Viewpoint: US stocks are expected to become the third largest RWA asset after stablecoins and government bonds

 according to Mint Ventures research partner Alex Xu, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and CFO Alesia Haas recently stated that they are considering tokenizing the company's stock to enable trading of US stocks on the Base blockchain. If successful, US stocks are expected to become the third largest category of RWA (real world assets) assets after stablecoins (USDT, USDC) and government bonds (Buidl), and may surpass the current size of tokenized government bonds in the short term.

The value proposition of tokenizing US stocks mainly lies in two aspects: expanding the trading market size, providing a 7x24, borderless, permissionless trading venue; and superior composability, where US stock assets can be used as collateral, margin, to build indices and fund products. For both supply and demand sides, listed companies can reach global investors to attract more buying interest, while investors can break through geographical restrictions to directly allocate US stock assets.

The concept has been attempted before, such as Coinbase's plan in 2020 to list securities tokens but was shelved due to regulatory issues, and in the last DeFi boom, Terra's Mirror and Ethereum's Synthetix also launched synthetic assets of US stocks. Currently, the SEC's shift in attitude provides new opportunities for such innovations. Beneficiaries include Polymath's Polymesh blockchain (Polyx token), which has been used by BlackRock to issue $500 million in digital bonds; in addition, RWA projects like Ondo and Chainlink as an oracle solution may also benefit from this trend.