The RWA wave is coming! Stock assets are poised for on-chain deployment as Bernstein identifies five key investment plays.

Wall Street financial giant Bernstein's latest research report shows that stock assets will become the next major asset class for the scaled development of blockchain finance, following stablecoins and tokenized debt, and that regulatory access, shareholder rights, and distribution capabilities will determine who can turn "stocks on-chain" into revenue growth. Bernstein's research report on stock asset tokenization shows that the global stock tokenization market has grown from about $700 million at the end of 2025 to $3 billion, but relative to the global stock market of more than $100 trillion, it is still at a very early stage. As Wall Street asset management giants are about to embrace the "on-chain" wave, which crypto leaders will benefit first? Bernstein identifies five key investment plays. The listed companies named by Bernstein as beneficiaries include: Coinbase, Robinhood, and Bullish, which control trading access and user distribution; Figure, which builds a native tokenized asset platform; and Circle, which provides on-chain dollar settlement tools. Among them, Coinbase, Robinhood, Figure, and Circle received Bernstein's most optimistic bullish rating of "Outperform," while Bullish received the relatively cautious neutral rating of "Market Perform." Bernstein's compiled "stock asset tokenization" investment theme covers multiple links including securities issuance, trading, lending, custody, and settlement. The institution expects that the overall RWA revenue-generating opportunities for these crypto leaders will also extend from trading commissions to infrastructure services, on-chain network activity, and stablecoin-related demand. In terms of specific strong bullish price targets, Bernstein gave Coinbase (COIN.US) a price target of $330, implying that in the institution's view the stock has up to 70% potential upside over the next 12 months (relative to its closing price on September 18); gave Circle (CRCL.US) a price target of $140, implying up to 52% potential upside; gave Robinhood (HOOD.US) a price target of $160, implying up to 35% potential upside; gave Figure (FIGR.US) a price target of $70, implying up to 97% potential upside; and gave Bullish (BLSH.US) a price target of $50, implying up to 30% potential upside. RWA, or Real-World Assets, in the blockchain context usually refers to recording and transferring the ownership, beneficial rights, or contractual claims of traditional assets in token form. It includes not only physical assets such as real estate and gold, but also financial assets such as government bonds, credit, fund shares, and stocks. Therefore, stock tokenization is an important part of RWA. The reason RWA has become one of the most important and possibly most core technological development directions for blockchain is that it brings global financial activities supported by real assets, yields, and financing needs onto the chain, recording and transferring them in token form with extremely high transaction efficiency and without cumbersome and redundant procedures. It focuses on using shared ledgers and smart contracts to reduce duplicate registration, manual reconciliation, and multi-layer transfers, and to automate some compliance processes. In addition, as one of the core application and infrastructure directions connecting blockchain to real finance, RWA can significantly lower the operational thresholds for small investments, securities issuance, and customer service through fractionalization, standardized interfaces, and shared infrastructure, making it easier for issuers to reach eligible investors in different regions. Increased investor choice and broader funding sources for financiers are important reasons why "global assets on-chain" is economically attractive. Smart contracts can connect rules such as interest payments, dividends, collateralization, redemption, and reinvestment, and can also combine funds, bonds, and cash instruments into automatically executing investment or financing arrangements, making some financial services that were previously too costly to coordinate and difficult to provide at scale and in customized form commercially viable. Regulatory opening and value reconstruction: Bernstein breaks down the five major growth pillars of stock tokenization First, the significance of the innovation exemption that Bernstein focuses on is to establish a practically operable institutional channel for compliant stock trading on public chains. On September 17, the SEC officially issued a five-year, conditional exemption allowing qualifying tokenized securities trading venues (TSVs) to be exempt from exchange registration requirements, and allowing participants that use their own funds to provide liquidity to be exempt from corresponding dealer registration requirements. The pilot has clear boundaries: Tier 1 involves at most 75 securities, with the single-stock volume cap measured at 0.25% of the previous month's average daily volume; Tier 2 has 250 securities and 2.5%, respectively, calculated on a combined basis for affiliated venues. Tokens must retain the economic, voting, and liquidation residual rights of the corresponding stock; third parties conducting tokenization must notify the issuer, and the issuer has the right to object; smart contracts must be auditable and deployed on public, permissionless networks. The exemption does not cover IPOs or synthetic products that merely track stock prices, and also restricts TSVs from borrowing, staking assets, and providing stock purchase credit. Bernstein therefore believes that near-term direct revenue is constrained by trading limits, but its long-term value lies in incorporating public chains and decentralized trading infrastructure into securities market rules, laying the foundation for future expansion. Second, the fundamental difference among the three operating models lies in "who maintains the legal record of holders, and what rights token holders have." In the issuer-led model, the company authorizes it, the transfer agent maintains the on-chain shareholder register, and tokens represent real shares. Figure, Bullish, Securitize, and Superstate are participants listed in the report. In the depository-led model, existing custodied securities are mapped on-chain, continuing to use the depository, broker, and beneficial ownership system, with DTCC (Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation) as the core promoter. The third-party model usually involves a platform purchasing and custodying stocks and issuing tokens backed by underlying assets through a special purpose vehicle (SPV). Specific rights vary by product and jurisdiction; some provide only economic exposure, while others have passed shareholder rights through to holders. Bernstein's research report expects DTCC to launch related services in October 2026, with more than 100 institutions already participating in the design. It is important to distinguish accurately that the plan described by Nasdaq continues to use a unified order book and T+1 settlement; the digital securities platform separately planned by the NYSE is aimed at 24/7 trading, real-time settlement, and stablecoin funding. Not all on-chain plans will immediately shift to T+0. Third, the core efficiency of tokenization comes from restructuring the full lifecycle of securities, not merely extending trading hours. The report divides the opportunity into four links: issuance and registration, trading and settlement, corporate actions, and securities lending. On-chain registration reduces multi-layer ledger reconciliation; coordinated delivery of security tokens and cash tokens can shorten settlement cycles; dividends, stock splits, voting, and shareholder communication can be automated through smart contracts and supporting services; stocks can also enter on-chain lending and collateralized financing systems. Figure's Democratized Prime especially embodies the latter opportunityturning the traditional broker-dominated, bilateral negotiation process for securities lending confirmation and borrowing into more transparent supply-demand matching, allowing holders to earn lending income and borrowers to obtain financing. Decentralized trading platforms such as Uniswap provide liquidity pools, protocols such as Morpho and Kamino expand collateralized lending use cases, and Broadridge supports voting and corporate governance services. Only when securities can both be traded and used for compliant financing can the actual value of on-chain holdings increase. Bernstein emphasizes that these lending applications must still comply with their respective applicable institutional arrangements and cannot be conflated with the venue leverage prohibited by the aforementioned TSV exemption. Fourth, industry competition is forming a pattern in which "native issuance platforms, global distribution platforms, and traditional market infrastructure" advance side by side. Figure builds the OPEN market with the Provenance blockchain, transfer agent qualifications, and an ATS trading system, supporting conversion between on-chain shares and traditional shares, and supplementing liquidity, retail distribution, and custody through Jump Trading, Moomoo, and BitGo. Bullish validates its business through tokenization of its own stock and plans to acquire Equiniti; the report expects the deal to close in January 2027 and to connect about 3,000 issuers and 20 million identity-verified shareholders. Securitize connects to traditional markets through partnerships with Computershare, Continental, and the NYSE. Robinhood and Coinbase are expanding stock token trading through user access, proprietary chains, and overseas distribution, with Robinhood covering more than 120 non-U.S. markets and Coinbase relying on Base. Ondo, Binance's bStocks, Backpack, and Dinari provide other third-party products, with differing rights and access arrangements. For Circle, Bernstein says the company's opportunity lies at the cash end of these systems: as stock trading, collateralized financing, and settlement increase, demand for on-chain dollars such as USDC may also expand. Bernstein is also bullish on the related activities' catalytic effect on Ethereum, Solana, and the decentralized trading ecosystem. Fifth, the latest data compiled in Bernstein's research report already shows accelerating adoption; what will determine value next is sustained usage and liquidity integration. The report's charts show that on-chain transfer volume of stock tokens in August was about $36 billion, which, relative to a stock of about $3 billion, reflects high activity. The metric here is Transfer Volume and cannot be directly equated with deduplicated exchange trading volume. Bernstein's research report shows that Robinhood's stock token scale exceeds $160 million, cumulative related DEX trading volume exceeded $10 billion as of September 16, and the holder metric rose from about 27,000 in July to 84,000 in August and about 194,000 on September 17. In terms of platform scale share, Ondo is about 29%, bStocks about 26%, Securitize about 10%, and Robinhood about 5%. In blockchain distribution, BNB Chain is about 34%, Ethereum about 23%, and Solana about 15%. Bernstein believes that Robinhood and second-layer networks such as Base have opportunities to increase share and capture more network revenue in the future. The real competitive barriers are compliant distribution, sufficiently deep liquidity, 24/7 price discovery, and interoperability between traditional stocks and on-chain products. The report also points out that cross-platform token fragmentation, price differences, and the rights structures of some third-party products remain practical issues that need to be resolved through registration, redemption, unified order books, and regulatory linkage. The RWA wave is coming: real assets on-chain open up a trillion-dollar financial landscape As of September 22, 2026, recent crypto industry developments and regulatory developments are actively echoing the "accelerated regulatory access, trading distribution, and on-chain settlement advancing in tandem" described in Bernstein's report. On September 10, Nasdaq announced plans to invest $100 million in Kraken parent company Payward to jointly advance stock tokenization infrastructure, with the related Nasdaq Equity Tokens expected to launch in the second quarter of 2027. Shortly afterward, on September 16, Circle officially launched the Arc public mainnet, using USDC to pay transaction fees and serving payments, foreign exchange, and tokenized asset settlement, reflecting stablecoin issuers' expansion into financial infrastructure. On September 17, the SEC issued a five-year, conditional "innovation exemption" for stock tokenization, opening a compliance channel for related trading venues and liquidity providers while requiring equivalent shareholder rights and issuer objection rights to be preserved. On September 21, the European Central Bank launched Pontes to support the settlement of wholesale tokenized asset transactions using European Central Bank system currency, and began preparations to invest a small amount of its own funds in tokenized securities. From Bernstein's investment framework, these latest positive developments all indicate that RWA is gaining practical support from traditional exchanges, regulators, and central bank settlement systems, and that commercial opportunities are gradually expanding toward asset issuance, trading services, custody, and on-chain cash settlement, providing more specific business growth paths for Figure, Coinbase, Robinhood, Bullish, and Circle, which the report names. RWA, or Real-World Assets, in the blockchain context usually refers to recording and transferring the ownership, beneficial rights, or contractual claims of traditional assets in token form. It includes not only physical assets such as real estate and gold, but also financial assets such as government bonds, credit, fund shares, and stocks. Therefore, stock tokenization is an important part of RWA. From an engineering implementation perspective, a complete project needs to connect legal confirmation of rights, custody or registration of underlying assets, identity verification and transfer restrictions, on-chain ledgers, and redemption processes: the stock wallet balance must correspond to a valid shareholder register or enforceable securities rights, and smart contracts can check investor eligibility, transfer restrictions, and handle corporate actions. When the securities side and the cash side, such as stablecoins or tokenized deposits, can operate in coordination, Delivery versus Payment (DvP) can be achieved, making payment and securities delivery conditional on each other. Technical value comes from consistency between legal rights and on-chain status, as well as programmable execution of trading, settlement, and financing processes. Regarding RWA scale forecasts, the forecast section of the joint research report by BCG and Ripple shows that the broader tokenized asset market is expected to reach about $19 trillion by 2033, covering areas such as real estate, lending, and credit. The reason RWA has become one of the most important development directions for blockchain is that it brings financial activities supported by real assets, yields, and financing needs onto the chainthat is, the core is that asset issuance expands investable products, products create trading and collateral demand, and trading and financing in turn drive stablecoins, custody, compliance, and full settlement services. Corresponding to Bernstein's research report, Figure seeks the issuance and financing links, Coinbase, Robinhood, and Bullish seek the trading and distribution links, and Circle seeks on-chain dollar demand, forming an investment framework in which business execution can be tracked item by item.