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Was This DeFi's Dream?

Olivia Capozzalo & Camila Russo
September 11, 2025

gm, Defiers!

Today’s big story:

  • Nasdaq is making a historic bid to bring the U.S.’s 60 trillion equities market on-chain — does this mean DeFi dreams are actually coming true?

In other news:

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READ MORE: Parallelizing Stellar Core: The First Step Toward 5000 TPS

We’re back! Here’s what you need to know in web3 today

📈 Markets in the Last 24 Hours

TICKERVALUE24H
BitcoinBitcoin$114,286
0.69 %
EthereumEthereum$4,415.56
2.09 %
XRPXRP$3.03
1.26 %
BNBBNB$895.65
0.15 %
SolanaSolana$226.16
1.62 %

Today’s Big Story

Nasdaq Wants to Tokenize Stocks — Another Sign DeFi Dreams Are Coming True

Nasdaq is making a historic bid to bring the U.S.’s 60 trillion equities market on-chain. In a filing with the SEC this week, the exchange proposed a framework that would allow U.S. stocks and exchange-traded products to be issued in tokenized form.

What we’re witnessing now is the world’s largest economy making way for blockchain technology to become the infrastructure for its financial system. Not just statements and memos, but an actual filing for the nation’s securities regulator to change equities’ plumbing.

True, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen tokenized equities. In fact, the past year has been a frenzy of experiments: Kraken started rolling out its xStocks product with partner Backed in the EU and other non-U.S. markets, Dinari got a broker-dealer license in the U.S. and pushed forward with dShares, Robinhood also tested tokenized stock exposure in Europe, and smaller projects have tried their hand at packaging equities as crypto assets.

Yet all of these efforts have had the same limitation: the tokens don’t give you full shareholder rights. They’re either synthetic representations or wrappers around equities held in custody, with dividends reinvested or translated into stablecoins, and voting rights stripped out.

Fully Fungible

Nasdaq’s plan is different. If approved, this would be the first model where tokenized stocks are fully fungible with their traditional counterparts. That’s because Nasdaq is keeping everything under the existing U.S. market structure. The tokenized version would carry the same CUSIP number as the “traditional” stock and, crucially, deliver the same bundle of rights, voting, dividends, and liquidation proceeds.

In other words, the token would not be a parallel asset or a derivative contract, but the same security, represented on a blockchain ledger. Orders for tokenized or traditional versions would hit the same order book, trade with the same priority, and settle under the same rules.

So how would this actually work? Nasdaq’s filing specifies that the Depository Trust Company (DTC) remains the backbone of settlement. After a trade, participants could elect to receive their shares in either traditional book-entry form or in tokenized form. If they opt for the token, the DTC would record ownership on a blockchain or distributed ledger, instead of in its internal databases. Beyond that, all the plumbing (surveillance, reporting, National Best Bid and Offer rules) remains exactly the same.

That’s what sets this plan apart from the Robinhoods and Krakens of the world. Other tokenized stock systems are only as strong as the intermediaries that issue them, and investors are trusting those issuers to hold the collateral and pass through economic exposure. With Nasdaq’s version, the collateral question disappears. The asset is the real stock itself, inside the same regulatory perimeter, with the DTC ensuring finality.

The big open question is whether the SEC will sign off. The proposal is framed as a rule change under the Exchange Act, but it will require the Commission to bless the idea that a blockchain ledger can serve as a legally recognized record of ownership.

What Chain Will DTC Use?

The next biggest question: what blockchain will DTC actually use? If they go with a public network like Ethereum or one of its Layer 2s, that could open the door to broader interoperability. If they opt for a permissioned or private ledger, it may look more like a database upgrade, which would make me backtrack on the grandiose intro of this essay.

The most likely outcome is somewhere in between. DTC may well leverage public infrastructure for transparency and security, but restrict transfers to whitelisted brokers and custodians. That means you probably won’t be depositing tokenized Apple shares as collateral in Aave anytime soon. Instead, the benefits would accrue to the back end: faster settlement, fewer reconciliation headaches, automated dividends and proxy votes, and a transparent audit trail regulators can monitor in real time.

Maybe there can be APIs where startups can build apps on top of the DTC ledger, but it’s unlikely we’ll get fully permissionless and composable stock tokens.

What’s Next?

The SEC will review Nasdaq’s filing under the standard comment-and-approval process. Nasdaq is targeting Q3 2026 for the first token-settled trades, but that depends on how quickly regulators and infrastructure providers move.

Judging from SEC Chair Paul Atkins’ statements and initiatives like “Project Crypto,” we might see fully tokenized stocks very soon, a giant leap towards the often-repeated dream of the “financial system running on blockchains” actually coming true.

With love,

Cami, founder of The Defiant

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🎬WATCH

Solana’s Rise as a Treasury Powerhouse: DeFi Development Corp’s Bold Strategy

On the latest episode of The Defiant Podcast, Cami sat down with Joseph Onorati, CEO of DeFi Development Corp, the second-largest Solana treasury company. Joseph shares the journey of transforming DeFi Development Corp into a Solana-focused treasury powerhouse, their innovative yield strategies, and why Solana's volatility and native yield make it a compelling treasury asset.

We also dive into the broader case for crypto treasury companies, the risks and rewards of staking strategies, and the future of Solana in the blockchain ecosystem. Plus, Joseph shares his bold prediction: Solana flipping Ethereum by market cap.

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  • Consensys’ Lubin Teases ‘Further Rewards’ for LINEA Holders as Token Tanks 50% Based on activity and the length of time a wallet holds LINEA, holders could qualify for future airdrops, Consensys co-founder Joe Lubin announced today, as the LINEA token price plunged in the first 24-hours after its launch. Why it matters: Despite its mainnet being live for more than two years, Consensys’ Layer 2 struggled leading into its TGE, with a network outage and users reporting difficulties claiming their airdrops.
  • PUMP Soars to Highest Price Since Opening Week PUMP dropped as low as a $2.4 billion fully diluted valuation (FDV) last month following its ICO, which was valued at $4 billion. But pumpfun’s native token has rallied 125% off the lows, driven by the platform’s buyback mechanism, and is currently changing hands around $0.0054, or a $5.4 billion valuation, 35% above its ICO price. Why it matters: Depsite the cool-off in memecoin activity, pumpfun remains one of the top revenue generators in DeFi.
  • Sonic TVL Plummets 67% Since May as Token Slumps Layer 1 blockchain Sonic, formerly known as Fantom, is grappling with a steep drop in total value locked across its ecosystem, raising questions about the sustainability of its growth strategy. Why it matters: The drop coincided with the end of Sonic’s 5-year deal with market maker Wintermute, underscoring how hard it can be for new blockchains to keep users and funds active on their networks.
  • Feature: Dragonfly Suggests Hyperliquid Stablecoin Competition is Rigged As Hyperliquid seeks to develop an in-house stablecoin, some of the largest protocols in decentralized finance are courting governance voters in an effort to secure the USDH ticker and manage the ecosystem’s stablecoin.

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