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Opinion: US stocks are expected to become the third largest category of RWA assets after stablecoins and government bonds

According to Alex Xu, a research partner at Mint Ventures, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and CFO Alesia Haas recently expressed their consideration of tokenizing the company's shares to enable trading of US stocks on the Base blockchain. If the process goes well, US stocks are expected to become the third largest category of RWA (real-world asset) assets after stablecoins (USDT, USDC) and national debt (Buidl), and may surpass the current scale of national debt tokens in the short term. The value proposition of the US stock chain is mainly reflected in two aspects: one is to expand the scale of the trading market, providing a 7 × 24-hour, borderless and permissionless trading venue; the other is the superior composability, US stock assets can be used as collateral, margin, to build indices and fund products. For both supply and demand sides, listed companies can reach global investors to get more buying, and investors can directly allocate US stock assets beyond geographical restrictions. Concepts have long been tried, such as Coinbase's plan to list a security token in 2020 but was put on hold due to regulation. Terra's Mirror and Ethereum's Synthetix also launched US-stock synthetic assets during the last DeFi boom. Currently, the SEC's shift in attitude provides new opportunities for such innovation. Relevant beneficiaries include Polymath's Polymesh blockchain (token Polyx), which has been used by BlackRock to issue digital bonds in the size of $500 million; in addition, RWA projects such as Ondo and Chainlink as an oracle solution may also benefit from this trend.