🚀 Backed Finance’s Tokenized Stocks Smash $300M Volume – Traders Flock to On-Chain Equities

Wall Street's paper certificates just got a blockchain bulldozer.

Backed Finance's tokenized stocks product—once a niche experiment—has surged past $300M in trading volume as defi degens and institutional players pile into synthetic equity exposure. No brokers, no PDT rules, just pure 24/7 market access.

Why Traders Are Ditching Traditional Platforms

The numbers don't lie: $300M proves demand for on-chain stock trading isn't slowing down. Forget waiting for market opens or dealing with legacy clearinghouses—these tokenized assets settle faster than a crypto Twitter feud.

The Cynic's Corner

Of course, some old-school fund managers will insist you need their $5000 suits and Bloomberg terminals to trade Apple shares. Meanwhile, a 19-year-old in Bali just long Tesla using BNB as collateral.

One thing's clear: when traditional finance finally wakes up to this trend, they'll probably try to regulate it—then copy it.

Not everyone is impressed by tokenized equities

While moving stocks to the blockchain rails and enabling access to overseas investors sounds revolutionary, not everyone is impressed.

According to Anton Golub, chief operating officer at crypto exchange FreedX, tokenized equities are merely a wrapper and not actual equities.

"You're not buying Tesla. You're buying a token that tracks Tesla. Issued by an offshore SPV or broker structure that holds underlying shares," Golub said in a LinkedIn post.

Golub explained that buying tokenized equities doesn't provide the buyer with voting rights, direct custody of the stock, or actual ownership, as is the case with stock CFDs issued in Europe.

CFD, or Contract for Difference, is a contract that stipulates the buyer will pay the seller the difference between the current value of an asset and its value at the time the contract was initiated.

The stock CFDs are fractionalized, allowing traders to buy and sell a fraction of the underlying asset's value with leverage. That allows traders to control a larger position with a smaller capital investment.

"CFD brokers in Europe [have] let you trade fractional U.S. stocks for years. You can buy Tesla, Apple, or S&P 500 with 5x leverage and full liquidity," Golub noted. This [tokenization] isn’t democratizing access. It’s just reframing CFDs with tokenization narrative."

Additionally, concerns have been raised about liquidity drying up over the weekend. Liquidity refers to the ease of executing large buy and sell orders at stable prices.

"There are still significant frictions with these new products," Parsec Finance noted in its newsletter early this month. "Liquidity cold start problem (liquidity begets volume but relies on market makers taking the risk and betting on real usage), spreads will be wide and probably insane on weekends."