Is crypto moving away from crypto? Yes and no.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are moving away from cryptocurrency as the product and toward cryptocurrency as the new, future-forward financial infrastructure for traditional finance. They no longer want their future to depend on discovering the next Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), or manufacturing demand for the next meme coin. Founders and exchange executives want to take things investors already understand and trust like traditional stocks, gold, Treasury bonds, and an ETF, and turn them into crypto assets via tokenization. Crypto’s future isn’t in Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) trades. It’s in tokenized Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) shares like AAPLx run by xStocks. 

"We don’t see it as a move away from crypto," said Gracy Chen, the Chinese CEO Of Bitget with an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "Crypto remains the foundation of our business and continues to generate the majority of trading activity on Bitget. What’s changing is investors’ expectations of what a modern exchange should offer."

Bitget launched a Cross-Asset Unified Trading Account (UTA) on July 16 to allow for eligible crypto assets and tokenized real-world assets to be managed through a single account on a single platform.  Since then, Bitget says it has brought more than 370 eligible assets, including 100 tokenized stocks, into one margin pool. That means an Apple token is no longer merely something a customer buys to track Apple.  It can potentially serve as collateral supporting crypto and derivatives trades on that platform. 

The company, whose chief executives are mostly based in the Seychelles, says it brought in more than 50,000 traders and generated over $670 million in cumulative trading volume by allowing for UTAs. "Investors are increasingly looking beyond crypto without leaving the digital asset ecosystem," Chen said. "Financial markets are converging. Investors no longer want separate destinations for crypto, equities, commodities and other assets."

As an example of crypto moving beyond crypto, around 40% of Bitget’s trading volume comes from non-crypto assets. 

Bitget executives have said they want to become "the first billion user company" in crypto within two years. Bitget’s Chief Operating Officer Vugar Usi told Benzinga on the sidelines of Consensus 2025 that to have a billion users in crypto, the industry cannot focus on crypto day traders.

Stock Tokenization Might be Only Growth Market for Crypto

Tokenized stocks are designed to provide 1:1 economic exposure to the performance of the underlying security, instead of direct legal ownership of the shares themselves. That means if the price of the underlying stock moves, the value of the token is designed to move with it. However, tokenized shares are not the same as being a bonafide shareholder.  

Bitget explicitly says their "rToken" holders do not become registered shareholders, do not appear on Apple’s shareholder register and generally lack voting and direct shareholder rights. 

But a growing number of market participants view tokenization as one of the most important trends shaping the future of finance, noted Bryan Choe, Head of Research at RWA.xyz, a New York-based data and market-intelligence company that tracks financial assets represented on public blockchains.

The tokenized-stock segment roughly doubled in the first half of 2026, growing from about $691 million to approximately $1.48 billion in market cap.  The number of wallets holding tokenized equities reportedly climbed from around 122,000 to roughly 352,000. Tokenized stocks now account for about 40% of all Real World Asset (RWA) wallets and have overtaken tokenized commodities and bonds as the single largest RWA segment by wallet count. The Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) blockchain handles over 90% of tokenized-stock trading volume.

Solana reached $5.77 billion in total tokenized asset volume during the second quarter of 2026, according to The Kobeissi Letter, driven heavily by record-breaking demand for on-chain equities and 24/7 market access. 

Bitget is in the middle of an industry-wide race, to be a leader in what they call the "Universal Exchange." Other players include Bybit, which also has UTAs. They are building an entire suite of stock-linked spot, derivatives and yield products around tokenized securities. Binance also offers traditional stock trades for foreigners, and has their own version of tokenized shares, known as ‘bStocks". They now offer crypto, actual brokerage-based stock access like E*Trade, tokenized stocks, stock derivatives, commodities and ETFs.

The OKX exchange launched more than 40 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs in July, including Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100-linked ETFs. They trade around the clock against USDT in the same account customers use for crypto. The initial targeted markets include Asia, the Middle East, Turkey and the former Soviet states opposed to Western investors. 

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a member of the OKX board, was on Fox Business on July 20, and said "The biggest misconception was that crypto was seen as tokens and memes. The real contribution of crypto is not that. It is the financial infrastructure, the technology that they developed."

This is as close to saying that crypto is no longer for Bitcoin.

Why Tokenized Stocks Are Surging

Tokenization of U.S. securities basically sells access to the U.S. stock market to anybody with an account on a fintech exchange. Whether or not they believe they are real shareholders is another matter. For sure, demand for tokenization will drive demand for American stocks because the companies offering the tokenization are supposed to own those stocks they are digitalizing for their buyers.

State Street research suggests that digital tokenization of real-world assets currently makes up approximately two percent of the average financial institution’s portfolio. Sam ten Cate, Head of Digital Strategy at State Street Investment Management said in March that he expected that to grow to five percent by 2030. 

"As the volume of these assets grows, so does the need for a better understanding of the different forms that tokenized securities can take, especially as regulators begin to clarify their own positions on the subject," he said. 

Critics Say Risks Underestimated

Bitget, Bybit and Binance all consider continuous trading and greater access a common good. But House Financial Affairs Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-Calif) says it is "gamification" of the free market, only with much weaker guardrails. 

"Leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, we were told that securitization and new financial technologies would make borrowing easier, spread risk, and lift everyone up," she said on March 25 during a hearing about tokenization. "What they actually did was allow Wall Street to build a process that legitimized predatory loans, stripped wealth from middle class homeowners, and created the conditions for the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. Working families lost their homes. The people who built and sold those products walked away richer. Creating new types of middlemen may sound innovative in practice, but it appears to me that tokenization adds new fees, complexities, and risks for investors and the financial system," she said.

Her take is not isolated.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md) have taken a broader but related position. They warned that Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) exemptions for crypto platforms could permit market participants to escape ordinary securities laws, creating loopholes at the expense of investor protections. Their letter of April 24 to SEC Chair Paul Atkins situated those concerns within the fight over tokenization and the competing demands of crypto platforms and traditional securities firms. 

In the markets, Citadel Securities delivered the Street’s A-list critique of this budding market being forged by old crypto natives. Stephen John Berger, Citadel’s Head of Government and Regulatory Policy warned in a July 21 letter to SEC Secretary Vanessa Countryman, that tokenized equities could siphon liquidity from the traditional, regulated U.S. equity markets into separate pools unavailable to the usual market participants. It would allow vertically integrated crypto exchanges to control the trading venue, customer funding and settlement infrastructure and would likely "confuse investors about whether the token was issued or endorsed by Apple," he wrote. 

"Tokenized securities must achieve success by delivering real innovation and efficiency to market participants, rather than through self-serving regulatory arbitrage," he said, accusing the crypto exchanges of "bending the rules." Berger told the Commission not to allow token sellers "to profit simply by avoiding the Commission’s time-tested framework for protecting the interests of retail and institutional investors."

The World Federation of Exchanges, representing major traditional exchanges and clearing houses globally, is also a solid "no" on this new market. The Federation said in a paper published last year that these tokens "mimic" equities "without supplying equivalent rights or safeguards."

The Race to Become the Universal Exchange 

For cryptocurrency exchanges, the market is heading into tokenization or bust. Bitcoin and the top alt-coins are not enough to provide these exchanges with any longevity. Seed financing and deeper investment rounds are being led by investors who are thinking beyond what exchanges can add new cryptos to the mix; cryptos that are not performing as well anymore as the general stock market. 

And so crypto exchanges are either offering traditional finance options, or are busy creating a parallel global market in instruments that look and move like U.S. stocks, but may not convey stock ownership, shareholder rights or the protections of regulated equity markets. 

Does nonstop trading deepen the stock market, or divide liquidity among disconnected venues with different prices, rights and protections?

The crypto industry’s next growth is unlikely to be another cryptocurrency. The growth story may be turning the entire traditional investment universe into crypto-compatible products. 

"The competition is between legacy financial infrastructure and platforms built for a multi-asset world," said Chen. "Traditional brokerages offer broad access to financial markets but still rely on fragmented infrastructure, fixed trading hours and conventional settlement cycles. Crypto exchanges pioneered 24/7 markets, blockchain-based settlement and digital-native capital movement, but most still focus primarily on trading digital assets. Our approach is to bring those two worlds together."

Her vision is an industry-wide vision now.

When Kraken launched tokenized-equity perpetual futures in February 2026, Mark Greenberg, Kraken’s global head of consumer, said, "This is what it looks like when traditional markets are rebuilt for a crypto-native, always-on world."

The writer of this article is invested in Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana. Artwork created by the author using Canva.

Benzinga Disclaimer: This article is from an unpaid external contributor. It does not represent Benzinga’s reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.