Tokenized Stocks Hit Records as US Access Opens

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Happy Friday to all the explorers at the convergence of crypto and TradFi. This is Converge, The Defiant's weekly recap of tokenization, stablecoins, and real-world assets, by Chris Storaker, The Defiant. Follow @ConvergeDefiant.

TOP NEWS THIS WEEK

• Tokenized Stocks Hit Records as US Access Opens
• CLARITY Act Enters Its Last Window Before the Recess

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

• Watch: our live breakdown of the CLARITY Act's make-or-break moment
• Samsung Wallet will add stablecoin support
• The OCC denies Wise a US national trust charter
• KAIO tokenizes a Mubadala fund; Ramp's stablecoin accounts; S&P's revenue screen

TOKENIZATION / MARKET STRUCTURE

Tokenized Stocks Hit Records as US Access Opens

The tokenized-equity market set records this week, and one issuer finally got the US license the rest have been building offshore to work around.

• The market for tokenized stocks reached a record $2.3 billion in mid-July, per Token Terminal, close to double its March level when the sector first cleared $1 billion. On July 21 alone, Artemis logged all-time highs for Ondo (514.5 million tokenized shares outstanding, 93,880 holders), Backed Finance ($579.4 million tokenized market cap) and Robinhood Chain (126,720 shares, 36,170 equity holders), per our tally of the week's records.
• Ondo's broker-dealer subsidiary, Oasis Pro Markets, secured authorization to sell tokenized equities, ETFs, mutual and index funds to US investors under SEC and FINRA oversight, the company said on Thursday. Until now Ondo confined its US business to Treasuries products and sold tokenized stocks offshore. Ondo says Oasis Pro can support omnibus structures through existing broker-dealer and advisory channels, which would put tokenized securities in reach of RIAs and retirement accounts. No launch date.
• Uniswap shipped Permissioned Pools, a v4 hook that checks an issuer's allowlist at the protocol level before a swap executes or a liquidity position mints. Superstate, Securitize and Dowgo are launch partners, and Dowgo contributed the ERC-3643 integration. The issuer keeps the allowlist; the AMM enforces it.
• OKX opened more than 40 tokenized US stocks and ETFs on a single shared order book, backed by Backed Assets' xStocks and traded against USDT, with US and EU users barred. One market per stock across every issuer, where Kraken and Binance each list their own issuer's version separately.
• Ondo also turned on tokenized-stock collateral at OndoPerps, starting with SPYon and QQQon under a $100,000 per-asset notional cap, and the venue bars US persons.

Ethereum holds 34% of tokenized stock market share, BNB Chain 30% and Solana 23%, per Token Terminal. The whole category is about 5% of tokenized real-world assets.

Our take: The chains have always been fine. Regulation is finally catching up

For two years, the binding constraint on tokenized equities was a regulatory one, not a technological one. Issuers built offshore venues, barred Americans, and grew anyway.

Ondo says Ondo Stocks has done more than $20 billion in cumulative volume. Oasis Pro changes which side of that wall the growth happens on. An SEC-registered broker-dealer with FINRA oversight can put tokenized equities into omnibus accounts at RIAs and retirement platforms, which is the distribution channel every offshore venue has been locked out of.

Uniswap's hook is the same move from the DeFi side. Compliance checks that used to sit in a frontend now sit in the pool, which means an issuer can send a regulated asset to an AMM and keep the allowlist. Superstate and Securitize as launch partners tell you who the customer is.

The precise historical parallel is the American depositary receipt, which JPMorgan invented in 1927 so US investors could hold Selfridges shares without touching London settlement. The receipt provided access to an underlying market that never changed. Tokenized stocks have been running the same wrapper in reverse, giving non-US holders exposure to US equities without touching US settlement. Now the pieces are being set so that these wrappers are also open to US investors, who can get Oasis Pro is the moment the wrapper comes home and has to satisfy the domestic rulebook.

Set this against last week's DTCC lead and the two paths are now explicit. DTCC tokenized $114 trillion of custodied securities onto Hyperledger Besu and Canton, where access is the point of control. The public-chain cohort went and got the license. Both roads reach tokenized equities. Only one of them keeps the composability that made anyone care.

What to watch: holder counts. Ondo's 93,880 and Robinhood Chain's 36,170 tokenized-equity holders are records, and they are rounding errors next to any retail brokerage. Records set by five issuers in a $2.3 billion market are records in a market smaller than a mid-cap stock. The Oasis Pro clearance has no launch date attached, and until it ships, the US access story is a permission without a product.

REGULATION / MARKET STRUCTURE

CLARITY Act Enters Its Last Window Before the Recess

The market-structure bill got its merged text, new ethics language, and a fresh Democratic revolt, all inside four days.

• Journalist Eleanor Terrett reported on July 20 that the White House had agreed on an ethics package and sent the language to certain Senate Republicans. Bitcoin reclaimed about $66,700 on the report, up roughly 2% on the day, after Polymarket passage odds had slid into the low-to-mid 40s during the deadlock.
• Sen. Cynthia Lummis released the merged text on July 22 — 616 pages combining the Banking and Agriculture committee versions, splitting digital-asset oversight between the SEC and the CFTC. Majority Leader John Thune intends to move to floor action before the recess, per the reporting on the release.
• The ethics section bans the president, vice president, members of Congress, federal judges and their spouses from issuing or sponsoring digital assets for compensation while in office, with a sunset on Jan. 20, 2029. Covered officials would sell or blind-trust their holdings, and the DOJ would get civil enforcement authority, including the power to sue exchanges that knowingly list prohibited tokens.
• Democrats went after the DOJ design. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland called it “wild and unserious and stone-cold crazy” and pressed for state attorneys general to have enforcement power. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, said it is “premature” to say whether he would vote against the bill.
• Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called the text ready for a floor vote. The DeFi Education Fund confirmed the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act section survived unchanged, so non-custodial developers stay outside money-transmitter treatment, and the Keep Your Coins self-custody provision is intact.

The bill needs at least seven Democratic votes to clear 60. The Senate leaves in roughly two weeks.

Our take

The ethics fight is what will define the bill’s approval. Everything a TradFi desk cares about — which regulator you answer to, whether customer assets get 1:1 segregation, what a federal AML baseline looks like — was settled in committee. What remains is a conflict-of-interest provision negotiated between the White House and two Republican senators without Democratic sign-off, aimed at a president whose 2025 disclosure showed roughly $1.4 billion in crypto-related income. Votes are hostage to that.

The sunset date is the detail worth reading twice. Ethics restrictions that expire on Jan. 20, 2029 apply to exactly one presidential term. Democrats are being asked to trade permanent market-structure law for temporary ethics law, which is a bad trade to defend to a primary electorate, and it explains why the DOJ enforcement clause became the fight.

If August passes without a vote, CLARITY slides into a midterm year and the statutory calendar effectively closes until 2027. That is the connection to this week's other lead. Oasis Pro, Uniswap's permissioned pools, and every tokenized-equity venue courting US investors would keep operating on agency guidance and staff no-action posture. Ondo got its clearance from the SEC and FINRA as they are currently staffed and currently inclined. Statute is what makes that clearance survive a change of chair.

THIS WEEK'S INTERVIEW

The CLARITY Act's Make-or-Break Moment

Now on our YouTube: The Defiant went live on the CLARITY Act's make-or-break moment — the ethics package the White House sent to Senate Republicans, the 616-page merged text, and the seven Democratic votes standing between the bill and the August recess. It is the frame behind this week's second lead.

OTHER STORIES WORTH YOUR TIME

Samsung Says Wallet Will Add Stablecoin Support

Samsung product manager Lee Dinham said at Galaxy Unpacked in London on July 22 that Samsung Wallet “will embrace new forms of digital value, including stablecoins,” the company's first direct commitment to the asset class. Samsung gave no launch date and named no issuers or markets; an on-stage mockup showed Circle's USDC, and neither company has confirmed a partnership.

OCC Denies Wise's US National Trust Bank Charter

The OCC rejected Wise's application for a national trust charter, saying the proposed management and board had “demonstrated a persistent inability” to manage money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk, per the decision letter reviewed by Law360. Wise shares fell as much as 10% in Nasdaq trading. The denial is an outlier: the agency has conditionally approved Circle, Ripple, Paxos, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Coinbase over the past eight months, and Circle opened its trust bank on July 10. Wise says it will refile under a GENIUS Act framework.

KAIO Tokenizes a Mubadala Capital Fund Across Base, Solana and Sui

KAIO launched tokenized access to one of Mubadala Capital's evergreen private-market strategies with about $75 million in onchain value, and said Coinbase will add exposure to the offering. Mubadala Capital is the asset-management arm tied to Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth apparatus, which puts a sovereign-linked private-markets product onchain and a listed US exchange in the position of holding exposure to a tokenized illiquid asset.

Even more this week:

• Ramp added stablecoin accounts and bill pay — The $200 billion-volume corporate card company runs both products on Stripe's Bridge and Privy, pays up to 3.25% on balances, and says more than 1,000 of its businesses already pay vendors in stablecoins, with 70% of that volume moving outside banking hours.
• S&P and Pantera launched a revenue-screened index — Eighteen constituents including Hyperliquid, Solana and Aave, screened on consecutive quarters of positive protocol revenue verified by Artemis, with Bitcoin and meme coins excluded. No tracking product yet.
• Franklin Templeton made the agentic-AI case for altcoins — Digital assets head Sandy Kaul argues card rails at 2%-3% plus $0.30 cannot price a $0.001 machine payment, which pushes agent transactions onto chains and into their fee tokens.
• BitMEX will shut down on Sept. 23 — Owner HDR Global Trading cited a strategic review, with an Aug. 26 risk-limit cutover before positions get force-closed. A proposed class action over 623 BTC in 2018 liquidation claims landed the same week.

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Converge is produced by The Defiant. This briefing is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.