Coinbase Enters the Tokenized Stock Wars

Coinbase Tokenized Stocks went live on Base this morning.

We’ve got four big names available out of the gate, namely Nvidia, Meta, Apple, and Google. More launches are coming within days and, per Base founder Jesse Pollak, “thousands” will be targeted over time.

The tokens themselves run 24/7 on B20, the ERC-20 revamp Base built specifically for stablecoins and real world assets (RWAs), so this launch doubles as the first real showcase of Base using this new standard for one of its other flagship products.

Zooming in, every Coinbase Tokenized Stock represents a 1:1 claim backed by shares held at broker-custodian Alpaca rather than functioning as a synthetic tracker like most competing products.

Thanks to the B20 architecture, dividends are handled automatically at the token level so stocks don’t break if they’re sitting in DeFi as collateral, and there’s no foundational KYC, either, as restrictions on U.S. users get applied at the app level, and not across Base broadly.

It’s a clever setup, both offchain and onchain, though it’s also true that Base’s arriving a little late to the party.

This tardiness might not matter in the long run if we really are entering a tokenization supercycle, yet for now there are other heavyweights to contend with here, e.g. Ondo Finance, which commands ~$1B of the ~$3B tokenized equities market today, followed not far behind by Kraken’s xStocks and Binance’s bStocks in size.

As Base maestro Jesse Pollak told Bankless this morning, though, Coinbase is certainly up for the challenge. He framed the entrance like so:

“I was talking with someone and they said, I feel like Coinbase is the Navy. Sometimes we move a little slow because you have to get boats around the world, but we’re always going to come, and when we come, we’re going to come in force. We’re the people you can always count on to bring the most trusted version to market.”

Slow, then overwhelming force. This is how Base plans to close the market share gap, and in the process, if the plans do pan out, the chain will become a major hub for onchain borrowing and yield strategies centered around equities. As Jesse added:

“We have all the pieces, now we just have to put them together. Three years ago, when we started Base, that wasn’t the case. We didn’t have tokenized stocks yet, things were still slow and clunky. Now we have incredible wallets, incredible stablecoins, and this whole wave of tokenized assets coming. It’s a special time to be in crypto.”

This all leads naturally toward Coinbase’s growing “Everything Exchange” vision, which Base is a big pillar of, and which B20 tokenized stocks now feature importantly within. On this, Jesse noted:

“Building the Everything Exchange, you’re not just talking about trading assets, but you’re talking about exchanging value. And that value can be in the form of trading an equity, or it can be in the form of doing a payment for goods and service, or it can be in the form of getting a loan or giving credit to someone else.

[…] We think it’s good that Ethereum is saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna be the World Computer, maybe trading isn’t our highest priority, because that means, great, Base is gonna complement that. We can be the exchange of Ethereum. We can be the exchange of the world with Ethereum. And I think that kind of difference has been cool to get to flesh out and start to formalize more over the last six to nine months.”

All that said, as for what to watch here going forward, volume, in a word. Keep an eye on whether Base DeFi giants like Aerodrome and Aave can help Base peel serious tokenized stocks volume away from the other notable earlier movers like Ondo and Kraken. It certainly has a fighting chance; now the task at hand is to just keep pushing forward.