Coinbase Puts Major Tech Stocks on Blockchain as Tokens

Coinbase has put four American tech stocks on its Base platform, making them available to be traded as tokens. These include Nvidia, Apple, Meta, and Alphabet, which can now be held in a self-custody wallet without needing a brokerage account. This allows for 24/7 trading, something that traditional stock markets do not offer.

The process works by a market maker buying the real shares, holding them in an SEC-registered broker-dealer's segregated account, and then issuing tokens that represent ownership of those shares. These tokens can be used to access various DeFi apps, such as lending platforms like Aave and Morpho, which can lend against the tokenized stocks.

In the first 24 hours, around $10.8 million worth of these tokens were traded, with a total onchain liquidity of approximately $3.06 million. The holders of NVDAc, the largest of the four tokens, numbered 1,745 by the end of that period.