Backed Finance Shatters Records: Tokenized Stocks Volume Rockets to $300M
Wall Street’s worst nightmare just got real—again.
Backed Finance’s tokenized stocks product isn’t just gaining traction—it’s eating traditional finance’s lunch. With volumes exploding to $300M, the message is clear: investors want blockchain’s 24/7 markets over the NYSE’s happy-hour window.
The numbers don’t lie (for once)
That $300M milestone? It’s more than a flex—it’s proof that synthetic assets are graduating from crypto-niche to institutional darling. TradFi gatekeepers can keep lecturing about 'risks' while DeFi builds the on-ramps.
Why this stings old-school finance
No PDT rules. No settlement delays. Just global liquidity that doesn’t pause for holidays or banker egos. The irony? These tokenized stocks might be the most honest thing in finance—actual blockchain transparency versus 'trust us' prospectuses.
One cynical footnote: $300M is still couch change for BlackRock. But remember—they said the same thing about Bitcoin in 2013.
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."
