Authors: Guo Fangxin, Sha Jun
In late February 2026, according to informed media reports, SpaceX may prepare to submit its IPO application to the U.S. SEC as early as March 2026. Media predictions suggest that the IPO could raise up to $30 billion, with an overall valuation of approximately $175 million, surpassing Tesla and Meta and joining the ranks of the "Seven Sisters" of U.S. stocks. In this chaotic era, with frequent irregularities in the capital market, SpaceX is expected to become the largest IPO in history, its scale terrifyingly large.
... SpaceX's powerful narrative is evident to anyone even slightly familiar with Musk's Starlink and Mars colonization stories. Many friends who previously paid no attention to the US stock market have also privately messaged CryptoSalty, wanting to know how to enter the US stock market. For Chinese residents, direct entry is a hurdle. Therefore, many have rekindled their enthusiasm for "US stock tokenization." CryptoSalty will not offer any investment advice or recommendations here. As always, I will thoroughly analyze the underlying logic of US stock tokenization; the rest is up to you to decide. In the previous article ("Global Listing, 24-Hour Stock Trading? Analyzing the NYSE's On-Chain 'Conspiracy'"), we dissected in detail what kind of tokenized US stock platform the NYSE wanted to achieve and deeply analyzed its underlying logic. If the past year saw US stock tokenization limited to Web3 exploration and experimentation, then the official launch of tokenized stocks by Nasdaq and the NYSE in 2026 completely ended this self-congratulatory hype within the industry. The Berlin Wall between US stocks and crypto assets has, in fact, collapsed. Previously, we have broken down the technical elements of the NYSE platform, including 24/7 trading, fractional share mechanisms, instant settlement based on stablecoins, and native digital securities issuance. This article will not repeat these details, but attempts to answer two deeper questions: Why did the NYSE choose this time to launch? Where does the future of tokenization in US stocks lie? "Why now?" To understand "why now," we must first understand the real constraints of the securities market. The reason why traditional markets have maintained fixed trading hours for a long time is not because the matching system cannot operate continuously, but because clearing, settlement, and margin management are highly dependent on bank business hours. Once the banking system closes, the flow of funds and risk control are disrupted, naturally limiting trading hours. The NYSE's proposal to cover the funding gap outside of business hours through on-chain settlement and tokenized funding instruments is essentially reshaping the market's time structure. Backed by its parent company ICE, which is collaborating with Bank of New York Mellon and Citibank to promote tokenized deposit arrangements, enabling clearing members to allocate funds and fulfill margin obligations during bank non-business hours, is a crucial step. The real systemic risk of 24-hour trading lies not in matching transactions, but in whether margin and liquidity can operate sustainably. Only when "money" itself is tokenized does 24/7 trading become realistically feasible. So, why focus on time? In traditional financial terms, weekends, holidays, and late nights represent liquidity gaps. Even with grey market support, time constraints and dispersed participants prevent true price discovery. Similarly, various US stock tokenization platforms cannot truly operate 24/7. However, in 2026, this "financial vacuum" is being violently filled by the tokenized contract market. In today's capital markets, risk appetite is revealed in real-time, down to the minute. For example, the cumulative trading volume of a series of contracts on "US military strike against Iran" on Polymarket, the world's largest decentralized prediction market, recently exceeded $529 million. While ordinary investors are still repeatedly checking "Iran," "casualties," and news releases in search boxes, real money has already priced in risk through the odds of the prediction market. Meanwhile, BTC, as a 24-hour liquid risk asset, also reflects the pulse of geopolitics, changing almost every second. This might be one of the reasons why the NYSE had to "flip the table." If the US stock market continues to maintain its 9-to-5 clearing system, it will completely lose its "initial pricing power" for core global assets. However, understanding this merely as a post-trade upgrade still underestimates its significance. When funds begin to settle on-chain, the ecological niche of financial institutions will be redistributed. The traditional path involves banks accumulating funds and earning interest rate spreads, securities firms earning transaction fees, and issuers attracting capital through compelling narratives. Funds flow sequentially between different institutions, each with its own profit logic. However, when stablecoins become settlement and margin tools, allowing trading, clearing, and fund management to be completed on the same technological layer, the previously fragmented value chain across different institutions may be compressed to fewer nodes. On-chain platforms can not only earn transaction fees but may also participate in fund management and liquidity organization. Of course, this doesn't mean banks will disappear, but it does mean funds no longer necessarily have to be tied up within the traditional banking system. To put it more simply: in the past, you had to deposit money into a bank and then transfer it to a securities firm account to complete a transaction; in the future, the path may become: wallet is account, settlement is complete. This shortening of the fund path is itself a structural shock. This is precisely why the NYSE did not choose to break away from the regulatory system and start afresh, but deliberately embedded tokenization into its existing market structure. The platform emphasizes non-discriminatory access, but only to qualified broker-dealers. Tokenization does not change the legal nature of securities; holders still fully enjoy dividend rights and governance rights. The on-chain form of assets does not change their legal essence. This restraint is key: the NYSE is not trying to create a "wild token market," but rather to incorporate on-chain forms into the core and most rigorous securities regulatory logic. Truly sustainable innovation is never the most radical, but rather the form that best withstands compliance and infrastructure scrutiny. Where does the future of tokenization in US stocks lie? Major Web3 exchanges possess an inherent sensitivity and rapid response mechanism. While mainstream media were still analyzing the value of SpaceX, exchanges like MSX had already opened SpaceX's pre-IPO market. Other exchanges followed suit; Robinhood even launched Robinhood Ventures, allowing everyone to participate in investing in private equity funds focused on building future technologies in private companies. According to Kraken, its tokenized perpetual stock contracts (xStocks), launched last year, garnered a staggering $25 billion in trading volume in less than a year. However, exchanges may not be the only future traffic gateway. With Binance, Bitget, OKX, and various Web3 wallets supporting on-chain asset trading, wallets themselves have become a new generation of traffic gateways. Wallets are no longer just storage tools, but interfaces aggregating trading, DeFi, staking, and investment. When assets can flow directly on-chain, the traditional path of "depositing into an exchange and then trading" is being shortened. Whose money does DeFi ultimately profit from? It profits from the price difference and market-making revenue resulting from efficient capital flow—a redistribution of traditional intermediary structures. When the NYSE launched its tokenization platform, it was essentially responding to this reality: if mainstream exchanges don't actively move to on-chain forms, on-chain liquidity will form a self-circulating cycle on other platforms. A deeper level of competition and cooperation also occurs between stablecoins and sovereign digital currencies. Having studied RWA for over a year, we've consistently believed that the most successful RWA currently is stablecoins, while the explosive growth of RWA is in listed company stocks. At some point in the future, there will be an increasing number of real-world asset RWAs. The US has explicitly stated that it will not allow central banks to directly issue stablecoins, but rather allows market participants to participate; China has clearly stated that only the state can issue the digital yuan. Whether stablecoins can generate interest and possess attributes similar to bank deposits reflects a competition for monetary niches. When stablecoins become settlement tools, they are not merely payment mediums, but closer to a "digital form of fiat currency." If the NYSE platform uses stablecoins as its settlement basis, it will inevitably participate in this broader institutional competition. If 2025 was the year of applications and trials for tokenization in the US stock market, then 2026 may be the year of institutional forks. As the post-trading system begins to loosen, as funds themselves begin to be tokenized, and as wallets become new traffic entry points, the time and capital structures of the securities market are quietly being rewritten. This is not as simple as "putting stocks on the blockchain," but rather a hierarchical migration of market infrastructure. In this process, whoever can simultaneously master the synergistic logic of trading, settlement, and capital will be closer to the future market form.