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Coinbase-issued tokenized stocks went live natively on Base on Monday, giving users outside the United States a way to hold fractional, self-custodied claims on shares of Nvidia, Meta, Apple and Alphabet that trade around the clock. The launch runs on B20, a token standard Base built specifically for stablecoins and real-world assets, and marks the first major product to use it at scale.
Each token represents a direct claim on a real share rather than a synthetic price tracker. Institutional market makers buy the underlying stock, which is then held by Alpaca, a regulated broker and custodian, in a bankruptcy-remote structure supervised by the Abu Dhabi Global Market's financial regulator. The issuing entity is Coinbase Onchain SPV Ltd, incorporated in the ADGM in June and owned through Coinbase Global's Onchain Marketplace Holdings subsidiary. Chainlink supplies continuous price data for the tokens, feeding lending markets, decentralized exchanges and other applications that need a live reference price, according to Base's technical documentation.
Around 50 third-party protocols had committed support for B20 by launch day, including Aave, Morpho and Euler for lending, Aerodrome for spot liquidity, 0x and 1inch for trade routing, and Wasabi for perpetuals and options. Because B20 extends the ERC-20 standard, the tokens work with existing wallets and routers without additional integration work, and dividends and stock splits are handled through an onchain multiplier so balances stay fixed and positions already deployed in DeFi do not break. The tokens carry no whitelist once minted, though the underlying offering is restricted under Regulation S: it is unavailable to U.S. persons, and the issuer retains the ability to freeze or blacklist wallets that end up in restricted jurisdictions.
The launch puts Coinbase in more direct competition with Kraken and Binance, both of which have pushed their own tokenized equities products this year. It also arrives via a different structure than Ondo Finance's approach, which wires shareholder voting rights into more than 250 tokenized stocks through Broadridge rather than routing exposure through a single issuer's custody chain. The broader market for tokenized stocks has reached roughly $2.48 billion in value, up 5.2 percent over the past month, with monthly transfer volume of $27.28 billion and more than 2.1 million holders, according to RWA.xyz data. Citigroup has estimated the tokenized securities market could reach $5.5 trillion by 2030.
Base has drawn an explicit parallel to Coinbase and Circle's 2018 launch of USDC, arguing that tokenized equities are following the same path stablecoins took from a niche idea to a market moving trillions of dollars a year. Coinbase said more tokenized stocks will follow in the coming weeks.
