The New York Stock Exchange and crypto firm Blockchain.com have announced a strategic collaboration to explore selling tokens that represent NYSE-listed stocks and ETFs on the blockchain. The companies plan to explore creating crypto versions of U.S.-listed stocks, though they have not said which countries the resulting products would actually be sold in.
What the Deal Actually Covers
As part of the arrangement, Blockchain.com will use NYSE data in its own app, while NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange will distribute Blockchain.com's crypto market data and analytics, according to the Charlotte Observer, which cited Reuters reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft. Blockchain.com, which is based in London and Dallas, said the collaboration is a bet on where capital markets are heading. The company has already started selling tokenized stocks to customers in Europe, though it declined to comment on how many customers had bought in.
Tokenization, broadly, is the creation of blockchain-based tokens representing or pegged to assets such as stocks and bonds. Buyers of these tokens typically do not become shareholders in the underlying company and do not receive the same rights as traditional equity owners, including voting rights. What the tokens do offer, according to the report, is a way for more people to buy stocks and trade them outside standard market hours.
A Crowded Field Already Testing the Concept
NYSE and Blockchain.com are entering a race that other players have already been running for a while. Trading platforms and crypto exchanges are vying for share in equities trading in token form, according to Investopedia. Tokenization was still theoretical when BlackRock chief Larry Fink publicly discussed it in early 2024, but it has since landed in the real world via trading platforms including Robinhood, Kraken and Coinbase, the outlet notes.
Kraken, for instance, offers what it calls xStocks — tokenized representations of more than 100 companies, including Apple and NVIDIA, that can be traded 24 hours a day on weekdays and purchased as fractional shares for as little as $1, per Kraken's own site. Each xStock is backed one-to-one by the underlying equity and issued as an on-chain token, but the company is explicit that the tokens do not confer ownership or shareholder voting rights. Kraken says the tokens are not currently accessible to retail clients in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom or Australia, though the exchange plans to add tokenized stocks from the U.K., Hong Kong and South Korea, subject to regulatory approvals, Yahoo Finance reports.
Ondo runs a comparable operation, offering more than 450 tokenized stocks and ETFs that Ondo says are fully backed and collateralized by the corresponding stock or ETF and cash in transit, according to the company's own materials. Ondo Stocks are offered only outside the United States and only to eligible non-U.S. persons, and the tokens can be transferred and traded peer-to-peer around the clock, even though direct minting and redemption generally runs on weekdays only. Ondo distributes its tokenized offerings through partners including Blockchain.com itself, alongside exchanges, wallets and decentralized platforms, per Datawallet.
Regulatory Green Light — With Limits
Robinhood launched stock tokens in Europe in mid-2025, even as the products had not cleared regulatory hurdles for U.S. investors as of Investopedia's reporting. That is starting to shift domestically: the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled an exemption allowing platforms to sell blockchain-based versions of stocks and other securities, per the Charlotte Observer's report. The SEC issued an order creating a temporary pathway for trading certain tokenized stocks under its existing authority, according to CNBC, though the exemption allows platforms to sell these blockchain-based securities without following many of the rules that traditionally apply to stock exchanges.
Elsewhere in the industry, Robinhood expanded its own tokenized stock offerings in July, while Coinbase is separately planning to offer tokenized stocks of its own, Yahoo Finance reports. Robinhood had previously launched tokens tied to OpenAI and SpaceX, though Investopedia notes those were derivative contracts rather than technically equity. Kraken, for its part, built its xStocks model with partner Backed, trading the tokens on Solana and BNB Chain.
Why Wall Street Is Watching Closely
The dollar figures behind the push help explain why NYSE wants in. Citigroup estimates that tokenized securities could become a $5.5 trillion U.S. market by 2030, including $2.6 trillion in tokenized stocks alone, according to Yahoo Finance. Coinbase has argued that capturing just 3% of equities trading market share would double the current crypto market, Investopedia reports. Advocates of the technology say tokenized stocks can offer faster settlement and around-the-clock trading compared with traditional exchanges.
For now, the NYSE-Blockchain.com partnership remains in the exploratory stage, with neither company saying which markets any resulting products would launch in or when. As competition in tokenized equities intensifies among crypto exchanges and Wall Street institutions alike, the collaboration signals that even the NYSE is unwilling to sit out a shift that has already taken hold across Europe and much of the crypto trading world.
