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About 8% of tokenized equities’ market cap is now deployed in DeFi. It was roughly 2% in January. DeFi active TVL grew from $15.5M to $313M this year. That’s about 20x, against 5.8x for market cap. Where it's sitting: 1) Spot DEX pools (Uniswap V4, Raydium, Aerodrome): $77.9M 2) Lending and borrowing (Kamino, Jupiter Lend, Frankencoin): $51.3M 3) Saturn: $50.9M 4) Figure Markets Exchange: $48.9M 5) Pendle: $42.6M The top ten protocols hold 89% of the total.

Weekly spot DEX volume in tokenized equities surged from $45.8M to $2.54B this year. 55x, against 5.8x for market cap. Volume reached $7.26B in the week of Aug 31, 158x the January level. Robinhood Chain accounted for 74% of that ($5.36B). Trading has also spread beyond Solana, which carried 99.8% of volume in January. 1) @solana: 31% 2) @RobinhoodCrypto Chain: 26% 3) @BNBCHAIN: 25% 4) @base: 18% Trading has grown as a share of onchain movement too: 14.5% of transfer volume in October, up from 10.9% in January.

Ethereum held 50% of tokenized equities at the start of the year. It holds 22% now. Two chains gained the most share: 1) @BNBCHAIN 9% to 32% 2) @avax 0% to 9% Binance’s bStocks launched on BNB Chain in June. 3/10 largest tokenized equities now sit there: CRCLb, SPCXb and MSTRb. @Securitize put a portion of its newly IPO’d shares on Avalanche in July. It's now the largest single token at $290M.

Tokenized equities grew 483% this year, from $654M to $3.8B. @Ondo still leads at $1B, but its share fell from 56% to 26%. @binance bStocks, launched in June sits at $905M. 24% of the market. @xStocksFi grew from $187M to $954M. It's held its ground at 25% market share.

The market hasn’t priced in the convergence of AI + crypto - yet. Here are our findings from @token2049 Agentic trading and payments are emerging. AI lets retail process far more information, decide faster, and even build their own infrastructure for managing money. But capital hasn’t followed. Frontier money is flowing into space, robotics and AI, not crypto. Investors decided early that crypto doesn’t benefit from AI, the same way they treated software companies. At the extremes of every tech cycle, markets overreact. We’re watching a swing back. AI has moved from capex build-out, to models, to execution. From here, the two cycles intertwine. The more of the world goes digital and the smarter agents get, the more crypto gets used. Compute markets running on crypto were named as a likely theme within the year. So, where to position? Team execution matters more than ideas. We're looking at... DePIN: networks that execute against AI bottlenecks like data, energy and distributed compute for inference Identity: proof of humans in a world of ever more agents Payments: crypto as the way to pay for inference

The exchange super-app race is on. Early crypto was about capital appreciation, so exchanges built around liquidity. Today the focus has shifted to risk management, lending and borrowing, and spending. The expected winners are vertically integrated, through in-app products, partners and alternative distribution channels. Many platforms will come and go chasing the single app for every asset and every person. The upside is massive. Crypto exchanges are small next to their TradFi counterparts, and incumbents like @okx are already raising fresh rounds to fund their next phase of growth. Different users need different things: Individuals need strong all-in-one platforms Institutions need full-stack prime brokers Liquidity is still fragmented across equities, crypto, perps, spot and options on separate platforms. @token2049 panelists expect that to persist before consolidation happens.

What do institutions really need to see before they touch DeFi? That question kept coming up @token2049 The blocker isn’t a lack of benefits. It’s the risk of being on-chain, specifically counterparty risk. Between human error and code failures, the number of exploits makes it hard for institutions with real size to get comfortable. Three things would change their assessment: 1. A track record across multiple cycles with no hacks at scale 2. Secure custody solutions that work at their size 3. Infrastructure partners who operate transparently and securely Retail faces the same barrier. Many individuals still trust institutions more than they trust code. So the most likely path to mass adoption isn’t users flocking to DeFi apps. It’s trusted institutions building on DeFi in the backend while users interact with a frontend they already trust, never needing to know what’s underneath. DeFi becomes the rails, not the product. One more note from Singapore, “crypto” as a word is tainted among institutions after past cycles. However, founders who focus on solving real problems will still do well.

A year ago, RWAs barely came up at crypto conferences. This year, they were named on almost every panel @token2049. And it wasn’t just crypto natives. @Nasdaq, @InvescoUS and @CMEGroup were all in the room. Tokenization is rolling out in two phases. Phase 1: the wrapper. Stablecoins and tokenized versions of existing assets. Where most tokenized assets sit today. Phase 2: native issuance on-chain, with @Securitize named as best in class. Where we’re heading as regulation clears up. Panelists were blunt: tokenization for tokenization’s sake does nothing. Liquid assets are largely a solved problem. The real unlock is illiquid ones: private companies, smaller nations’ equity markets (Nigeria, Brazil), real estate, and emerging asset classes with no formal venues. The strongest case for adoption is tokenized assets as building blocks. Collateral: yield-generating assets you can trade against without selling. Faster settlement means higher asset velocity, quicker margin calls and less collateral posted. Structured products: tokenized assets plus DeFi primitives create new products, which drive more demand for the assets. Three things are slowing progress: Operations. The tech integrates fast. Redesigning how markets operate does not. Issuance. Permissionless vs official, with no shared standard. Regulation. Rules reportedly flip every 2-4 years, making big commitments hard to justify. Reality check: tokenized assets are still only in the billions, versus trillions sitting offchain in TradFi. It's early, but everyone believes blockchains will be the rails of finance. For more from Singapore, read on in full.