Tokenized equities are starting to work less like a novelty and more like financial plumbing. New figures from Binance show holders of its bStocks tokens increasingly borrowing against them, deploying them in decentralized finance and trading them when Wall Street is closed.
The exchange said on Thursday that bStocks, its tokenized versions of U.S.-listed stocks and ETFs, have passed $1 billion in assets under management about four months after their June 11 launch. Binance described it as the fastest tokenized equity product to reach that level, citing on-chain data from Dune Research.
The usage data is the more telling part. Outstanding borrowing against deposited bStocks collateral rose to 46.2% by September 10, up from 5.5% at the end of June, an 8.4-fold increase. In early October, 11.2% of bStocks were deployed in DeFi protocols, measured by total value locked, around 3.8 percentage points above the rate for comparable tokenized equities.
That shift was helped by a policy change last month, when Binance extended bStocks collateral support to all eligible users. Retail traders can now post supported tokens as margin and futures collateral, borrowing quote assets with up to 5x leverage, or hold the same token as both collateral and the hedge for a futures position. Traditional venues generally accept only cash or cash-equivalents as collateral.
“bStocks trade around the clock, get used as collateral, move between self-custodial wallets, and convert 1:1 into direct stock holdings,” said Shunyet Jan, Head of Exchange and Trading at Binance.
Trading patterns also point to demand that conventional markets do not serve. In July, just 38% of bStocks volume happened during regular U.S. market hours, against 89.2% for ordinary U.S. equities. Cumulative volume has passed $40 billion since launch, or more than $300 million a day on average.
The product does not appear to be pulling users away from Binance’s other markets. End-of-July data showed 58.5% of early bStocks users also traded perpetual futures, direct equities, or both on the platform.
Each bStocks token is backed 1:1 by its underlying security and can be redeemed for the security itself. Users have converted $6 billion between direct stock positions and bStocks since launch, and the number of listed assets has grown from five to nearly 100.
The broader market is moving in the same direction. Tokenized equities were the fastest-growing real-world asset category of 2026, Binance said, with market capitalization more than quadrupling to over $3 billion by late September, while on-chain transfers of tokenized stocks topped $100 billion in the third quarter.
bStocks are offered via an Approved Prospectus in ADGM, are available only to eligible users in permitted jurisdictions and are not offered to U.S. persons. Holders do not directly own shares in the underlying companies.
