The Hottest New Public Chain of 2026, Backed by a Brokerage

In the business of moving stocks onto the blockchain, what is truly valuable: the assets or the platform selling the assets?

Written by: Clow

It’s not that crypto companies have stormed Wall Street; rather, Wall Street has transformed crypto into its backend.

In July 2026, Robinhood launched its own chain, and within just 7 days, the locked value exceeded $100 million. This company was previously best known as a brokerage that allowed young Americans to trade stocks with zero commission.

It’s not a solo effort. In December 2025, the established exchange Kraken directly acquired the issuer of tokenized stocks, Backed Finance. Shortly after, Telegram integrated these U.S. stock tokens into the chat boxes of a billion users.

Three giants, one common move.

What they are competing for is not the assets, not the technology, and not even the licenses. They are competing for the interface where you click the “buy” button.

Thus, the question arises: in the business of moving stocks onto the blockchain, what is truly valuable: the assets or the platform selling the assets?

01 Public Chains Become Utilities, Issuers Become Factories

Moving stocks onto the blockchain is not a new idea. In the wave of 2020, Mirror’s synthetic assets and FTX’s equity tokens were attempted but ultimately failed due to regulatory issues and ecosystem collapses, as users were only buying price shadows, not actual stocks.

What’s different this time is that the assets have become real.

The ERC-8056 standard promoted by Robinhood and Superstate allows for seamless handling of stock splits and dividends at the smart contract level; Ondo partnered with voting giant Broadridge, enabling token holders to vote at shareholder meetings using their private keys for the first time.

Even more impressive is the composability. Tokenized Nvidia stocks can be deposited into lending protocols, stablecoins borrowed for yield, turning static assets in brokerage accounts into active money for the first time.

The business is indeed growing. Boston Consulting Group predicts that by 2030, the global market for tokenized assets could reach $10 trillion. As of mid-2026, on-chain RWA has surpassed $31.4 billion, nearly five times the amount at the beginning of 2025.

A report from Chainalysis also noted an explosive growth in new wallets on Ethereum specifically for receiving RWA tokens. Buying stocks has become the primary reason for new money entering the blockchain world.

The pie is getting bigger, but the knife to cut the pie is not in most people's hands.

This industry chain has three layers. At the bottom are public chains and custodians, with Ethereum, Solana, and BitGo responsible for storing and circulating assets.

In the middle are issuers like Backed, Dinari, and Ondo, who handle the legal framework to map real stocks 1:1 into tokens. At the top is the user-facing distribution entry.

The first two layers are becoming increasingly competitive. Users don’t care which chain the stock tokens are on; they just want it to be cheap and safe, and public chains are turning into utilities. On the issuer side, more licensed institutions are entering, driving fees down, making the work resemble that of a factory.

To determine who can take the lion's share, there is only one standard: who controls the button that users click to “buy.”

Those who control the button can charge listing fees to issuers, guide users to their own wealth management, contracts, and lending, and hold the lifeblood of secondary market liquidity.

This is also why Kraken simply bought the issuer. Backed reportedly holds about 24% of the compliant tokenized stock market; bringing it in means the entry point is not at risk of being choked.

02 Money Votes with Its Feet

Do you think this is just a narrative? The funds have already cast their votes.

In the first week after Robinhood Chain launched, a meme coin called CASHCAT generated nearly $98 million in trading volume in a single day, while the total DEX trading volume surged to $560 million. It felt very much like a standard “casino chain.”

But looking at the locked value structure tells a completely different story. Of the $100 million TVL, $90 million is locked in the lending protocol Morpho, supporting Robinhood Earn’s annual yield of about 7%. Ninety percent of the money is not for gambling; it’s for saving.

In other words, the savings-type funds behind 27.6 million brokerage accounts are quietly being funneled into DeFi through a single pipeline.

Ironically, DeFi has been shouting for ten years to eliminate intermediaries, to get rid of banks and brokerages, yet the largest incremental entry in 2026 is a licensed brokerage.

Top protocols are lining up to work for it. Lending is handled by Morpho, perpetual contracts by Lighter, which signed a 12-year long contract, splitting fees 50/50, and even airdropped $11 million worth of tokens to Robinhood users.

Protocols provide technology and subsidies, brokerages provide users, while conveniently leaving the riskiest parts with the protocols.

This chain itself is built on the Arbitrum tech stack, with block confirmations at 100 milliseconds, and gas fees paid in ETH. Robinhood has also opened AI agent trading to eligible U.S. users, allowing AI to monitor the market around the clock, executing arbitrage and yield strategies.

The ideal of eliminating intermediaries hasn’t died; it’s just that the intermediaries have changed their faces.

03 Wall Street's Entry Point, Lagos' Chat Box

The same business has sprouted completely opposite forms on two ends of the Earth.

Robinhood hides DeFi behind its brokerage interface, while Telegram has stuffed Wall Street into chat boxes.

In the U.S., Robinhood users feel no presence of blockchain. The experience of buying stock tokens is no different from buying stocks; private keys, cross-chain bridges, gas fees—all are welded into invisible places in the frontend.

In Lagos or Buenos Aires, the story is reversed. A Nigerian retail investor wanting to buy Apple stock used to have to overcome three major obstacles: offshore accounts, foreign exchange controls, and high wire transfer fees.

Now, he opens the TON wallet in Telegram, buys a tokenized share of Apple, just like sending a message to a friend. TON has nearly 100 million wallet users, backed by 1 billion monthly active users, and Kraken’s xStocks is precisely paving the way to emerging markets through this channel.

Reports indicate that SK Hynix's record-setting $26.5 billion financing for its U.S. listing was also delivered to Telegram users through xStocks at the first opportunity.

Stock tokens can even be embedded in mini-apps within group chats, used for tipping or payments. For the first time, financial assets have a social media-style dissemination method, completely bypassing traditional gatekeepers.

But amidst the excitement, all three companies share a common awkwardness: they cannot enter the U.S. market.

In January 2026, the SEC issued a statement clarifying that tokenization does not change the nature of securities; on-chain stocks are still subject to securities laws.

Robinhood's stock tokens are issued by a Jersey trust and are only available to non-U.S. users; Kraken's xStocks is constrained by its Swiss structure, also circumventing the U.S.

Kraken has another layer to its strategy. It is preparing for a U.S. IPO in 2026, having already spent $1.5 billion to acquire the traditional brokerage NinjaTrader, and bringing the issuer in is a story meant for Wall Street. No matter how well the story is told, if the product cannot enter the domestic market, it remains a hard injury.

In contrast, a small company called Dinari has honestly obtained a transfer agency license in the U.S., legally selling tokenized stocks backed by real shares, and has even turned this capability into an API to sell to others.

Ondo took a different route: the underlying stocks remain in the U.S. compliant custody chain, with only ownership mapping done on-chain, aligning well with the SEC's relatively friendly “third-party custody model” in its statement.

The giants are queuing outside the door, while the key is temporarily in the hands of the small players.

To put it bluntly: the technological story of asset tokenization is overestimated, while the monopolistic value of the entry point is underestimated.

Standards for stock splits and dividends, oracles, legal frameworks—these are all important, but they can all be leveled out. What cannot be leveled out are the 27.6 million accounts linked to bank cards and the chat boxes opened by 1 billion people every day.

The internet did not kill brokerages; brokerages learned to offer zero commissions. DeFi did not kill brokerages; brokerages turned DeFi into their backend.

In the next decade, there will be more chains, and assets will become more homogeneous. The only truly scarce thing will be: whose button does the user’s finger land on.

Users do not need to know what a chain is.

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