Mentioned in This Article
1. What did John D'Agostino say about Coinbase tokenized stocks?
John D'Agostino, head of strategy at Coinbase Institutional, said on the Bits + Bips podcast, recorded on Monday, October 19, that Coinbase's tokenized stocks are generating roughly $20 million a week and that the figure is growing. He added that Binance, which entered the market earlier, is doing multiples of Coinbase's volume. He did not say what the number actually measures.
The remark gives one of the first public glimpses of demand for Coinbase's tokenized equities, which debuted only a few weeks before the interview. It also places the exchange, the largest US-listed crypto platform, in direct comparison with the competitor that has dominated this niche since mid-year.
Tokenized stocks are blockchain-based tokens designed to track the price of a listed share. Holders get price exposure through a crypto wallet or exchange account rather than through a traditional brokerage, which is why the product has drawn attention from crypto platforms looking to widen what they offer beyond digital assets.
2. A figure without a definition
The most important caveat around the $20 million number is that D'Agostino did not specify its basis. A weekly total of this kind could describe trading volume, the value of new tokens created, or net deposits into the product, and each of those tells a very different story about demand. He also did not state which weeks the figure covers, beyond saying it reflects the period since the launch.
That ambiguity matters when comparing it with other data points in the market. Trading volume can be churned repeatedly by the same capital, while net deposits reflect fresh money arriving. Without knowing which measure he had in mind, readers cannot directly set the Coinbase number against statistics published by rivals or by data providers.
D'Agostino described demand for US equities in tokenized form as strong and seemingly without limit, particularly among people who cannot open a brokerage account of their own. That framing points to the core audience for these products: users outside the United States who want exposure to American shares but face barriers to ordinary account access.
3. How Coinbase's product works on Base
Coinbase's tokenized stocks went live on Base, the company's Ethereum layer-2 network, on August 24. The tokens are issued out of Abu Dhabi Global Market, the financial free zone in the United Arab Emirates where Coinbase obtained a license in August. The tokens are not available to US persons, which limits the addressable market to customers in other jurisdictions.
Earlier in the same interview, D'Agostino said Coinbase was seeing good uptake of the tokenized equities offering in the UAE, consistent with the licensing arrangement behind the product.
On the day of the launch, Blockworks Data counted more than $12 million in tokenized equities traded on Base, with nearly all of it coming from Coinbase's program. Separately, Jesse Pollak, the creator of Base, said at the Token2049 conference in Singapore earlier this month that tokenized stocks on the network were trading about $70 million to $100 million a day.
Those numbers are not directly comparable with the $20 million weekly figure. Pollak's range describes daily trading on the network, while D'Agostino's number is a weekly total with no stated definition. Pollak also said that 50 stocks were listed on Base by early October and that 250 were expected by the end of the month, a fivefold expansion of the catalog that could change activity levels quickly.
4. Binance's head start with bStocks
Binance launched its tokenized stock product, called bStocks, on June 11, roughly two and a half months before Coinbase's arrival. On October 15, the exchange announced that bStocks had passed $1 billion in assets under management about four months after their debut. Binance cited data from Dune and said cumulative trading volume had exceeded $40 billion.
The company's announcement also said bStocks have averaged more than $300 million a day in trading since launch. It added that bStocks accounted for over 90% of weekly on-chain tokenized stock transfers at the early-August peak. Data from rwa.xyz had earlier ranked bStocks first among tokenized stock platforms.
D'Agostino did not indicate which Binance metric he was comparing against when he said Binance is doing multiples of Coinbase's figure. Measured against the $300 million daily trading average Binance reports, the gap would be far larger than a few multiples, which underlines how much the comparison depends on the metric chosen.
5. Why the numbers are hard to compare
Tokenized stock markets are young, and no single standard exists for reporting activity. Platforms publish figures such as assets under management, cumulative volume, daily averages, on-chain transfers or holder counts, and independent trackers use their own methods. A headline number from one source therefore rarely lines up with another.
For Coinbase, a weekly figure of about $20 million in the first weeks after launch is modest beside the volumes Binance reports, yet the product is available to a narrower group of customers and has been live for a much shorter time. D'Agostino's description of the number as growing suggests the company views it as an early baseline rather than a mature run rate.
The comparison also reflects a broader contest among crypto exchanges to offer traditional assets. Stocks give platforms a way to keep users engaged when digital-asset trading slows, and tokenization allows around-the-clock access using the same wallets and settlement rails that customers already use for crypto.
6. How do tokenized stocks work?
A tokenized stock is a digital token issued on a blockchain that is intended to follow the market price of a share in a listed company. An issuer, which in Coinbase's case operates out of Abu Dhabi Global Market, creates the tokens and is responsible for the structure that supports them. Holders do not necessarily receive the voting or ownership rights attached to the underlying shares, so the product is best understood as price exposure delivered in token form.
Because the tokens live on a public network such as Base, they can move between wallets and be traded at any hour of any day. Traditional stock exchanges operate on fixed schedules and settle trades after a delay. Token transfers on a blockchain settle within moments, which is one of the main arguments advocates make for putting securities on-chain.
The model also allows platforms to serve customers who sit outside conventional brokerage channels. That is the audience D'Agostino pointed to when he described demand for US equities as strong and seemingly endless among people who cannot open a brokerage account, and it explains why the Coinbase product is aimed at users outside the United States rather than US persons.
7. Why exchanges are competing for this market
Crypto exchanges earn most of their revenue from trading activity in digital assets, and that activity rises and falls with market sentiment. Adding tokenized equities gives a platform another category of products that users can trade through the same account, wallet and settlement infrastructure. A customer who comes for stocks may also use other services on the platform.
Binance moved first, launching bStocks in June, and the early lead shows in the figures the company has published: more than $1 billion in assets under management and over $40 billion in cumulative trading volume. Coinbase, by contrast, introduced its offering in late August on its own Base network, which gives it direct control over the infrastructure on which the tokens trade.
The contest is therefore as much about distribution as about technology. Binance has an established base of users who trade around the clock, while Coinbase is building on its institutional relationships, its regulatory license in Abu Dhabi and a network it operates itself. D'Agostino's willingness to acknowledge that Binance is ahead, while stressing that Coinbase's figure is growing, reflects that competitive picture.
8. What should readers take from the $20 million figure?
Treated cautiously, the number shows that Coinbase's tokenized stocks have attracted measurable activity within weeks of going live. It does not show how many customers are involved, how much capital is staying in the product or how concentrated the trading is in a small number of listings. Those details would be needed to judge whether the early pace is durable.
It is also a single remark from an executive on a podcast rather than a company disclosure with a defined methodology. Readers comparing it with Binance's published statistics, or with Pollak's estimate of $70 million to $100 million a day across Base, should keep in mind that each figure comes from a different source and measures something different.
9. What to watch next
The first thing to watch is whether Coinbase publishes a defined metric for its tokenized equities, such as trading volume or assets held, which would allow a like-for-like comparison with Binance's disclosures. Without that, the $20 million figure remains an informal remark rather than a reportable benchmark.
The second is the expansion of the catalog on Base. If the number of listed stocks rises from 50 toward the 250 Pollak projected for the end of October, trading activity could shift materially. Further indications of demand in markets such as the UAE, where D'Agostino reported good uptake, would also show whether Coinbase's licensed structure is attracting users at scale.
A third point is how the Binance comparison develops. If Coinbase begins to report its own volumes or assets under a clear definition, observers will be able to test D'Agostino's claim that Binance operates at multiples of Coinbase's level, and to see whether the gap narrows as the product matures and reaches more customers.