NEW YORK, NEW YORK – DECEMBER 24: Traders work on the floor of the New York stock Exchange (NYSE) during a shortened trading day before the Christmas holiday on December 24, 2025 in New York City. The Dow finished up nearly 300 points on positive economic data, indicating strength in the U.S. economy. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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The New York Stock Exchange announced today that it’s building a tokenized securities platform. The system will offer 24/7 trading, instant settlement, and stablecoin-based funding for U.S. equities and ETFs. BNY and Citi are partnering with parent company ICE to support tokenized deposits across its clearinghouses.
“We are leading the industry toward fully on-chain solutions, grounded in the unmatched protections and high regulatory standards that position us to marry trust with state-of-the-art technology,” said Lynn Martin, President of NYSE Group.
This isn’t a crypto startup pitching blockchain to skeptical bankers. It’s the world’s oldest and largest stock exchange adopting the infrastructure that crypto builders have been developing for years. And it signals something more meaningful than validation: the infrastructure layer of global finance is converging onto shared blockchain rails.
The same stablecoin rails and blockchain settlement systems now power both NASDAQ-listed tokenization startups and the New York Stock Exchange. Once assets live on-chain, any application can surface them. Distribution fragments while the underlying plumbing unifies. The race to build “everything apps” in finance is really a competition to build the best interface to shared rails.
The tokenization of everything
The NYSE’s move is a prominent example, but it’s far from the only one. Tokenization is hitting every asset class simultaneously.
In commodities, Streamex Corp (NASDAQ: STEX) is preparing to launch GLDY, a yield-bearing gold token that pays investors up to 4% annually in additional gold. The company, which went public via reverse merger last year, represents a new species: a NASDAQ-listed pure-play tokenization platform.
“Tokenization is what allows us to securitize that process,” said Henry McPhie, Streamex’s CEO, in a recent interview. “Before tokenization exists, to be able to securitize that, one would be extremely hard and it would be a lot of paperwork, a lot of lawyers going back and forth.”
Streamex is targeting the $22 trillion gold market with a product designed specifically so ETFs and retail brokers can distribute it. The company expects to launch within weeks.
In cultural assets and collectibles, the vision extends even further. “The tokenization of everything… it really is everything and it’s a very broad vision for crypto,” said Devin Finzer, CEO of OpenSea, in a December interview. “You can have prediction markets, you can have onchain stocks, you can have things that are more cultural, you can have games, you can have tickets.”
The numbers support the thesis. Real-world asset tokenization has grown to between $18 billion and $37 billion, depending on methodology, according to data from RWA.xyz and Bernstein. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund alone holds over $2.5 billion in tokenized Treasury securities. Securitize, the platform powering BUIDL, is going public at a $1.25 billion valuation. Bernstein projects the market will roughly double to $80 billion by the end of 2026.
What made this possible
Two forces enabled this convergence: regulatory clarity and stablecoins.
The GENIUS Act, which passed the Senate 68-30 in June 2025 and was signed into law on July 18, established the first comprehensive federal framework for stablecoins. The SEC’s DTC no-action letter in December created a three-year pilot program for tokenizing equities, ETFs, and fixed-income securities. Without these regulatory signals, the NYSE couldn’t have made this announcement.
But the real tell is stablecoins. The NYSE’s platform will use “stablecoin-based funding,” meaning the dollar itself is moving onto blockchain rails. BNY and Citi are supporting tokenized deposits across ICE’s clearinghouses to handle margin obligations and funding requirements outside traditional banking hours. Bernstein projects stablecoin supply will reach $420 billion by the end of 2026.
“Supporting tokenized securities is a pivotal step in ICE’s strategy to operate on-chain market infrastructure for trading, settlement, custody, and capital formation in the new era of global finance,” said Michael Blaugrund, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at ICE.
When the largest banks in America are building tokenized deposit systems for the world’s largest exchange, the infrastructure war is over. Crypto won.
The convergence
The traffic isn’t one-way. While traditional finance adopts crypto infrastructure, crypto-native companies are going public and submitting to traditional regulation.
Circle went public around the time the GENIUS Act passed. Securitize is heading for the public markets. StreamX trades on NASDAQ. More than 150 digital asset treasury companies launched in 2025, according to Alex Tapscott, managing partner at CMCC Global.
“Digital asset treasury companies launched over the course of the summer, over 150 of them raising tens of billions of dollars to provide access to crypto assets like Bitcoin and ETH, but also Solana and many others,” Tapscott said in a recent interview.
The result is a shared foundation where the distinction between “crypto” and “traditional finance” becomes increasingly meaningless. Both are building on the same rails.
The everything app revisited
As I wrote in a recent piece on the race to build financial super apps, multiple players are competing to become the “everything app” for trading and financial services. The NYSE’s announcement suggests they’ve all been building on the same foundation.
Once assets are on-chain, any application can access them. The NYSE will serve institutional equity traders. OpenSea is positioning for cultural assets and collectibles. StreamX is targeting commodity investors. Robinhood and its competitors will fight for retail. But they’re all building interfaces to the same underlying rails.
“I am interested in smart operators that can build businesses that leverage this technology,” Tapscott said. “And if by doing that, they happen to also own big stakes of assets that could go up in value, then all the better for it.”
Competition shifts from asset access to user experience. The moat is no longer having assets that others don’t. It’s building the best way to interact with assets that everyone can access.
What this means for you
For the average investor, the changes will be practical and visible.
Your brokerage account will eventually offer 24/7 trading with instant settlement. Today, you trade stocks between 9:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern, and settlement takes a day. Tomorrow, you trade whenever you want, and the transaction is final immediately.
Your gold holdings could earn yield. “Now, instead of paying to hold gold, investors can get paid to hold gold,” McPhie said of StreamX’s GLDY product. Traditional gold ETFs charge 30-40 basis points annually. A yield-bearing gold token flips that equation.
Your event tickets and collectibles become liquid assets tradeable on global markets. The barriers between asset classes dissolve.
This is comparable to the shift from floor trading to electronic markets in the 1990s and 2000s. The technology changed, costs dropped, access expanded, and new players emerged. The same transformation is beginning now.
The question ahead
Crypto didn’t replace traditional finance. It became the infrastructure traditional finance runs on.
The question is no longer whether tokenization wins. It’s who builds the best experience on top of shared rails. The crypto-native builders have a head start and a culture of innovation. The traditional incumbents have trust, scale, and regulatory relationships.
Both are now building on the same foundation. The winners will be those who understand that the infrastructure war is over, and the experience war has just begun.
