Recently, many people have been talking about 'on-chain US stocks', but what has always been truly important is not how to 'move stocks onto the chain'.
The real watershed is: whether there is a set of structures that can be accepted by the entire industry and can exist in the long term. Many on-chain US stock solutions have issues in that they remain at the stage of 'the concept is correct', which we refer to as talking big without action.
Recently, Kraken acquired BackedFi (xStocks) @xStocksFi, and in my opinion, this is a very clear signal: exchanges are also increasing their investment in on-chain US stocks, which is a very important aspect of RWA-Fi.
xStocks has already realized the genuine launch, tradability, and transferability of over 60 stocks, which itself indicates one thing: it is not a theoretical possibility, but one of the verified advantageous paths.
Long-term compliance design, custody structure, PoR verification, risk control boundaries, these are the elements that prevent 'on-chain stocks' from being directly affected by market cycles. xStocks essentially addresses not the narrative issue, but the industry standard issue.
The reason xStocks is chosen by CEXs like Kraken and Bybit is not because it tells a better story, but because it has already approached an infra shape in several key dimensions:
- Compliance and transparency, asset verifiability
- Can be directly integrated by exchanges, protocols, and wallets
I casually reviewed the real data of the entire stock tokenization market:
A few popular targets (TSLAx, NVDAx, CRCLx), with a daily trading volume of around 10M–30M USD, on-chain cumulative trading volume has approached 400 million USD, slightly higher on the CEX side, and recently Binance Wallet has also completed integration, with short-term growth expected.
HYPE has introduced HIP-3, focusing on on-chain US stock trading, and its sister company trade.xyz is also working on on-chain US stocks. I have also found that xStocks can already be used as collateral for lending on Kamino.
- Real stocks 1:1 fully supported
- Verifying underlying assets through Chainlink PoR
- Permissionless and freely transferable
- Not being locked into a single platform or account system
This allows users to pledge US stock assets to realize liquidity redemption. It's a very good practice. Compared to many other solutions, the problem is actually very clear. If users cannot transfer assets out of the platform, into the public chain, or into lending or structured strategies, they can only limit themselves to the trade & hold scenario. In that case, there isn't much difference between holding US stocks on-chain and holding US stocks with traditional brokers, while xStocks' attempt at collateral lending on Kamino has greatly improved capital utilization.
In today's market environment, a single scenario means the ceiling is very low. From this perspective, explorations like xStocks are actually a long-term advantage and may be the real breakthrough for tokenized stocks, or RWA-Fi, moving to the next stage.
So in my view, xStocks is not about 'copying stocks onto the chain'. It is more about linking traditional capital markets with an open, composable decentralized financial system.
