Tokenized equities crossed $1 billion in total market value in Q1 2026, up approximately 2,900% year-over-year from under $100 million in mid-2025. Monthly trading volume in the sector has reached approximately $1.8 billion. The growth has triggered a parallel infrastructure buildout: on April 6,...
"Proxy voting is a core feature of equity ownership and bringing proxy voting on-chain for a public company is not theoretical anymore." — Mike Novogratz, CEO, Galaxy
Tokenized equities crossed $1 billion in total market value in Q1 2026, up approximately 2,900% year-over-year from under $100 million in mid-2025. Monthly trading volume in the sector has reached approximately $1.8 billion. The growth has triggered a parallel infrastructure buildout: on April 6, 2026, Broadridge Financial Solutions launched on-chain proxy voting for tokenized equities, with Galaxy set to conduct the first on-chain shareholder vote by a U.S. public company at its May 2026 annual meeting.
Simultaneously, the SEC approved Nasdaq's rule amendment (SR-NASDAQ-2025-072) on March 18, 2026, permitting tokenized securities to trade alongside traditional shares. The NYSE announced its own tokenized platform in partnership with Securitize on March 24, 2026, targeting late 2026 launch. These moves represent a structural convergence: crypto-native tokenization platforms built the market from zero to $1 billion, and now incumbent exchanges are building parallel rails to capture the same flow.
The question is no longer whether tokenized equities will exist. It is who controls the infrastructure — and who captures the economic value from settlement, custody, governance, and trading.
The tokenized equities market reached approximately $1.08 billion in total value by early 2026, according to data aggregated by CoinDesk and industry trackers. The growth curve has been steep: tokenized equity value sat below $100 million as recently as mid-2025, making the 2,900% year-over-year expansion one of the fastest category ramps in digital assets.
Key growth metrics:
The growth is not uniformly distributed. Ondo Global Markets accounts for more than half the total market value, with $700 million in total value locked across 250+ tokenized stocks and ETFs. The platform reported $13 billion in cumulative trading volume and tens of thousands of holders as of April 2026. Ondo's broader platform, including tokenized Treasuries and other products, reached $2.52 billion in TVL — a 404% year-over-year increase.
The sector's expansion coincides with a structural demand driver: non-U.S. investors gaining 24/7 access to U.S. equities without brokerage accounts, time-zone constraints, or T+1 settlement delays.
The tokenized equities market has consolidated around three primary issuers, each with a distinct positioning:
Ondo Global Markets holds the largest market share at roughly 60-70% of total tokenized equity value. Founded by Nathan Allman, the platform launched in September 2025 and has expanded to Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain. Ondo's partnership with Binance — announced February 23, 2026 — brought tokenized U.S. stocks back to the exchange five years after Binance discontinued a similar product under regulatory pressure. Abu Dhabi's ADGM approved Ondo's tokenized stocks for trading on Binance's regulated venue, marking the first such approval under that regime. Allman stated: "We saw stablecoins export the U.S. dollar by bringing it on-chain. Now, Ondo Global Markets is doing the same thing for U.S. securities."
Backed Finance (xStocks) holds the second-largest position. By mid-February 2026, xStocks held eight of the top eleven tokenized equities by unique holder count and 68% of the top 25 positions overall, according to Four Pillars research. The product is the most widely distributed tokenized equity by holder count, though its total value trails Ondo.
Securitize operates as a regulated transfer agent and broker-dealer, with over $4 billion in tokenized assets under management. Its DS Protocol v4 handles issuance, with assets custodied at BNY Mellon. Securitize's institutional alignment made it the partner of choice for the NYSE's tokenized securities platform, announced March 24, 2026.
This three-player structure creates a market where crypto-native platforms (Ondo, Backed) own the current volume, while institutional-grade infrastructure providers (Securitize) position for the exchange-driven wave.
Until April 2026, tokenized equities functioned primarily as price-tracking instruments — synthetic exposure to traditional stocks without the governance rights that accompany actual share ownership. Two developments changed that.
Broadridge-Galaxy: First On-Chain Shareholder Vote
On April 6, 2026, Broadridge Financial Solutions — which processes $8 trillion in tokenized assets per month and handles over $15 trillion in daily average trading across traditional and tokenized securities — announced on-chain governance capabilities for tokenized equities. Galaxy (NASDAQ: GLXY), the first U.S. public company to issue native tokenized equity on a major public blockchain, will use the platform for its May 2026 annual meeting.
The technical architecture records corporate actions on Broadridge's dedicated Avalanche-based L1 blockchain, then distributes them across multiple chains. Broadridge's ProxyVote platform integrates directly into digital wallets, enabling investors to receive proxy materials, verify holdings, and submit votes with a verifiable on-chain record.
Broadridge CEO Tim Gokey stated: "Ensuring accurate, scalable, and cost-effective governance has never been more critical to supporting the growth of tokenized equities."
The platform creates what Broadridge calls a "single pane of glass" — consolidating registered, beneficial, and tokenized holdings for issuers. This matters because it resolves a fragmentation problem: tokenized shareholders previously existed outside the traditional proxy infrastructure entirely.
Ondo-Broadridge: 250+ Stocks Get Proxy Voting
On April 28, 2026, Ondo Finance announced its own integration with Broadridge, enabling proxy voting and regulatory filings access for holders of its 250+ tokenized stocks and ETFs. Through Broadridge's Web3-enabled ProxyVote solution, investors can authenticate via crypto wallets and access the same governance tools — prospectuses, proxy statements, voting — typically confined to brokerage accounts.
This integration covers $700 million in tokenized equity value and represents the first time holders of third-party tokenized stocks and ETFs have had formal proxy voting rights.
The $1 billion crypto-native tokenized equity market has drawn attention from both major U.S. equity exchanges. Their entry signals that the category has moved past the experimental stage.
Nasdaq
The SEC approved Nasdaq's rule amendment (SR-NASDAQ-2025-072) on March 18, 2026, permitting tokenized securities to trade under the DTC tokenization pilot. Under the new framework:
NYSE
The New York Stock Exchange announced on January 19, 2026 a platform for trading and on-chain settlement of tokenized securities, partnering with Securitize as its first digital transfer agent (announced March 24, 2026). The platform targets:
The platform combines NYSE's Pillar matching engine with blockchain-based post-trade systems. ICE, NYSE's parent company, is working with BNY and Citi to support tokenized deposits across its clearinghouses.
The incumbent entry creates a two-track market: crypto-native platforms serving global, non-U.S. retail investors today, and regulated U.S. exchange platforms targeting domestic institutional flow by late 2026 to 2027.
The economic case for tokenized equities centers on three value propositions that reduce costs borne by intermediaries in traditional markets:
Settlement Window Compression. Traditional T+1 settlement creates credit risk between trade execution and finality. Atomic delivery-versus-payment (DvP) on-chain collapses this window to zero — the token and payment asset exchange in a single transaction, or neither does. This eliminates counterparty failure risk during the settlement period.
Capital Efficiency. Tokenized equities can serve as collateral for on-chain borrowing while simultaneously earning returns — a dual function with no traditional market equivalent. This is already visible in DeFi: tokenized equity positions backing stablecoin loans on lending protocols.
Operating Cost Reduction. Programmable compliance — transfer restrictions, accreditation checks, jurisdiction blocks, investor limits — executes automatically at the token level. This replaces manual compliance processes that cost broker-dealers and transfer agents an estimated $2-5 per transaction in traditional markets, according to industry analyses.
The question of who captures this value is unresolved. In the current crypto-native structure, platforms like Ondo earn fees from issuance, trading, and management. In the exchange-driven model, Nasdaq and NYSE would route flow through existing fee structures, with transfer agents (Securitize) and custodians (BNY Mellon) capturing post-trade revenue. Broadridge's governance infrastructure adds another revenue layer: proxy processing fees that currently generate billions annually in traditional markets.
Tokenized equities operate under an evolving U.S. regulatory regime:
The regulatory picture remains incomplete. The SEC has approved tokenized trading under existing securities frameworks, but questions around 24/7 market surveillance, circuit breakers, and cross-border enforcement for crypto-native platforms remain open.
The tokenized equities market has moved through three phases in under 12 months: proof of concept (mid-2025), rapid scaling to $1 billion (Q1 2026), and infrastructure convergence (Q2 2026). The April 2026 governance integrations — Broadridge with Galaxy and Ondo — resolve one of the category's fundamental limitations: tokenized equity holders can now exercise the same voting rights as traditional shareholders.
The entry of Nasdaq and NYSE shifts the competitive dynamics. Crypto-native platforms built the market serving global retail investors outside the U.S. Incumbent exchanges will target domestic institutional flow under existing regulatory frameworks. The two tracks are not mutually exclusive, but they compete for the same underlying value: settlement fees, custody revenue, governance processing, and trading margins.
The data shows a market that is small relative to global equity markets ($1 billion versus $100+ trillion) but growing at a rate that has attracted the two largest U.S. stock exchanges in the same quarter. The infrastructure for tokenized equities — issuance, trading, settlement, and now governance — is largely built. The remaining variable is adoption velocity.