CoinShares report shows tokenized stocks up 842% as non-US investors pile in

Tokenized stocks just posted the kind of growth chart that usually belongs to a meme coin. According to CoinShares, the market reached $3.91 billion on September 30, 2026, an 842% jump from a year earlier.

The findings come from the firm’s Hybrid Finance Q3 2026 Update, produced with blockchain analytics outfit Token Terminal. The report makes a clear case that tokenized equities are the fastest-growing corner of the tokenized asset world. It also makes the case that they are still very, very small.

The numbers behind the surge

CoinShares ranks tokenized stocks ahead of every other tokenized asset class on year-over-year growth.

Tokenized commodities rose 267% over the same stretch. Tokenized funds climbed 97%. Stablecoins, the sector’s longtime heavyweight, grew just 4%.

User activity is moving even faster than market value. The report counts 4.88 million on-chain holder positions for tokenized stocks, an 8.5-fold increase since the end of June 2026.

The supply side is broadening too. Since September 2025, the number of issuers with more than $1 million in tokenized stocks rose from 10 to 25.

The list of underlying assets got longer as well. Shares and ETFs with over $1 million in tokenized value went from 83 to 172 over the same period.

Built for buyers outside the US

The most revealing detail is who this market actually serves. According to CoinShares, 87.2% of tokenized stock value tracks US-registered shares or ETFs.

Yet 85.4% of issuances explicitly exclude US persons. So the product is mostly American stocks, sold mostly to people who are not American.

That is the core of the story. CoinShares says the bulk of the growth comes from non-US investors looking for a cleaner route into US equities and ETFs.

Scale, though, keeps the hype in check. Foreign investors hold $24.3 trillion in US equities, and tokenized stocks represent only 0.016% of that figure.

The custody problem nobody can ignore

Rapid growth has come with a single point of dependence. CoinShares flags concentration in custodianship as a key risk, and the name at the center is Alpaca Securities LLC.

Alpaca holds 81.3% of the underlying shares backing the market. That is down from a prior 94.6%.

Most tokenized stocks are only as good as the real shares sitting behind them. If one custodian holds roughly four out of every five of those shares, any operational, legal or regulatory trouble there could ripple across the entire market.

Regulation and the rise of perpetuals

CoinShares expects growth to continue even if the US throws up regulatory obstacles. Its reasoning rests on a shift already underway: derivatives.

The report points to perpetual futures on platforms such as Trade.xyz. Perpetual futures are contracts that track an asset’s price without an expiry date and without the trader owning the asset itself.

Open interest on Trade.xyz’s offering sits at $1.51 billion, according to the report.

That figure is notable next to the $3.91 billion in share-backed tokens. Synthetic exposure is already a meaningful fraction of the size of the asset-backed market.

The implication, per CoinShares, is adaptability. If share-backed tokens run into restrictions, demand may simply route toward instruments that do not need custodied shares at all.

This update is the third installment in the Hybrid Finance series. The two earlier editions covered tokenized assets more broadly, and the series frames this convergence of traditional finance and blockchain rails as an ongoing structural shift.

What this means

The 85.4% exclusion rate for US persons is the clearest signal of where the opportunity sits. Tokenized equities are, for now, an export product: a way for global capital to reach US markets on crypto rails.

Custody concentration is the other variable to watch. Alpaca’s share falling from 94.6% to 81.3% is a trend worth tracking each quarter, because a more distributed custody base would make the whole market sturdier.

The $1.51 billion in open interest on Trade.xyz shows traders will take price exposure in whatever wrapper is available. If regulators squeeze share-backed tokens, perpetuals could absorb that demand, though they carry their own risks, including leverage and the absence of underlying ownership.

The widening field of issuers, from 10 to 25, signals a land grab in progress. With the market at just 0.016% of foreign-held US equities, the firms that solve distribution, custody diversity and regulatory clarity first could shape what this sector becomes as it scales.