DeFi Community Debates Onchain Equities as Coinbase Mulls Tokenizing $COIN

Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas spoke at Coinbase's fireside chat with Morgan Stanley, where she shared that the company’s first F1 filing in 2020 involved a public security token, but was shot down by regulators.

“We may be able to bring forward security tokens…and I’m just excited to see innovation in the U.S. and bring more and more assets onchain,” she said.

The case for tokenized securities is bolstered by the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) new crypto-friendly stance, with the agency dropping enforcement actions against major crypto entities like Consensys, Uniswap, and Yuga Labs within a matter of weeks.

Tokenized securities have been attempted before and failed to gain traction, but have largely fallen out of the limelight considering the SEC’s aggressive persecution of DeFi under former chair Gary Gensler.

While some market participants have pointed out concerns, others remain optimistic.

General partner at Dragonfly Rob Hadick said, “Equities are going to come on chain and it'll be huge, but not until it's PRIMARY issuance that brings off chain capital with it. That makes pricing/MM separate and distinct from just using an oracle to track off chain markets.”

“I would prefer to trade stocks onchain...If I want to buy a stock, I have to off-ramp, wait for deposit, send to broker, buy stock. Can take a few days. Obv would prefer for it to take 5 minutes,” said Cobie, the founder of Echo, when the topic was debated on X following rumors of tokenized stocks coming to Hyperliquid.

Meanwhile, some DeFi protocols are already working to bring stocks onchain despite the lack of regulatory clarity. BackedFi, a tokenized real-world asset protocol, launched tokenized $COIN today.

Backed claims that its wbCOIN is 1:1 backed by Coinbase stock, but not officially affiliated with the company.

Despite the flurry of interest around onchain stock activations, the announcements have not driven any substantial inflows into the protocol.

0xNGMI at DeFiLlama was quick to point this out as he cited Backed’s total value locked (TVL), which has been in a downtrend.

“This seems like something that would get usage, however, every time it's been tried (mirror, synthetix...) it has gotten minimal traction. imo it's because crypto users have a different risk profile vs ppl buying S&P500,” he said.