What is Coinbase chasing after being two months behind?

On its first day, the tokenized stocks on Base reached a scale of $4.55 million, far lower than Binance’s bStocks at $610 million.

Written by: Conflux

$4.55 million on the first day. This is the total on-chain value of the four tokens launched on August 25 by Coinbase‘s Base chain after the introduction of tokenized stocks. In contrast, Binance’s bStocks, which launched two months earlier, has already grown to an asset management scale of $610 million. One is just starting out on its first day, while the other has been running for two months, but the gap is clear: what Coinbase is chasing is the distance that has already opened up.

The number answers a question that is not really what this battle is about. Issuing tokenized stocks is just the first step; the real money-making activities, such as collateral and lending that revolve around it, have yet to be determined in whose ecosystem they will thrive.

Following closely

On August 25, Coinbase launched tokenized stocks on Base, with the first four being NVDAc, METAc, AAPLc, and GOOGLc, corresponding to Nvidia, Meta, Apple, and Alphabet, using the B20 token standard designed for real-world assets, integrated with Chainlink’s on-chain price oracle. Two months prior, Binance’s bStocks launched with initial assets including Nvidia, Tesla, Circle, Micron, and SanDisk.

When comparing the product structures of both sides, they are actually quite similar: both correspond 1:1 to real stocks, are held by licensed brokers, support withdrawals to self-custody wallets, allow 24/7 trading, and have designed on-chain mechanisms to handle dividends and stock splits, indicating a similar approach.

Base also announced that on the launch day, about 50 third-party DeFi protocols publicly expressed support for the B20 standard, covering liquidity from Aerodrome, price data from Chainlink, and future lending features planned by protocols like Aave, Morpho, and Euler. This list itself is a positive signal—having so many protocols express support right at launch indicates that the developer ecosystem Base has built up over the past few years has indeed been mobilized at this moment. As for when these protocols will truly establish a lending market and how much real capital they can attract, we will need to observe the subsequent governance developments and actual data.

First movers

Less than a week after Binance’s bStocks launched, the lending protocol Lista DAO on the BNB chain officially integrated, allowing users to deposit tokenized stocks of Nvidia and Tesla as collateral or to earn yields, with protocols like Venus and PancakeSwap following suit. By early August, the asset scale of bStocks surged to about $610 million, surpassing the earlier Kraken’s xStocks (approximately $601 million), becoming the second-largest tokenized stock issuer after Ondo Finance. On the xStocks side, Kamino, the largest lending protocol on Solana, has also officially integrated, with the collateral scale of tokenized stocks reaching about $53 million.

Additionally, statistics show that the transaction volume of bStocks and xStocks is approximately $9.6 billion, capturing 70% of the tokenized stock DEX trading volume, dominating the entire $13.7 billion market. This set of numbers illustrates a mechanism: the more concentrated the trading volume, the deeper the liquidity pool, and the stronger the willingness of lending protocols to use it as collateral. The more collateral is used, the more it attracts additional trading volume—this is a self-reinforcing cycle, where the token that first achieves scale will continue to draw in new trading activities.

Coinbase’s current position is that its product structure is already in place, and ecosystem protocols have collectively expressed support on the launch day, but to truly be integrated by protocols and generate real trading and collateral scale, it still needs time to catch up with the distance already established by Binance and Kraken. This is not a gap in product design, but rather a scale advantage accumulated by first movers.

A similar fork

This competition of “who can be used by more protocols by default” has already been previewed in the stablecoin space, and Coinbase itself was one of the main players in that battle. In 2018, Coinbase and Circle jointly established the Centre alliance to issue USDC, and the early circulation and distribution of USDC largely relied on Coinbase’s platform promotion—it made USDC the primary stablecoin entry on its exchange. By 2022, USDC held on Coinbase’s platform accounted for about 5% of its total circulation, and by 2024, this ratio increased to about 20%. In 2023, the two companies dissolved the Centre alliance, with Circle paying Coinbase about $210 million in stock in exchange for the equity Coinbase held in the alliance. In return, Coinbase obtained direct equity in Circle and agreed to share USDC reserve interest income with Circle as per their agreement.

This history illustrates that USDC was able to compete with the first mover USDT in the DeFi world not because it launched once and secured its position, but because Coinbase invested years in distribution channels, binding its ecosystem, and participating in profit sharing, gradually making it a default option for protocols to integrate. As the DeFi world increasingly values composability and institutional trust, USDC once gained a disproportionately large share in scenarios like on-chain lending and liquidity mining due to its stronger compliance image—even though its total market cap has always been less than USDT. This shows that “the asset with the largest user base” and “the asset that is defaulted by other protocols for building business” can be two different winners; the former wins in distribution, while the latter wins in the depth of integration, and this position requires time and sustained investment to achieve, not just a one-time launch.

Tokenized stocks are now at a similar fork. Binance and Kraken have already built up absolute scale, and Coinbase enters with a similar product structure and a complete ecosystem list—considering its demonstrated distribution capability and long-term investment patience in the USDC case, whether this time tokenized stocks can replicate a similar path and gradually convert “expressed support” into real integration and trading scale is a point worth continuous attention in the coming months.

The rules are not yet written

The biggest variable in this competition is that the regulatory framework in the United States has yet to be established. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins is pushing for an “innovation exemption,” planning to create a lighter compliance channel for tokenized securities, allowing 24/7 trading and fractional shares, but will explicitly exclude traditional shareholders’ voting and dividend rights—this means that once the rules are established, compliant tokenized stocks in the U.S. may very well have a different rights structure compared to the versions issued by Coinbase and Binance through offshore structures. Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Nasdaq are also preparing their own on-chain settlement infrastructure, and the U.S. Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is similarly involved, but these plans are currently still in the preparatory and pilot stages, and whether they can truly be implemented and in what form remains uncertain.

In other words, the positions Coinbase and Binance are currently competing for are based on the specific window period where U.S. regulatory rules have not yet been established. How long this window will last and whether the on-chain plans of traditional exchanges will ultimately become real competitors are still unanswered questions—but this is indeed the biggest variable that will influence the direction of this competition in the future.

This competition will ultimately not be decided by who launches first, but by whose tokenized stocks are still being used by the most protocols as collateral, liquidity, and underlying assets for automated trading six months or a year later. Coinbase has now filled in the product and ecosystem list; whether it can once again use time to gain a default position like it did with USDC remains to be seen—once U.S. regulatory rules are truly established, they may also bring new variables to this competition.