The NYSE Just Picked Avalanche — and Tokenized Stocks Are Quietly Going Mainstream
Three U.S. tokenized-stock venues chose three different blockchains in a single week, as the market for blockchain-based shares hit $3.7 billion.
Tokenized stocks — traditional shares issued and traded on a blockchain — are having a breakout week, and the biggest names in American finance are now choosing sides. Over the past week, three U.S. tokenized-stock venues picked three different blockchains to launch on, turning what was once a crypto curiosity into a three-way contest for the plumbing of the stock market.
According to The Block, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the New York Stock Exchange chose Avalanche as the sole settlement chain for its planned 24/7 trading platform. Days earlier, on November 4, $CNTN became the first U.S. equity to trade under the SEC's Innovation Exemption, with Five North selling tokenized shares to DRW Cumberland on TSV, a permissioned venue on the Canton Network. And on Monday, Formation notified the SEC that it will run a venue on Solana, targeting an early 2027 launch.
One chain per venue — for now
No venue is going multichain at launch, and the reason is regulatory as much as technical. According to The Block, splitting activity across networks would complicate compliance and make it harder to build deep liquidity while staying under the SEC's strict 0.25% average daily volume cap per asset. Each venue is betting on a single chain and hoping the biggest platforms and issuers follow.
The chains leading the market so far have mostly ridden on large exchanges launching their own tokenized-stock products. BNB Chain's surges have been driven by Binance's bStocks, Base's rise by Coinbase, and Solana's volume is largely tied to Kraken's xStocks. The Block's assessment is blunt: the chains that win market share will be the ones that attract the biggest platforms and issuers — and the NYSE's choice of Avalanche is the clearest signal yet of how that contest could play out.
Growth tracking the stablecoin playbook
The numbers suggest tokenized stocks are following a familiar path. According to The Block, 240 days after crossing $1 billion, stablecoins stood at roughly $4 billion; tokenized stocks stood at $3.7 billion at the same point, while tokenized Treasuries reached $2.5 billion and have since fallen well behind. The newsletter cautions that tokenized stocks may not keep growing at this rate, but calls the trend promising.
The market is also getting wider, not just bigger. The count of tokenized stocks and ETFs worth more than $1 million climbed from three in January 2025 to 287 as of November 8, across roughly 4,400 tokenized assets and a $3.7 billion market. Distribution keeps broadening too: HTX launched spot trading in bStocks on Monday with 20 names including NVDA, TSLA, QQQ, and CRCL, and Strategy and SpaceX are now the most tokenized issuers by asset count.
The Block's take is that breadth is the healthier signal for a young market — a long tail of products with real size offers a better user experience than one or two large wrappers. With the NYSE, the SEC's exemption framework, and a growing roster of venues all moving in the same week, tokenized stocks are no longer an experiment on the sidelines. The question now is which chain's ecosystem the rest of Wall Street decides to build on.
Crypto prices are volatile and the figures above reflect the reporting of the cited sources at the time of publication.
Written by the BidAsk Newsroom. Based on reporting from the sources below.
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