Crypto: CZ Sees IPOs Moving to the Blockchain

Changpeng Zhao believes initial public offerings will eventually move onto the blockchain. The Binance founder made the claim on September 8, as CoinGape reported more than $30 billion in cumulative volume over three months on bStocks, Binance’s tokenized stock offering. The market remains tiny compared with traditional exchanges: RWA.xyz counted $2.88 billion worth of tokenized stocks distributed on-chain as of September 7. Yet CZ’s vision is no longer purely theoretical. The SEC is adapting its rules to blockchain-based ledgers, while Securitize is already working with Cantor Fitzgerald on infrastructure that would allow companies to conduct genuine on-chain IPOs.

CZ Is No Longer Talking Only About Tokenized Stocks

“IPOs will move on-chain.” Changpeng Zhao’s statement is brief. It nevertheless extends a position he has defended for several months.

In June, CZ was already calling on governments to tokenize their stock markets to make them more accessible to foreign investors. In August, he even presented tokenization as a tool that could help states attract international capital.

This vision aligns with the rise of RWAs among the leading crypto narratives of 2026. The shift is nevertheless significant: until now, most available products have represented already-listed stocks. CZ is now taking the idea all the way to the point at which a company itself goes public.

The timing is revealing. bStocks reportedly surpassed $30 billion in cumulative volume over three months. At the end of July, Binance Research was still recording only $8.7 billion, with a market capitalization above $500 million. In July alone, $7.4 billion in on-chain volume was recorded.

The figures are accelerating rapidly.

This still does not mean that Wall Street has just moved onto the blockchain. Several legal and technical layers still separate buying a tokenized Nvidia stock from conducting an IPO for a company directly on-chain.

A Tokenized Stock Is Not Necessarily a Real Share

This is probably the most important distinction in the debate.

The term “tokenized stock” currently covers several very different products. Some tokens correspond to genuine securities whose ownership is recorded on a blockchain. Others are issued by a third party that holds the traditional stock and gives the customer a token representing its economic value. Still others are merely derivatives that track its price.

The SEC itself has distinguished since January between securities tokenized by the issuer or on its behalf and those created by independent third parties. The holder’s rights can vary considerably from one model to another.

Take Binance.

Its bStocks are presented as tokenized securities backed 1:1 by the corresponding shares and offered to certain users within the ADGM regulatory framework. Binance itself specifies that these products have their own legal structure and rights.

Alongside them, Binance offers pre-IPO perpetual contracts. The Tesla contract previously launched by Binance illustrates this other category of products.

A pre-IPO perpetual does not confer any shares.

The trader takes a position on a company’s anticipated valuation before its public listing. The contract can then transition into a standard perpetual contract once the stock officially begins trading.

It is therefore not an on-chain IPO.

SpaceX Contracts Tested the Market Before the Listing

The SpaceX example nevertheless shows why CZ believes the next step is close.

On May 21, Binance launched SPCXUSDT, its first pre-IPO perpetual contract. The product allowed traders to speculate on SpaceX’s expected valuation before its stock became available on Nasdaq. Leverage was capped at 5x and, in the absence of a genuine stock-market price, the price came essentially from Binance’s order book.

Demand was spectacular.

Around SpaceX’s listing, Binance said that SPCXUSDT briefly became its second-most-traded perpetual contract behind BTCUSDT, with more than $5.6 billion in volume over a 24-hour period and more than $9 billion since the product launched.

Binance has since applied the same mechanism to OpenAI, Anthropic and Quantinuum through dedicated pre-IPO contracts.

The commercial signal is fairly clear: crypto users want access to companies before their traditional listings.

The limitation is just as clear. These traders do not provide capital to SpaceX when they buy SPCXUSDT. They trade a derivative among themselves.

A genuine on-chain IPO would do something else: the company would issue its securities as part of its capital raise, with the blockchain directly involved in recording, distributing or settling the shares.

That is precisely what other players are already building.

Securitize and Cantor Are Preparing Genuine On-Chain IPOs

The most concrete project does not come from Binance, however.

On July 15, Securitize and Cantor Fitzgerald announced a collaboration explicitly aimed at allowing companies to conduct IPOs and secondary offerings using blockchain infrastructure. Cantor brings its investment-banking business, while Securitize provides issuance, recordkeeping and regulated tokenization infrastructure.

This is not merely a marketing announcement.

In May, Securitize Markets received FINRA approval to expand its broker-dealer activities. The company can now custody tokenized securities, conduct atomic settlements between securities and stablecoins, and participate as an underwriter or member of a selling group in initial and secondary offerings.

Atomic settlement requires some explanation.

In a traditional transaction, the transfer of the security and the transfer of money pass through several intermediaries and systems. With a properly designed blockchain architecture, the two movements can be made conditional on each other: ownership of the security changes if, and only if, payment is made.

Securitize has even served as a test case for its own thesis. When it went public in July under the ticker SECZ, the company also placed its shares on a blockchain on the first day of trading. It says it was the first U.S. company to do so in this configuration.

As of September 7, RWA.xyz valued this on-chain version of SECZ at approximately $192 million.

A fully blockchain-based IPO is therefore no longer far removed from the regulated market.

The SEC Is Also Beginning to Change Its Rules

Washington is evolving at the same time.

On September 1, the SEC proposed the most significant modernization in several decades of the rules applicable to transfer agents, the intermediaries responsible in particular for maintaining official records of stock ownership.

The proposal explicitly mentions the use of blockchain for securities issuance and stock transfers. SEC Chair Paul Atkins believes the rules must now reflect these new processes.

The change may appear administrative. Yet it goes to the heart of the issue.

Tokenizing an economic representation of Apple is relatively simple. Ensuring that Apple’s official register recognizes the token holder as the true shareholder is far more ambitious.

The SEC is also proposing that transfer agents report the number of tokenized securities they track, their nature and their tokenization model. The regulator also distinguishes between products sponsored by the issuer and versions created by third parties.

Commissioner Hester Peirce is already asking the following question: if securities move on-chain, should shareholders continue to be identified solely by their name and physical address, or should identifiers such as a wallet address also be accepted?

We are still far from a general authorization for blockchain IPOs.

The proposal nevertheless confirms that the SEC no longer treats tokenization as an experimental curiosity.

It is beginning to adapt the regulatory infrastructure that could make it commonplace.

Tokenized Stocks Reach $2.88 Billion

The current market measures both its progress and how far it still has to go.

According to RWA.xyz, tokenized stocks represented $2.88 billion in value distributed on-chain as of September 7, up 13.6% over 30 days. The number of holders reached 2.78 million.

Ondo leads with approximately $875.7 million, ahead of xStocks at $631.1 million and bStocks at $624.3 million. Securitize follows with $274.1 million. Together, these four players account for most of the current market.

Just a few months are enough to show the acceleration.

At the end of the first quarter of 2026, CoinGecko valued tokenized stocks at only $486.7 million. They were still worth just $2.09 million at the end of June 2025. Rising from less than $500 million at the end of March to nearly $2.9 billion in early September represents an increase of almost sixfold in five months.

Volume is growing even faster.

RWA.xyz recorded $15.47 billion in transfers over 30 days as of September 7. Care should nevertheless be taken before automatically calling this “trading volume”: on-chain movements can also include settlements, transfers between wallets or custody movements.

The same applies to the $30 billion in bStocks cited for bStocks: this is cumulative volume, not $30 billion invested in these securities.

The market is becoming active. Its asset base remains relatively modest.

London Also Wants Stocks to Trade Around the Clock

The movement is no longer limited to crypto companies.

London Stock Exchange Group has just partnered with Payward, the parent company of Kraken, to prepare tokenized British stocks for its future LSE 24 platform. The launch is scheduled for 2027, subject to regulatory approval.

The project is intended to combine traditional securities with blockchain infrastructure while extending trading hours.

This is an important element of CZ’s thesis.

Tokenization is often marketed around four promises: 24/7 trading, fractional ownership, faster settlement and global access. In practice, each benefit also raises a new question.

What happens when a tokenized stock trades on a Sunday while the market where its primary price is formed is closed? How are dividends, voting, splits or takeover bids handled? Who bears the risk when a token is issued by an intermediary rather than by the company itself? What happens to liquidity when the same security exists on Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain and several closed platforms?

The rights are far from uniform. Reuters had already noted that some tokenized products provide neither voting rights nor direct ownership of the underlying stock.

Blockchain reduces certain frictions.

It does not eliminate corporate law.

On-Chain IPOs Could Primarily Transform Emerging Markets

This may be where CZ’s statement deserves to be taken seriously.

A U.S. company listed on Nasdaq already has access to one of the world’s most liquid capital markets. The marginal benefit of blockchain exists, but its financing already works.

For a company based in a smaller market, the situation is different.

Binance says that at the beginning of its traditional stock offering, more than 80% of the volume came from users in emerging markets, and that approximately 39% of trades were below $100.

This is precisely the audience CZ is addressing when he explains that tokenization could allow a country to sell its stocks to buyers around the world.

A properly regulated African, Asian or Latin American company could theoretically issue fractional securities accessible from multiple jurisdictions, settle transactions in stablecoins and maintain a digital register in near real time.

Theoretically.

Accessing “the entire world” does not exempt anyone from KYC, securities laws or cross-border restrictions. A global blockchain does not automatically create a legally unified global financial market.

This is also what distinguishes the current transformation from earlier RWA promises. Citi now estimates that tokenized securities could represent several trillion dollars by 2030, but most of the work today concerns far less spectacular issues: transfer agents, custody, shareholder registers and settlement.

And yet, this is probably where on-chain finance is being built.

CZ’s prediction remains a prediction. Not every IPO is about to abandon Nasdaq or the NYSE for BNB Chain.

The underlying trend, however, is much harder to ignore than it was a year ago. Tokenized stocks are approaching $3 billion, Binance claims tens of billions in volume, the SEC is rewriting rules that in some cases date back to the 1970s, and Securitize now has the necessary approvals to participate in tokenized initial offerings with Cantor Fitzgerald.

The next step is therefore no longer simply putting Tesla in a crypto wallet.

It is ensuring that the stock itself is born on these new financial rails.

If this happens at scale, CZ will have described less a revolution in IPOs than an infrastructure shift: companies will still go public, investors will still buy securities and regulators will remain involved. The difference is that part of the recordkeeping, settlement and distribution will take place on a blockchain.

That is less spectacular than replacing Wall Street.

And probably much more realistic.