In the past year, “tokenized U.S. stocks” should be the sexiest narrative in the RWA (Real World Assets) track. Bringing the stocks of Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia onto the chain, allowing global investors to trade seamlessly 24 hours a day—this seemingly perfect decentralized finance story has developers and capital rushing in. But if you carefully examine this track, the business of tokenized U.S. stocks may have been done wrong by them all!

Let’s first look at a set of data that is enough to completely calm everyone down. As of April 30, 2026, the Wilshire 5000 index shows that the total market value of U.S. stocks has soared to $72 trillion, while the current total TVL of global tokenized U.S. stock projects is only a mere $1.2 billion (rwa.xyz data). $1.2 billion vs. $72 trillion. This means that the much-hyped tokenized U.S. stocks only account for 0.00166% of the total market value of U.S. stocks. This is not even a drop in the bucket, but rather “a bacterium on an elephant.”

If you look at the top tokenized stocks, the data is even more dismal: Circle (CircleOn) TVL $130.00 million, STRC (STRCx) TVL $79.00 million, Tesla (TSLAx) TVL $53.00 million, Nvidia (NVDAon) TVL $39.00 million. The size of these tokenized stocks is not even as good as a second-rate Meme coin. Let’s also make a horizontal comparison with “tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds,” which are also in the RWA track. According to the latest data from rwa.xyz, the on-chain TVL of tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds has exceeded $15.20 billion, hitting a record high. In other words, also bringing traditional financial assets onto the chain, the size of tokenized Treasury bonds is 15 times that of tokenized U.S. stocks.

All current U.S. stock tokenization projects only focus on the trading aspect. This leads to a fatal problem: a serious misjudgment of the real needs of on-chain users. The needs of on-chain users can actually be divided into two categories: one is trading users, who pursue high risk, high leverage, and high returns. What they want on the chain is to be able to 100x long Tesla and short Nvidia, rather than a “1x unleveraged tokenized stock.” In this dimension, U.S. stock perpetual contracts are more attractive than tokenized U.S. stocks, directly stealing this group of users.

The other category is yield-seeking users, who pursue stable and sustainable passive income. What they want on the chain is assets that can continuously generate interest, rather than a “tokenized stock” whose price fluctuates with U.S. stocks and does not generate any cash flow itself. Taking Ondo and xStocks as examples, the official websites have almost no real user traffic. The reason is simple: buying directly on the official website not only requires completing KYC real-name authentication, but also providing proof of qualified investor status. This threshold directly blocks 99% of on-chain users, while in the cooperative centralized exchange, they can directly buy without any obstacles. This means that the real users are on the exchange, and what the users of the exchange really want are two things: high-leverage trading and stable, certain returns. Tokenized U.S. stocks provide neither.

In the past two months, a far-reaching event has occurred in the U.S. stock market: In December 2025, the SEC issued a no-action letter to the U.S. central securities depository (DTC), allowing it to conduct a three-year tokenization pilot; on March 18, 2026, the SEC formally approved Nasdaq’s rule revision, allowing specific stocks to be traded in tokenized form; on April 17, 2026, the SEC approved almost identical rule revisions from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in an “immediately effective” manner. In the second half of 2026, DTC’s tokenization pilot will officially launch. This means that Wall Street is using blockchain to reverse co-opt decentralized finance. DTC, as the “household register” of all U.S. stocks, is personally entering the market to do settlement layer tokenization. At the transaction matching level, tokenized stocks are completely equivalent to traditional stocks. In front of the regular army, those on-chain native protocols that engage in “tokenized U.S. stocks” will have no power to fight back.

So, does the tokenized U.S. stock track not belong to entrepreneurs? The answer is no. The key is that we must use the “asset attributes” of tokenized U.S. stocks, rather than the “trading attributes.” What are asset attributes? It is to use the underlying assets as a yield-generating tool, collateral, or underlying asset for structured products, rather than simply as chips for buying and selling.

Here are two good examples of using the asset attributes of U.S. stocks: One is Saturn’s USDat, which uses preferred stocks as the underlying yield-generating asset, and its pledged version sUSDat uses STRC as the underlying, providing an annualized return of 11.50%, raising $100.00 million in just 45 days. The second is RWAlpha.ai, which targets the Income ETF niche track and encapsulates it into an on-chain RWA Token through systematic financial engineering, automatically paying dividends every week, with a target annualized return of up to double digits. This return comes from the Nasdaq ETF matrix’s own real cash flow.

The second half of tokenized U.S. stocks has arrived, and the protagonist is becoming a traditional giant on Wall Street. For RWA entrepreneurs, continuing to fight to the death on “trading attributes” is tantamount to hitting a stone with an egg. Only by breaking out of the trading mindset, deeply exploring asset attributes, and introducing the returns of traditional finance onto the chain through structured products, is it possible to explore the correct direction for tokenized U.S. stocks. [NathanMa]