On-chain stocks To da moon: Robinhood competes with xStocks layout

2025-07-04 09:52:53

Abstract generation in progress

Author: thedefinvestor Translation: Shan Ouba, Golden Finance

This is another historic week for the crypto industry.

The trading platform giant Robinhood announced the launch of tokenized versions of US stocks on Arbitrum One. But this isn’t even the most significant news of the week. On the same day, xStocks also went live on Jupiter Exchange on Solana.

In the initial stage, Robinhood’s on-chain stocks will have some limitations:

Only supports 24/5 trading (closed on weekends).
Researchers have reverse-engineered the tokenized stock contracts of Robinhood and believe that these stock tokens are very likely incompatible with DeFi.
Buying these on-chain stocks seems to require KYC.

However, Robinhood’s on-chain stocks have an interesting highlight:

They also support investments in private companies such as OpenAI and SpaceX—which was almost impossible for retail investors to do before.

Of course, don’t get me wrong: this news from Robinhood is very exciting, but the real breakthrough is allowing tokenized assets to be used in DeFi without permission.

This is the highlight of xStocks.

Earlier this week, Backed Finance launched xStocks on Solana. These are tokenized versions of real U.S. stocks and ETFs, and are truly “DeFi-ready” products.

The term “DeFi-ready” means: integrated into multiple DeFi protocols, anyone with a Solana wallet can trade freely on-chain without permission.

Currently, you can do the following with these xStocks:

Exchange any Solana token for xStocks on Jupiter Exchange
Provide liquidity for xStocks on Raydium and earn trading fees
Borrow stablecoins by using xStocks as collateral on Loopscale (currently, stocks from Circle, Tesla, and Nvidia can be used as collateral)
Soon, they can also be used as collateral on Kamino Lend.

I have actually been waiting for this “DeFi-ready” version of the stock for a long time.

Although Ethereum still leads in institutional adoption, it is interesting that Backed chose to launch xStocks exclusively on Solana.

However, I wouldn’t be surprised if they also expand this product to other chains in the future.

Of course, you can also buy xStocks directly through centralized exchanges like Bybit, Kraken, and Gate, although this is not the use case I am most interested in.

The Future of Asset Tokenization

Imagine these scenarios:

Speculating on future dividends of a certain American company on yield trading protocols like Pendle.
Borrowing against on-chain stocks on AAVE
You can also trade stocks on-chain during the weekend (when traditional stock markets are closed).

In my opinion, tokenized assets (such as on-chain stocks) have great potential, as they can give rise to many new interesting use cases.

This is exactly why DeFi has the opportunity to bring the next billion users on-chain: by providing the same products as traditional finance, but with lower fees, a better experience, and the ability to support entirely new high capital efficiency use cases.

Currently, RWA is still a very early field. The total value of tokenized stocks globally is only 392.8 million dollars, while the total market capitalization of the global stock market exceeds one trillion dollars.

I wouldn’t be surprised if by 2030, the RWA sector could develop into a market worth trillions of dollars.

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