TechFlow reports, according to Alex Xu, Research Partner at Mint Ventures, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and CFO Alesia Haas recently indicated they are considering tokenizing the company's shares for trading U.S. equities on the Base blockchain. If successfully implemented, U.S. equities could become the third major category of RWA (real-world assets), following stablecoins (USDT, USDC) and treasury bonds (Buidl), potentially surpassing the current scale of tokenized treasuries in the short term.
The value proposition of on-chain U.S. equities lies in two key aspects: first, expanding the market size by enabling a 7×24, borderless, permissionless trading environment; second, superior composability, allowing stock assets to be used as collateral, margin, or structured into indices and fund products. For both supply and demand sides, listed companies can access global investors and gain broader investor demand, while investors can overcome geographical barriers to directly allocate U.S. equity assets.
Earlier attempts have been made in this domain—Coinbase planned a security token listing in 2020 but was halted due to regulatory concerns; during the last DeFi boom, Terra’s Mirror and Ethereum’s Synthetix introduced synthetic U.S. equity products. Currently, the SEC’s shifting stance presents new opportunities for such innovations. Potential beneficiaries include Polymath’s Polymesh blockchain (token: Polyx), which BlackRock has already used to issue a $500 million digital bond; additionally, RWA projects like Ondo and oracle solution Chainlink may also benefit from this trend.
