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"Large crypto exchanges such as Binance are entering the stock market because they no longer want to be dependent on market cycles," Ivan Patriki, co-founder of analytics platform Quantmap, told Decrypt.
Binance wants to take away daily user balance “from brokers and ensure that users don't leave the app for Tesla, the S&P 500, stablecoins, or DeFi,” Patriki added.
Alongside the launch, Binance described "bStocks," a coming feature that will let users tokenize the equities they buy by minting synthetic versions on its BNB blockchain.
"Tokenized stocks could become a major driver of both RWA adoption and crypto more broadly," Misha Putiatin, co-founder of collateral markets platform Symbiotic, told Decrypt.
Rather than competing with crypto for capital, tokenized equities could become part of the same financial stack, providing a predictable yield base for broader on-chain markets, Putiatin added.
Vytautas Mackonis, COO of Swiss-based RWA protocol ALCUM, told Decrypt that Binance's stock offering is "more structurally complex than it appears," with users relying on Binance as the interface, Nest Trading as the broker-dealer, and Alpaca Securities as the custodian, creating operational risks if regulatory actions or technical issues disrupt access to positions.
Patriki cautioned the new model raises questions, such as "who guarantees redeemability, what happens at night when the Nasdaq is closed, how the token price is synchronized with the underlying stock, and what regulators will say when retailers start using tokenized Nvidia as collateral in DeFi."
The shift, he said, won't kill brokers but will "usher in a new hybrid market where brokers, exchanges, banks, and blockchain platforms compete for the same user balance."
