Tokenized Stocks Were Supposed to Kill Brokers — Instead, 94% of Them Depend on a Single One Called Alpaca
10h ago · 1 source
The tokenized stock market, which was designed to decentralize and disintermediate traditional brokerage services, has become overwhelmingly concentrated around a single broker: Alpaca. The firm now reportedly holds around $1.5 billion in tokenized stock assets, representing approximately 94% of the market — raising serious questions about centralization risk in a space built on decentralization promises.
WHY IT MATTERS
Imagine crypto promised to replace the post office with email — instant, direct, no middleman. But then it turned out that 94% of all those emails were being routed through a single post office anyway. That's essentially what's happened with tokenized stocks. These are digital versions of regular stocks (like shares of Google or Amazon) that live on a blockchain so anyone in the world can theoretically trade them. The problem is that almost all of them depend on one company, Alpaca, to actually hold and manage the real stocks behind the tokens. If something went wrong with Alpaca, the whole tokenized stock market could be in trouble. It's a reminder that just because something uses blockchain doesn't mean it's truly decentralized — you always need to ask who's actually behind the curtain.
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Educational only — not financial advice.