chain first, but in 2026, equities have stolen the spotlight. With traditional brokerages, namely Robinhood adopting them. But just how much has the category grown? And who’s driving it?  Here’s a numerical deep dive.  Tokenized equities grow 483% Total value of tokenized equities reached $3.8B in the week of October 5, up from $654M in the week of January 5. Ondo Finance still leads at $1B in market cap, but its share fell from 56% to 26%. More issuers entered, and existing ones gained traction. New issuers drove much of the shift. Binance launched bStocks in June 2026, which surged to $100M within two weeks, and now sits at $905M (24% of the market). Robinhood launched in July and grew from $20M to $170M. Existing issuers gained too.  In July, Securitize launched its own stock , its main tokenized equity, and now holds $290M (8% of the market). xStocks grew from $187M to $954M, and has held its ground as the second-largest issuer at 25%. BNB Chain leads with bStocks launch Ethereum starts with a big lead because early issuers choose the network they trust. However, its market share is eroding as issuers expand to other networks and activity takes over. At the start of the year, Ethereum held 50% of all tokenized equities. Now it holds 22%. The biggest rallies? BNB Chain (9% to 32%) and Avalanche (0% to 9%). After Ondo made the expansion in October 2025, BNB Chain gained initial traction. Its lead later solidified when Binance released its own tokenized equities product, bStocks. Three of the 10 largest tokenized equities sit on BNB Chain: CRCLb, SPCXb and MSTRb. Avalanche entered in July, with an immediate 7% share because Securitize tokenized a portion of its newly IPO’d shares on the network. That stock is now the largest single tokenized equity at $290M. Are they actually being used on-chain? Tokenization for tokenization’s sake won’t work in the long run. There needs to be added utility beyond their off-chain versions to drive demand for tokenized equities. So market cap growth matters less, than whether these assets are used on-chain instead of sitting idle in wallets.  The below takes three views: transfer volume, which counts any movement of tokens between addresses (trading, moving assets across protocols for lending, and so on), spot DEX trading volume, and DeFi active TVL. Transfer volume grew 41.8x between the weeks of Jan 5 and Oct 5, from $420M to $17.5B, while market cap grew 5.8x. Weekly turnover (transfer volume divided by market cap) rose from 0.64x to 4.6x, so each dollar of market cap moved about seven times as often. That points to rising on-chain usage. Isolating trading volume shows a similar trend. Weekly spot DEX volume in tokenized equities grew from $45.8M in the week of January 5 to $2.54B in the week of October 5, a 55x increase against 5.8x for market cap. Weekly trading velocity (spot DEX volume divided by market cap) rose from 0.07x to 0.67x. Volume reached $7.26B in the week of August 31, 158x the January level. Robinhood Chain accounted for 74% of that ($5.36B). Additionally, trading has spread beyond Solana, which carried 99.8% of volume in January. In October, Solana held 31%, Robinhood Chain 26%, BNB Chain 25% and Base 18%. Trading has grown as a share of on-chain movement too: 14.5% of transfer volume in October, up from 10.9% in January. Next, how much of this is deployed in DeFi? DeFi active TVL in tokenized equities grew from $15.5M on January 1 to $313M on October 15, about 20x, against 5.8x growth in market cap between early January and early October. Deployed capital rose from about 2% of market cap to about 8%, and the 30 days to October 15 added $33.2M (12%). The protocol breakdown shows where these assets are put to work.  Lending and borrowing markets (Kamino, Jupiter Lend, Frankencoin) hold $51.3M, and spot DEX pools on Uniswap V4, Raydium and Aerodrome hold $77.9M. Saturn, an onchain credit protocol, holds $50.9M, Figure Markets Exchange $48.9M, and Pendle’s yield markets $42.6M. The top ten protocols hold 89% of the total. At $3.8B, tokenized equities are just 0.005% of an estimated $75T US equity market, and global equities are roughly twice that at $150T. There is work to be done, however the size of the market, coupled with how tokenization could transform financial markets, make this one of the most exciting sectors in crypto, if not the most.