Crypto promised to eliminate stockbrokers, but 94% of its tokenized market now relies on an Alpaca

Alpaca says it custodies more than $1.5 billion of shares backing tokenized equities, which, by public tracker measurements, would represent most of the market.

With DTCC preparing to launch its own tokenization service in October and the SEC warning that third-party stock tokens can expose investors to additional ownership and intermediary risks, the numbers reveal a concentrated brokerage layer beneath a market promoted as decentralized.

Tokenization is the practice of representing a real-world asset as a digital token on a blockchain, so that owning the token stands in for owning, or at least tracking, the thing itself. Applied to equities, it means a version of Apple or Nvidia stock that exists in a crypto wallet, trades on crypto exchanges around the clock, and moves between buyers in minutes without touching a traditional brokerage account.

A buyer from basically anywhere in the world can hold exposure to US companies through the same app they use for Bitcoin, at any hour, in fractional amounts, and the market has grown into hundreds of tokenized assets spread across Solana, Ethereum, and several other chains, issued by competing platforms and sold through exchanges that never close.

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