Chainfeeds Summary:

Just a few days ago, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and CFO Alesia Haas both stated that they are considering tokenizing Coinbase's stock to enable trading of US stocks on the Base blockchain. If the plan proceeds smoothly, US stocks may become the third largest RWA (Real-World Asset) after stablecoins (USDT, USDC) and government bonds (Buidl).

Source:

https://x.com/xuxiaopengmint/status/1898566963175276635

Author:

Alex Xu

Perspective:

Alex Xu: Compared to the narratives of Crypto AI agents and desci (decentralized science) that have emerged in this cycle, the value proposition of on-chain US stocks is clear, and the demand from both the supply and demand sides is very explicit. Specifically, the value proposition of US stocks on-chain is similar to other DeFi products, reflected in a larger free market and superior composability. First, it expands the scale of the trading market. Secondly, by combining with existing DeFi infrastructure, US stock assets can be used as collateral, margin, to construct indices and fund products, and many unimaginable use cases can be derived. The demand from both the supply and demand sides is also very clear. The supply side (US-listed companies) can reach potential investors from around the world through the borderless blockchain platform and obtain more potential buy-side demand. The demand side (investors) are many who were previously unable to directly trade US stocks for various reasons, and can now directly allocate and speculate on US stock assets through the blockchain.

In fact, the idea of on-chaining US stocks has been tried before, such as Coinbase's attempt to list its stock token ($COIN) as a security token in 2020, but it was shelved due to regulatory barriers from the US SEC. From the background and logic of the narrative, we can sort out the relevant targets in the crypto secondary market. In fact, there are not many well-established STO (Security Token Offering) concept projects that have already issued tokens and gone online. The most relevant may be Polymath, which was founded as early as 2017 and was one of the earliest to provide STO concept education in the crypto industry. It later launched the Polymesh blockchain, a public permissioned blockchain designed for compliant assets (such as security tokens), with built-in identity authentication, compliance checks, privacy protection, governance and instant settlement functions. Polymesh's token, Polyx, has already been listed on Binance, with a market cap and fully diluted valuation both over $100 million, but the valuation is not high. In addition, RWA concept projects like Ondo, which have mainly focused on the tokenization of government bonds in the past, can also adjust their products according to compliance regulations to serve the stock tokenization scenario. Moreover, Ondo is closely associated with the Trump family and may receive more overt or covert conveniences, or even endorsement from Trump family members (although the marginal impact of such actions is becoming weaker and weaker). Chainlink, as a mainstream oracle solution and security token service provider, has also done a lot of work in connecting traditional financial institutions and blockchains, and will theoretically benefit from this as well.