Last Friday I wrote about the morning DTC spent in production, thirty-some firms moving real collateral, and the thing I kept circling was what nobody did. Not one of them put a tokenized share in front of the public. On July 16, Broadridge published a survey that reads like the explanation.
Phronesis Partners polled 200 senior decision-makers at wealth managers, asset managers, capital markets desks and digital asset firms across the US and Canada. Eighty-four percent called tokenization strategically important. Ninety-two percent expect digital and traditional assets to sit side by side for the long haul. Eighty percent think tokenized mutual funds and money market funds will matter within five years. On tokenized equities, the number falls to about half.
Half the Room Said No
That gap is the whole survey. These are not people who doubt the technology. They just spent two years watching it work. Sixty-nine percent of them plan to fold tokenization into the systems they already run rather than stand up something separate. They believe in the format. When the question turns to equities, half of them decline to sign.
The reason is the same one the exchanges took to the SEC in May, when the tokenized-stock innovation exemption came off the table. A tokenized money market fund is a fund in a new wrapper. It has a transfer agent, a daily NAV, an administrator, and a regulator who has known what it is since 1940. A tokenized share drags in Regulation NMS, CAT reporting, corporate actions, proxy voting, and a transfer agency layer that decides who legally owns what. Every one of those has to be answered before the first share changes hands. Regulatory uncertainty was the most-cited obstacle in the survey, and equities are where the uncertainty lives.
The Volume Went Somewhere Else
While half of Wall Street was declining to sign, the tokenized equity market had the best year in its short life. Monthly transfer volume in tokenized stocks ran $9.22 billion in June, against $53 million in June 2025. A 170-fold move in twelve months.
Value outstanding followed. Tokenized stocks printed a record near $2.3 billion in mid-July, roughly double where the sector sat in March when it first crossed a billion. Ethereum carries about 34 percent of it, BNB Chain 30 percent, Solana 23 percent.
Then look at who is doing the issuing.
Ondo Global Markets has around $955 million in on-chain equities outstanding. Kraken's xStocks holds roughly $507 million, Binance's bStocks about $334 million. None of those three was in the DTC room on July 15, and none of them issues a registered share. They issue a wrapper that tracks one, largely to customers outside the United States, on venues that never answered to Regulation NMS in the first place.
Both Answers Are Correct
The survey respondents are right about their own market. A US institution cannot hold a synthetic wrapper against a margin call, and no clearinghouse is going to take one. What J.P. Morgan pledged at CME last week worked because the security stayed at DTC with its legal rights attached.
The wrapper issuers are right about theirs. Their customer wants exposure to a US name at two in the morning on a Sunday with two hundred dollars, and does not much care whose ledger it lives on. That customer is not being served by the American market at all, and the volume says so.
My first job in markets, in 1977, was as an options Account Executive, which meant taking orders from people the floor did not spend much time thinking about. The received view where I sat was that the serious money moved between the firms and the rest was noise around the edges. The noise around the edges kept growing. Two markets can carry the same word and never touch. They can also converge, and when they do, the side with the customers tends to set the terms.
What I'm Watching
Whether October puts an equity product in front of the public. DTCC's full service launch lands in October. If it leads with collateral and financing again, the survey's half was right and this stays two markets for a while.
Whether the tokenized money market fund shows up as DTC collateral. Societe Generale's tokenized Treasuries went in as collateral last week. The fund underneath them is still missing, and eighty percent of this survey expects it inside five years. The firm that ships it first gets to price it.
Whether the wider pool starts moving again. Real-world assets on chain sit around $34.7 billion, off a $35.2 billion high set on July 10. Equity token volume ran 170 times last June while the pool it draws from went flat. That is existing capital turning over faster, not new money arriving.
Bottom Line
Half of Wall Street told a pollster that tokenized equities will not matter inside five years. The same month, tokenized equities did $9.22 billion of transfer volume and set a record for value outstanding. Both things are true, because they describe different rooms. Those 200 people were asked whether tokenized equities would matter to them, and they answered honestly. Their answer says more about who they think the customer is than about where the volume is headed. I have watched that particular judgment get revised before.
All the best,
— Tony
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