Dune report finds 81% of tokenized equities held in spot markets are individual stocks

Dune's new report argues that tokenization is producing trading behavior unlike the markets it was expected to copy. The analytics platform, Fortune reported, puts total supply of tokenized real-world assets above $34 billion in 2026 and locates the sharpest break with Wall Street in equities, where onchain users hold individual companies rather than baskets.

Cash equivalents and commodities, the two categories the report names, each more than doubled over the past year, while tokenized stocks grew fastest of the categories it tracks, up more than 2,000%, with active holders passing one million. Supply measures what has been issued; holdings measure what happens to it afterward, and the holdings figure is where the report departs from the assumptions Wall Street brought to the technology.

On Wall Street, more than 6,000 U.S.-listed ETFs now outnumber individual stocks, and index-wide investing is the default. Dune estimates that individual stocks account for 81% of tokenized equities held in spot markets, and the value of those holdings grew ninefold over the past year, outpacing tokenized funds and exchange-traded funds. That is a market organized around the ticker rather than the basket.

Frederik Haga, Dune's chief executive, gave Fortune an architectural explanation for the gap: the way the market is wired is different, and the underlying design of these venues produces different trading behavior. He contrasted a global financial system that has become indices and packaged products with blockchain trading, which he described as more about self-expression than passive investing.

The behavioral evidence follows the same line: onchain investors trade equities around the clock and use private credit tokens inside decentralized lending markets, two activities with no clean analogue in the fund complex, according to the report. A single-stock token that changes hands continuously is a different instrument from an index fund that prices once a day, and the machinery around it, from market data to venue rules to collateral treatment, has to be built for the first case rather than adapted from the second.

The private credit piece carries the most immediate institutional relevance because tokens pledged inside lending markets turn a holding into borrowing capacity, the point at which tokenization stops being a distribution story and starts competing with the systems that price collateral today. Who attests to a token's backing and who will accept it as margin follow from borrowers rather than from issuers.

The infrastructure arriving alongside that demand mixes incumbent asset managers and crypto-native issuers. Tokenized government money-market and Treasury funds from Franklin Templeton and BlackRock gave institutions a conservative product to hold on a chain, while Robinhood and Ondo Finance have taken onchain versions of stocks and exchange-traded funds to investors outside the United States. Nasdaq announced a $100 investment in Payward, Kraken's parent, to continue building out tokenized stocks, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a limited path for compliant U.S. venues to test blockchain-based equity trading.

Payward is where the two halves of the story meet. Payward's xStocks arrangement with the London Stock Exchange would put the UK's 100 largest listed companies on a 24/5 venue as loan notes, with the shares parked in a Jersey vehicle, as PWD reported in September. That is a basket product aimed at the same appetite Dune is measuring, and the single-name skew the report describes sits awkwardly with the assumption that the next standards fight in tokenized equities is over index licensing. If demand is expressed one ticker at a time, the binding rules will be listing and market-data standards for those tokens — the venue work behind the argument that onchain finance's real product is a counterparty you can name.

For the asset-management half of this market, the gap Dune measures cuts against the wrapper incumbents know best. BlackRock and Franklin Templeton built fund and Treasury products with a chain-based share class, and the demand Dune counts is growing faster in the instruments those products are not. Whether that skew reflects a durable preference or simply which products have reached users outside the United States is unresolved by the numbers on offer, and both readings leave the same task in front of issuers: pricing and settlement for a name that trades continuously instead of once a day.

Dune's figures are estimates from a platform that observes onchain activity, and the 81% applies to tokenized equities held in spot markets rather than to tokenized equities as a whole. Most of the distribution activity the report cites is aimed at investors outside the United States, and the American route the SEC has opened for blockchain-based equity trading is described as limited.

What the test venues produce will matter more than what the report predicts. A listing standard for a single-name token, a price that publishes while the underlying market is closed, and a settlement answer for the weekend session are the specific pieces of plumbing that decide whether the onchain preference Dune has measured survives the move inside the regulated perimeter. The population that will render the first verdict is the one the report already counted — the more than one million active holders in tokenized stocks.