Equities Onchain Will Be Bigger Than Stablecoins: The $240B Playbook for Global Asset Access
How tokenized stocks will do for investing what stablecoins did for dollars
Equities Onchain Will Be Bigger Than Stablecoins
How tokenized stocks will do for investing what stablecoins did for dollars
Stablecoins proved something most people missed: you can decouple access from infrastructure.
A guy in Nigeria can hold USDC backed by US government bonds in a simple wallet. No bank account needed. No brokerage. No correspondent banking relationships. No legacy rails. The token IS the access.
That is what makes it simpler. And that simplicity is about to reshape how the world invests.
The Stablecoin Playbook
Before we talk about where this is going, let us acknowledge what stablecoins have already accomplished.
The numbers are staggering: $240 billion in supply, with $10 trillion transacted in the last 12 months (adjusted for payments, source: visaonchainanalytics.com). This is not speculative crypto trading volume. This is real economic activity: remittances, cross-border B2B payments, savings in stable currency, and increasingly, everyday commerce.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. What stablecoins actually did was solve a distribution problem that traditional finance could not crack for decades.
Think about what it used to take for someone in Brazil, Nigeria, or Indonesia to hold US dollars:
Open a local bank account with all associated requirements
Find a bank that offers foreign currency accounts (most do not)
Navigate complex regulations around foreign currency holdings
Pay significant fees for currency conversion and maintenance
Accept limited access and withdrawal restrictions
Or they could download a wallet app and buy USDC. Same underlying asset exposure. Fundamentally different access model.
This is not about technology replacing banks. It is about distribution channels evolving to match how people actually want to interact with financial products.
The Equities Opportunity
Now apply that same logic to equities.
Imagine a Brazilian using Pix to buy a stablecoin, swapping to USDC, then purchasing a token representing the S&P 500. From an asset perspective, there is little difference between this token and a traditional index fund. The underlying exposure is identical.
But from an access and distribution perspective? This changes everything.
Consider what happens when someone in Mexico wants exposure to US equities today:
Open a local brokerage account (KYC, documents, waiting periods)
Find a broker that offers international investing (limited options)
Navigate currency conversion through their bank
Pay custody fees, FX spreads, and transaction costs
Accept restricted trading hours and settlement delays
Deal with tax reporting complexity across jurisdictions
Each of these steps adds friction, cost, and exclusion. Not technical exclusion, but practical exclusion. The kind where the product technically exists but is so cumbersome that most people never bother.
Now imagine the alternative: Pix to stablecoin to tokenized S&P 500. Three steps. One interface. Available 24/7. Settlement in seconds.
Why Intermediaries Collapse
Here is what actually happens when assets move onchain:
The number of intermediaries collapses. No local custodian, no foreign broker, no correspondent banks, no transfer agents, no clearing houses in the traditional sense. The blockchain handles settlement. The smart contract handles custody rules. The token handles transferability.
The product becomes simpler and cheaper. Fewer middlemen means lower fees and less complexity. When you remove four intermediaries from a transaction chain, you do not just save their fees. You eliminate the operational complexity, the reconciliation errors, the settlement delays, and the regulatory overhead that each one introduces.
Demand increases exponentially. When you make something 10x easier to access, you do not get 10x more users. You get entirely new categories of users who were priced out before.
This is the part most traditional finance people miss. They look at the current market for international equities and think about taking share from existing competitors. But the real opportunity is in creating markets where none existed because the friction was too high.
> How many people in emerging markets want exposure to US equities but have never seriously considered it because the process is too complicated? That is the addressable market.
Derivatives Make Even More Sense
If tokenized equities seem like a natural evolution, derivatives and perpetuals are an even more obvious fit for blockchain rails.
Think about what a derivative actually is: synthetic exposure to price movements without owning the underlying asset. There is no physical settlement. No custody of actual shares. No dividend processing. No corporate actions to manage.
It is just math. A contract that pays out based on the difference between entry and exit prices.
And math runs better on programmable rails than on legacy infrastructure.
Traditional derivatives markets work through a complex web of prime brokers, clearinghouses, margin accounts, and settlement systems. All of this exists because trust between counterparties needed to be intermediated. But smart contracts can do this natively. Collateral can be locked programmatically. Settlement can happen automatically. Margin calls can execute without human intervention.
For emerging market users who want exposure to US asset price movements, onchain derivatives offer something that traditional markets simply cannot match: direct access without the infrastructure burden.
The Flywheel Effect
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle that traditional finance cannot easily replicate:
More access leads to more liquidity. When you make it easier for someone in Colombia to buy tokenized US equities, you are adding to the global liquidity pool. This is not regional liquidity. It is unified, 24/7, global liquidity.
More liquidity attracts more asset issuers. As tokenized asset markets grow, more traditional asset managers will see the distribution opportunity. Why limit yourself to investors who can navigate traditional brokerage infrastructure when you could reach anyone with a wallet?
More products drive more access. As the range of available tokenized assets expands, the value proposition for new users increases. First they came for dollar exposure. Then equities. Then bonds. Then alternatives. Each new product category brings new users into the ecosystem.
More users create more infrastructure. As user numbers grow, more developers build better interfaces, better on-ramps, better compliance solutions. This makes the next wave of adoption even easier.
This flywheel is already spinning in stablecoins. The infrastructure built to support USDC and USDT adoption is now the foundation for tokenized equities. The same wallets, the same exchanges, the same compliance frameworks.
The Emerging Market Perspective
I keep coming back to Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia. This is not random. These markets represent where the impact will be most dramatic.
In developed markets, the existing infrastructure mostly works. A retail investor in the US or Europe can access diversified equity exposure through low-cost ETFs with reasonable friction. The gains from tokenization are incremental: maybe faster settlement, maybe 24/7 trading, maybe some cost reduction.
But in emerging markets, the existing infrastructure often does not work. Or it works so poorly that most people are effectively excluded.
This is not about financial literacy or investor sophistication. Plenty of people in emerging markets understand the value of diversified equity exposure. They have phones. They have internet. They have money to invest. What they lack is infrastructure that makes investing practical.
Tokenized assets solve this at the infrastructure level. You do not need to build brokerage networks in every country. You do not need correspondent banking relationships in every jurisdiction. You do not need local custody solutions for every market.
You need a wallet and an internet connection.
The Scale of Opportunity
Let me put some context around the opportunity size.
Stablecoins achieved $240 billion in supply by solving the dollar access problem. This is meaningful, but dollars are just one asset class. A useful one, but limited in what they can do for long-term wealth building.
Equities are where wealth is actually created over time. The historical equity risk premium, the power of compound growth, the access to corporate earnings. This is how people in developed markets have built generational wealth.
Global equity markets represent roughly $100 trillion in market capitalization. Even a small percentage of this moving to tokenized rails represents an opportunity that dwarfs stablecoins.
But the real opportunity is not in tokenizing existing investments. It is in the new investments that become possible when access friction disappears.
How many people globally would invest in diversified equity portfolios if they could do it as easily as sending a text message? That is not a rhetorical question. That is the addressable market for tokenized equities.
What This Means
The future of financial products will be built on high-quality American assets tokenized and distributed globally.
This is not a prediction about technology. It is a prediction about distribution economics. The infrastructure that stablecoins built, the regulatory frameworks emerging around digital assets, the wallet penetration in emerging markets, all of this is creating the conditions for tokenized equities to follow the same trajectory.
The builders who understand this today will define how the next billion people invest.
I do not say this as an observer. This is exactly why I am building Awa.
We are creating a platform to enable builders in emerging economies to create savings, investments, and borrowing products on the shoulders of high-quality US assets once they are finally onchain.
The infrastructure is finally ready. The regulatory clarity is emerging. The user demand is already there, waiting for products that work.
Now it is time to build.
Final Thoughts
Stablecoins proved that the model works. You can take complex financial infrastructure and replace it with a token that just works. The $240 billion in supply and $10 trillion in transaction volume is the proof of concept.
Equities onchain is the next chapter. Same playbook. Bigger prize. More transformative impact.
The question is not whether this will happen. The question is who will build the products that bring it to market.
What do you think? Is the equities tokenization thesis overstated, or are we actually underestimating how fast this will move? I would love to hear perspectives from both sides.
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