Coinbase reports 46.7K holders for tokenized stocks on Base

Coinbase’s tokenized stock experiment on Base just posted its first real report card, and the numbers are hard to ignore. The exchange’s suite of on-chain equities has attracted roughly 46,700 asset holders, representing a 97-fold surge in just 30 days since the product launched in late August.

The tokenized equity supply on Base has climbed to an estimated $26.5 million, a figure that’s modest by traditional finance standards but meaningful for a product category that barely existed on the network a month ago.

From four stocks to ten in eleven days

Coinbase kicked things off on August 24 with tokenized versions of four heavyweight US stocks: Nvidia, Apple, Meta, and Alphabet. Each token, branded with suffixes like NVDAc and AAPLc, represents a direct 1:1 claim on actual underlying shares held by a regulated custodian.

By September 4, the lineup had nearly tripled. Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, SpaceX, SanDisk, and Strategy (the company formerly known as MicroStrategy) all joined the roster, bringing the total to ten tokenized equities available on Base.

The tokens use Coinbase’s proprietary B20 standard, purpose-built for representing real-world assets on its Ethereum Layer 2 network. Fractional ownership is baked in, meaning users don’t need thousands of dollars to hold a piece of Nvidia or SpaceX.

One important caveat: these tokenized stocks are currently available exclusively to eligible non-US users.

How the custody and structure actually works

When someone purchases a tokenized stock on Base, institutional market makers acquire the corresponding real shares on traditional markets.

Those shares are then held by Alpaca, a regulated custodian operating under the Abu Dhabi Global Market framework. The structure is designed to be bankruptcy-remote, meaning that if any single party in the chain goes under, the underlying shares should theoretically remain protected and claimable by token holders.

Token holders don’t automatically receive voting rights attached to the underlying equities. They do, however, maintain beneficial ownership claims on the shares themselves.

The tokens trade around the clock on decentralized exchanges, with Aerodrome serving as a primary venue on Base. That 24/7 availability is a genuine differentiator from traditional stock markets, which shut down on weekends, holidays, and every weekday at 4 PM Eastern.

Coinbase has also set up a verification portal at base.org/stocks where investors can confirm they’re interacting with authentic Coinbase-issued tokens rather than counterfeits.

Why DeFi composability changes the equation

Aerodrome already facilitates liquidity provision for these tokenized equities, meaning holders can pair their stock tokens with other assets in liquidity pools and earn trading fees. Morpho, a lending protocol, opens up the possibility of using tokenized stocks as collateral for on-chain borrowing.

Picture owning a tokenized share of Apple, depositing it into a lending protocol, borrowing stablecoins against it, and deploying that capital elsewhere, all without selling the underlying position.

The 46,700 holder count, while a fraction of Coinbase’s overall user base, demonstrates that demand exists for on-chain equities even in an early, geographically restricted launch.