At exactly 4:00 PM in Lower Manhattan, a loud gavel bangs down and the trading floor goes quiet. The screens freeze, the brokers pack up their bags, and the doors effectively lock until the next morning. For decades, this rigid schedule has defined how we buy pieces of companies like Apple or Tesla. But on a pair of digital platforms named Kraken and Bitget, that 4:00 PM curfew has quietly dissolved. They are trading hundreds of millions of dollars in company shares right now, in the middle of the night, without a single traditional stockbroker in sight.
- Nearly $850 million in “digital tickets” are on the blockchain.
- Kraken launched xStocks in June of last year.
- Bitget captured nearly $1 billion in recent trading volume.
This is the new reality of “tokenized stocks.” While the traditional stock market sleeps, a parallel system is running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is currently a two-horse race, with two major companies fighting for control of a market that is already moving billions of dollars.
What exactly is a tokenized stock?
Before we look at the companies fighting for your business, we need to understand what they are selling. A “tokenized stock” sounds complicated, but it is actually quite simple if you think about a coat check ticket.
When you go to a museum or a theater, you hand over your heavy winter coat and get a small paper ticket in return. That ticket isn’t the coat, but it represents the coat. Whoever holds the ticket owns the coat. You can hand that ticket to a friend, and now they own the coat. It is fast, light, and easy to move.
In this scenario, a share of Apple stock is the heavy winter coat. It usually sits in a central vault (a brokerage). A “tokenized stock” is the digital ticket that proves you own it. Because this ticket lives on a blockchain—which is essentially a shared digital ledger that never turns off—you can trade it instantly, anywhere in the world, without waiting for a bank to open its doors.
According to recent data, there is now nearly $850 million worth of these “digital tickets” floating around the blockchain. People are trading about $2.4 billion worth of them every month. It is no longer a science experiment; it is a functioning economy.
The Battle of the Giants: Kraken vs. Bitget
Right now, this market is consolidating. That is a fancy way of saying that instead of fifty small shops selling these items, everyone is flocking to two massive supermarkets. The data shows that most of the action is happening on two specific platforms: Kraken and Bitget.
Kraken was the early leader. They launched a product called “xStocks” in June of last year. Think of Kraken as the established department store that opened its doors first. They allowed people to buy digital versions of U.S. stocks and ETFs (baskets of stocks). They also introduced something very important: fractional exposure.
Fractional exposure is like being able to buy a single slice of cake instead of being forced to purchase the entire wedding cake. If a share of a company costs $1,000, but you only have $50, Kraken lets you buy $50 worth of that share. This feature made them incredibly popular. Until recently, Kraken controlled about 97% of this specific market.
But in business, a monopoly rarely lasts long. Enter Bitget.
Bitget is a crypto exchange that decided to take a different route. Instead of building everything themselves, they partnered with a company called Ondo Finance. If Bitget is the supermarket, Ondo is the supplier delivering the fresh produce. Ondo specializes in taking real-world assets—like U.S. government bonds or stocks—and wrapping them in that digital “coat check” format we talked about.
This partnership has been explosive. Since launching in September, Bitget has eaten into Kraken’s lead aggressively. While Kraken used to hold nearly the entire market, they now hold about 55%. Bitget has captured a massive chunk of the trading volume, with nearly $1 billion traded recently.
Why the “plumbing” matters
There is a subtle but important difference in how these two giants operate, and it comes down to the “rails” they use. In the tech world, “rails” just means the underlying system that moves money or data, much like train tracks move cargo.
Bitget and Ondo are using “onchain” rails. This means the digital tickets (tokens) can actually leave the exchange. If you buy a tokenized stock on Bitget, you aren’t stuck keeping it there. You can move it to your own digital wallet—which is like taking your cash out of the bank and putting it in your physical wallet. You have total control.
This freedom has attracted over 155,000 holders to this market. They like the idea that their assets aren’t just numbers on a company’s screen, but digital items they can hold in their own custody.
The “Do Not Enter” sign for Americans
If you are reading this from inside the United States, you might be wondering, “Where can I sign up?” The short answer is: you can’t.
Both Kraken and Bitget have blocked U.S. customers from using these products. This is because of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC is the police force of the financial world. They have very strict rules about how stocks are sold, who can sell them, and what paperwork needs to be filed.
Right now, the SEC views these tokenized stocks with a lot of skepticism. They haven’t given a clear “green light” for these products to operate freely in America. As a result, the biggest companies in the U.S. are sitting on their hands, waiting for permission.
Robinhood, the popular trading app, tried to launch something similar for its users in Europe. Even there, they ran into some friction with regulators. Coinbase, the largest crypto company in the U.S., has said they want to offer this. They are building what they call an “everything exchange,” where you could trade crypto, stocks, and prediction markets all in one place. But for now, they are stuck in the waiting room.
The sleeping giants
This creates a strange situation. The technology is working. The volume is in the billions. But the biggest potential customers—Americans—are locked out.
Steven Zheng, a researcher who studies these markets, put it simply: “Distribution begets volume.”
That is a dense sentence, so let’s unpack it. Imagine you have invented the world’s most delicious soda. It doesn’t matter how good it tastes if you can’t get it onto the shelves at Walmart or 7-Eleven. “Distribution” is the ability to get your product in front of people.
Right now, Kraken and Bitget are doing well, but they are like specialty shops. The “Walmarts” of this world are Robinhood and Coinbase, who have millions upon millions of users already logged in and ready to trade. Zheng believes that once the regulators finally open the gate, and these big U.S. apps turn on the feature, the market will skyrocket.
Until then, the revolution is happening offshore. The trading floor in New York may close at 4:00 PM, but the digital claim checks are flying around the world, building a new financial system while Wall Street sleeps.