For years, “tokenized stocks” sounded like a crypto side-quest: intriguing, but trapped between market demand for 24/7 trading and regulators’ insistence that securities remain tightly supervised. This week, Binance is trying again—this time by weaving tokenized securities into its Binance Alpha experience through a partnership with Ondo, a firm focused on turning real-world assets into on-chain instruments. The pitch is straightforward: keep the familiar feel of an exchange account while opening a door to blockchain-native versions of traditional market exposure.
Binance says Ondo’s tokenized securities are now available on Binance Alpha, positioned as digital securities that track the price performance of traditional stocks or ETFs on-chain. The important caveat is right there in the fine print: they’re meant to mirror price movements, not to recreate every shareholder privilege. That means exposure without features like voting rights, a distinction that will matter to anyone assuming “tokenized equity” automatically equals “equity ownership.” Binance also stresses that these products are issued by a third-party provider, not by the exchange itself, and points users to Ondo’s documentation for mechanics and fees.
The mechanics Binance highlights read like a checklist of what retail traders usually ask for when they hear “on-chain”: access without new funding rails, lower friction, and flexibility. The exchange says users can access tokenized securities directly using their CEX funds, place both market and limit orders, and—at least for a limited time—pay zero gas for placing and canceling orders, alongside potentially very low trading fees. There’s also a gamified layer: traders can earn Binance Alpha Points by trading or holding the tokenized securities, which Binance says can unlock access to campaigns and events such as airdrops, token generation events, and Prime Sales.
The timing is not accidental. Tokenization has been getting louder in mainstream finance, driven by the idea that assets represented on public blockchains can trade continuously and settle faster than today’s clearing infrastructure. MarketWatch recently framed tokenized equities as a potential shift toward “24/7 digital cash,” with big-name infrastructure players exploring how tokenized securities could plug into traditional rails. Binance’s move fits that arc, but it also carries the cautionary memory of earlier tokenized stock experiments that drew regulatory scrutiny and were eventually wound down. PYMNTS notes that Binance previously offered tokenized stocks linked to names like Apple and Tesla before ending the service amid attention from regulators in the U.K. and Germany.
