Solana’s Tokenized Stocks Smash $100M Barrier in Under 30 Days—But DeFi Adoption Still Playing Catch-Up

Solana’s tokenized stock experiment just hit warp speed—crossing $100M in trading volume before the champagne could chill. Yet decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols? Still stuck in first gear.

Wall Street’s digital doppelgängers are thriving…

Tokenized Tesla, Apple, and SPDR S&P 500 ETFs dominate Solana’s synthetic asset boom, proving traders crave traditional exposure without the paperwork (or the SEC’s bedtime stories). But here’s the kicker: most of this action lives on centralized platforms. DeFi’s ‘permissionless’ utopia? More like a ghost town with a few yield farmers napping in the corners.

The irony? Solana’s speed could finally make DeFi competitive with Wall Street’s legacy systems—if anyone bothered to build. Meanwhile, crypto’s ‘disruptors’ are busy reinventing… *checks notes*… stock certificates. Progress!

Assessing composability

Despite the explosive growth of tokenized assets issued on Solana, xStocks investors are not interacting with DeFi protocols that have made these assets composable.

Solana-based money market Kamino offers support for eight xStocks: TSLAx, SPYx, Nvidia’s NVDAx, Robinhood’s HOODx, Strategy’s MSTRx, Apple’s AAPLx, Nasdaq’s QQQx, and Alphabet’s GOOGLx.

Although their collective market cap stands at nearly $50 million, only $585,000, roughly 11%, has been used as collateral so far.

The numbers fare slightly better when it comes to liquidating providing. On Raydium’s pools, the largest TSLAx pool has $1.1 million in liquidity, of which $423,600 represents the amount of tokenized stock deposited per GeckoTerminal.

The SPYx with most liquidity also displays a significant amount of $1.9 million in liquidity, with $502,000 worth of tokenized stocks on it.

Nevertheless, the ratio remains short. The roughly $637,000 worth of TSLAx tokens used on DeFi is just 4.7% of its market cap. For SPYx, the ratio is 7%.

Crypto to traditional, not the other way around

The relatively low usage of tokenized stocks on DeFi applications occurs mainly because money is mostly flowing from crypto to traditional products, rather than the other way around.

Michael Cahill, CEO and co-founder of Douro Labs, explained in an interview with CryptoSlate that holders from the traditional market who are entering the crypto space are not yet ready to utilize DeFi composability.

He used the Apollo Diversified Credit Securitized Fund (ACRED), launched by PYTH and created by Apollo Global Management and Securitize, as an example to illustrate that the issue of wasted composability still affects the entire tokenization industry.

ACRED has over $100 million in net asset value, yet its on-chain lending pool represents only a small fraction of this value.

However, Cahill also said he sees growth potential. He added:

Furthermore, he believes a Strategy-style “big company moment” could help, but thinks the real catalyst will be the product experience with a traditional finance interface for on-chain products.

Cahill concluded: