Tokenized Stocks Grew 395% in a Year but DeFi Usage Remained Below 3%

WHY IT MATTERS

Think of tokenized stocks like digital copies of traditional company shares — such as Apple or Tesla stock — that live on a blockchain instead of in a brokerage account. The idea is that putting stocks on a blockchain could make them easier to trade, available around the clock, and usable in new ways. DeFi, or decentralized finance, refers to financial applications built on blockchains that let people lend, borrow, and trade without traditional middlemen like banks. This report shows that while more tokenized stocks are being created, almost none of them are actually being used in these DeFi applications yet. For someone new to crypto, this highlights an important distinction: just because an asset exists on a blockchain does not mean it is automatically part of the broader decentralized ecosystem. Regulatory rules and technical hurdles still create barriers between tokenized real-world assets and the open financial tools that crypto was designed to enable.