Tokenized Equities: the on-chain stock category that grew several times over in a single year

In a Real-World Assets market where private credit and US Treasuries usually dominate the conversation, another category is closing the gap fast: Tokenized Equities, stocks issued as tokens on a blockchain. The trend just got a lot harder to ignore after ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, committed $200 million into the space, a clear sign that mainstream capital markets are paying attention.

Tokenized Equities take shares from traditional exchanges, think Tesla, Nvidia, Alphabet, and issue them as digital tokens on-chain, each backed 1:1 by the underlying share through a regulated custodian. That structure lets investors trade around the clock instead of being limited to exchange hours, hold fractional positions, and move tokens across platforms in real time, a sharp contrast to traditional equities, which are bound by trading hours and settlement cycles that can take days.

What’s new

The category went from having almost no footprint in 2024 to visible, active trading by early 2026. Ondo Finance, through its Global Markets platform, holds roughly 60% of the market. It has also partnered with Franklin Templeton to tokenize five ETFs, and teamed up with Broadridge to let holders of tokenized stocks and ETFs vote the shareholder rights tied to the underlying assets.

Larger institutions are moving too. ICE put $200 million into OKX, with plans to bring NYSE-listed stocks onto its X Layer chain in tokenized form during the second half of 2026. DTCC, which clears and safekeeps over $114 trillion in US securities, has started piloting tokenized securities trading with more than 50 financial institutions, with a possible full commercial rollout by October 2026.

Current market size

RWA.xyz puts the total value of Tokenized Equities at around $960 million as of March 2026, up sharply from roughly $424 million in mid-2025. That’s still under 5% of the broader $20 billion Tokenized RWA market.

But with growth north of 2,000% over the past year, a number of industry voices now see this as the year Tokenized Equities breaks out, a signal that mainstream capital markets infrastructure is starting to move on-chain in earnest.

Role of SIX Network

The rapid growth of Tokenized Equities in global markets reflects the same problem SIX has already built infrastructure to solve: making traditional assets, whether stocks, real estate, or debt instruments, easier to access and trade, without requiring a full overhaul of existing systems.

What Ondo did with Franklin Templeton, letting token holders vote the shareholder rights tied to the underlying asset, is a concrete example of what Cap Table Tracking in SIX Garage is built to support: keeping ownership and holder entitlements accurate and verifiable even after a tokenized asset changes hands on-chain.

That leaves the infrastructure ready to scale if demand for tokenizing stocks or other assets in the region grows in line with this global trend.