In January 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto embedded a line in the Bitcoin genesis block: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." This line served as a timestamp and is often seen as a critique of the bank bailout system following the 2008 financial crisis: Bitcoin aimed to establish a peer-to-peer value transfer system that didn't rely on banks or trusted third parties.
Yet, seventeen years later, one of the mainstream ways to hold Bitcoin is to buy a share of an ETF issued by BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, or hold shares of related Bitcoin treasury companies. Does this mean the crypto market has strayed from its founding purpose? Is Wall Street systematically seizing the issuance, pricing, custody, and distribution rights of crypto-financial assets?
1. Is Wall Street Seizing the Issuance, Pricing, Custody, and Distribution Rights of Crypto Assets?
1.1 The Ideal: Bitcoin's Founding Intent in 2009
This goes back to Bitcoin's original intent. The Bitcoin whitepaper envisioned a financial order built around three "de-" principles:
• Decentralization: No central issuer, no headquarters, no servers that can be shut down. The ledger is maintained by a global network of nodes, with rules written into the code.
• Disintermediation: Peer-to-peer value transfer without the need for banks, brokerages, or clearinghouses to act as intermediaries or guarantors. "Private key equals ownership," with self-custody as the default.
• Debanking: Anyone can hold and transfer assets and participate in new coin issuance (through mining) without needing to open an account, undergo KYC, or have accredited investor status.
The core ethos of this ideal was to reclaim the four powers of finance—issuance, pricing, custody, and distribution—from the hands of a few institutions and distribute them among every participant in the network. This was both a direct response to the 2008 financial crisis and a benchmark, declaring to the market that if the centralized financial system could fail, then build a system that doesn't need it.
1.2 Reality: Are These Four Powers Being Seized?
However, this decentralized order seems to have lost its purity following the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs in 2024. In other words, traditional finance is incorporating crypto technology into its own asset issuance, settlement, and distribution systems.
Asset management giants like BlackRock, Fidelity, and Franklin Templeton have packaged BTC and ETH into products that can be bought in traditional financial accounts. When BTC and ETH are packaged as ETFs, they transform from "on-chain assets requiring an understanding of wallets and private keys" into "financial products that can be bought in traditional securities accounts." As of May 2026, ETFs hold approximately 1.5 million Bitcoin. In just two years, ETFs represent about 7.14% of Bitcoin's total capped supply of 21 million.
A similar shift is happening in the derivatives market. CME's Bitcoin and Ethereum futures and options provide institutions with a regulated venue for trading, hedging, and integrating into risk models. Increasingly, institutions can gain crypto exposure without directly touching on-chain assets, through futures, options, ETFs, structured products, and fund shares.
RWA and tokenized government bonds further expand the boundaries of this "Wall Street-ization." The tokenized US Treasury market grew from about $380 million in early 2023 to over $11 billion by 2026, making it the fastest-growing segment in the entire RWA space. The list of issuers reads almost like a roll call of Wall Street: BlackRock's BUIDL, Franklin Templeton's Benji, JPMorgan's Kinexys, Ondo's tokenized Treasury products—all are moving traditional financial assets on-chain.
Institutions like Coinbase, Fidelity Digital Assets, and BNY Mellon handle custody, trading, and compliance infrastructure. Furthermore, in August 2025, a US executive order allowed cryptocurrencies, private equity, and other alternative assets into 401(k) retirement plans, opening the door to the approximately $12.5 trillion in retirement account funds. As more institutions participate, numerous brokerages and wealth managers are gradually incorporating parts of the distribution rights.
This is not just a change in product form; it's a change in power structure: asset managers handle issuance, brokerages and advisors handle distribution, compliant custodians handle safekeeping, market makers and authorized participants handle primary market creation/redemption, exchanges handle listing, and regulatory frameworks define the boundaries. Crypto assets are thus entering the language system of traditional finance.
2. A Two-Way Convergence: 1+1>2
But Wall Street's "centralization" is only one side of the coin. Zooming out, the other side is the two systems complementing each other's shortcomings. This is not a zero-sum game where one side swallows the other, but a two-way convergence of two systems.
The crypto-native system has permissionless openness, 24/7 global markets, and programmable on-chain settlement. However, it has always lacked four things: compliant issuance channels, institutional-grade custody trust, deep fiat liquidity, and distribution networks that can reach mainstream users. These four are precisely what Wall Street has in abundance.
Conversely, Wall Street has licenses, custody, trillion-dollar capital pools, and global distribution channels. But its assets are trapped in an archaic system: markets open only on weekdays, cross-border barriers are high, settlement takes T+2, and products cannot be freely combined. These limitations are precisely what the crypto rails can inherently solve. Thus, this 1+1>2 dynamic is not just a theoretical exercise.
Over the past year, crypto exchanges have successively launched real stock trading. This wave presents two completely opposite yet converging directions. One starts from crypto exchanges and moves towards traditional finance; the other starts from traditional finance and moves towards crypto. Gate and Robinhood are the clearest representatives of these two paths.
2.1 Path A: From CEX to Traditional Finance
Gate's TradFi path can be divided into four stages. The first stage is the tokenization of traditional assets/stocks. Gate officially launched the xStocks Trading Section on July 3, 2025, becoming one of the earliest crypto exchanges to offer tokenized asset trading. Partnering with xStocks and Ondo, it allows users to trade spot and perpetual contracts for stocks like Apple, Tesla, and Meta directly with USDT, 24/7, without needing a traditional securities account. The core of this path is the "third-party compliant issuance + CEX distribution" model represented by xStocks. The underlying structure involves compliant Swiss entity Backed Finance holding the real underlying stocks 1:1 via an SPV structure under DLT law (purchased through brokers like Interactive Brokers and custodied at regulated custodians like InCore Bank). Tokens are issued on the Solana SPL standard, with Chainlink oracles synchronizing prices with off-chain markets at high frequency.
The second stage is the CFD-ization of traditional assets, providing price exposure to gold, forex, indices, commodities, and select stocks via contracts for difference. In January 2026, Gate expanded its TradFi CFD products to cover gold, forex, indices, commodities, and popular stocks, integrating the trading experience using USDx, an internal unit of account pegged to USDT. In this stage, the exchange acts as a price exposure gateway; users trade derivatives without directly holding the underlying stock assets.
The third stage is the launch of real stock trading in June 2026. On June 1, Gate officially launched real stock trading, currently supporting over 10,000 US stocks and ETFs, covering major markets like NYSE and Nasdaq. Users can trade directly using USDT. This means a native crypto trading platform is no longer content with offering spot, futures, Launchpad, copy trading, wallets, and on-chain tools to native users; it has begun to include stock, ETF, bond, forex, and fund traders into its trading ecosystem.
The difference from the previous CFD stage is that Gate emphasizes its connection to real securities markets through compliant brokerage infrastructure, not via stock tokens or synthetic assets. On June 3, Gate also announced a strategic partnership with Alpaca to expand access to real stock trading for eligible users. Alpaca is an SEC-registered clearing broker, and the partnership focuses on trade execution, clearing, and custody infrastructure. In other words, Gate isn't issuing stocks itself; it's acting as the front-end gateway between crypto accounts, stablecoin funds, and the traditional brokerage clearing system.
The fourth stage is geographical expansion in stock markets. Following US stocks, Gate launched Hong Kong stock trading on June 15, initially covering over 1,000 stocks listed on the Hong Kong Exchange. Users can trade assets like Tencent, HSBC, Xiaomi, Meituan, BYD, and China Mobile using USDT, sharing the same stock account system as for US stocks. On June 22, Gate further launched Korean stock trading, supporting stocks listed on the KRX exchange, initially covering the top 1,000 companies by market cap, including Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, NAVER, Hyundai Motor, and Celltrion, covering both KOSPI and KOSDAQ markets. Within June, Gate rapidly deployed a "US-Hong Kong-Korean stocks" matrix, forming a multi-market product portfolio with USDT as the unified funding entry point and global stocks as the allocation targets.
These four stages reflect a shift in CEX growth logic. In the past, CEXs primarily relied on spot, futures, Launchpad, wealth management, and Web3 wallets to build user ecosystems. However, as crypto trading penetration increases, fee competition intensifies, and regulatory demands rise, growth space relying solely on crypto-to-crypto trading is narrowing. Traditional assets like stocks, ETFs, and commodities can expand the pool of tradable assets and improve user asset retention. For Gate, real stock trading not only serves the cross-asset allocation needs of crypto users but also helps attract traditional finance users into its account system.
2.2 Path B: From Traditional Finance to Crypto
Opposite to Gate's direction, traditional brokerages represented by Robinhood have been gradually penetrating the crypto market. The advantage of these traditional brokerages lies in their established retail brokerage user base, compliance frameworks, and experience in retail trading products. This allows them to integrate traditional finance products like stocks, ETFs, and options with crypto assets on the same trading platform at a relatively low customer acquisition cost. Traditional financial institutions not only incorporate crypto assets as a supplement to their traditional wealth management systems but also leverage characteristics like 24/7 trading and high volatility to explore new revenue streams and enhance platform competitiveness.
The most representative among traditional brokerages is Robinhood. Originally a typical retail brokerage and fintech platform starting with stocks, options, cash management, margin, and subscription services, crypto assets have become one of its growth engines in recent years. In Q4 2024, Robinhood's crypto trading revenue reached $358 million, a year-on-year increase of over 700%, driving a more than 200% increase in trading revenue. For the full year 2025, Robinhood's total revenue reached $4.5 billion, net deposits for the year reached $68 billion, and Gold subscription users reached 4.2 million, indicating its evolution from a single stock trading app into a comprehensive financial account.
Robinhood's crypto strategy is not limited to listing coins for trading. In June 2025, Robinhood completed its acquisition of Bitstamp, integrating Bitstamp's retail and institutional crypto trading businesses covering the EU, UK, US, and Asia, and strengthening its global crypto licensing and institutional capabilities. This shows Robinhood isn't simply adding crypto as another trading category within its stock app; it's acquiring crypto exchange capabilities, licenses, institutional clients, and global operations through M&A.
More importantly, it is working on moving traditional stock assets on-chain. On June 30, 2025, Robinhood announced the launch of Stock Tokens in Europe and disclosed plans to build the Robinhood Layer 2 to support real-world asset tokenization, 24/7 trading, cross-chain functionality, and self-custody. Its stock tokens were initially issued on Arbitrum, with plans to migrate to its own Layer 2 based on Arbitrum's tech stack. These Classic Stock Tokens are derivative contracts with Robinhood reflecting the price performance of the underlying stocks and ETPs.
This contrasts with Gate's path emphasizing real stock trading. Robinhood leans more towards encapsulating traditional stock exposure as on-chain or quasi-on-chain tokenized exposure, while Gate is connecting to real securities brokerage infrastructure starting from its CEX account.
2.3 The Common Goal of Both Paths: Competing for the Next-Generation Integrated Financial Account
For the average user, the financial classification behind an asset may not be that important. Most people don't care whether they're trading stocks, cryptocurrencies, ETFs, event contracts, or tokenized securities. What users truly care about is whether they can execute trades in the same account, enter and exit positions at low cost, see price changes in real-time, and quickly switch positions during market volatility.
And this is precisely the core motivation for traditional brokerages to embrace crypto assets. They don't simply want to become another Gate or CEX; they want to avoid the next generation of financial gateways being captured by crypto platforms.
Therefore, the key isn't whether a particular product succeeds in the short term, but that the direction of industry convergence is clear: Traditional brokerages want the trading speed, global liquidity, younger user base, and high-frequency trading behavior of the crypto market. Crypto platforms want the real assets, compliant identity, institutional trust, and broader asset supply of traditional finance.
Both sides are moving towards the most valuable parts of the other. The boundary between Crypto and TradFi is being broken at the product level. The core competition in the next phase will be around compliance capabilities, asset coverage, capital efficiency, user experience, and global account systems.
3. RWA and On-Chain Treasuries: The Middle Layer Unifying Capital Markets
The Gate and Robinhood examples mentioned above represent convergence at the user gateway level, while RWA and on-chain Treasuries represent convergence at the asset layer.
Historically, one of the biggest issues in the crypto market was the relatively closed supply of on-chain assets. Beyond native tokens, stablecoins, NFTs, and a few derivative assets, the on-chain world struggled to host a sufficiently rich, low-volatility, and institutionally suitable pool of real-yield assets.
On-chain Treasuries change this. When US Treasuries, money market funds, and short-term bond funds are tokenized, they become the on-chain world's approximation of "risk-free yield." They can serve as collateral, be integrated into DeFi compositions, facilitate institutional treasury management, and become the yield source backing stablecoins and other on-chain financial products.
However, this market is still nascent. Data from May 2026 shows the tokenized US Treasury market is around $15 billion, while the entire US Treasury market is approximately $30 trillion. There is a difference of over three orders of magnitude.
This gap indicates two things. First, RWA is not a completed market but a market just beginning its institutionalization. Second, its ceiling isn't determined by crypto-native users but by whether traditional financial assets can enter the on-chain environment in a compliant, auditable, settleable, and distributable manner. This is why traditional institutions like JPMorgan, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, BNY, DTCC, and Nasdaq simultaneously appear in the tokenization narrative. In the long run, they are not creating a separate crypto product but testing the underlying settlement and asset registration methods for future capital markets.
And data proves this convergence is not a narrative bubble but a real structural trend. In H1 2026, while the broader crypto market fell 28% and DeFi TVL shrank over 25%, the RWA sector grew over 40% against the trend, surpassing $32 billion in scale. Tokenized stocks were the growth engine: the number of holding wallets grew 188% in six months, reaching about 350,000, making it the largest RWA category by wallet count, surpassing tokenized gold. This means many users already in the crypto world who wanted exposure to US stocks found an entry point without returning to traditional brokerages. Meanwhile, DTCC, US, and Japanese banks plan to enter in 2026–2027, aiming to "infrastructure-ize" tokenized stocks.
4. The Logical Endpoint: Stocks, Crypto, RWA, On-Chain Treasuries Trading Side-by-Side
4.1 Unified Capital Markets and the "Super Account"
In the old financial system, different assets were segregated into different accounts: stocks in brokerage accounts, funds in asset management accounts, bonds in institutional systems, deposits in bank accounts, crypto on exchanges or wallets, and on-chain assets in self-custody addresses. Each asset class had its own trading hours, settlement cycles, custody rules, compliance requirements, and user interfaces. But the new generation of platforms is attempting to compress these divisions into a single account.
Crypto exchanges are expanding from coins to stocks, ETFs, RWA, payments, and on-chain yield. Traditional brokerages are expanding from stocks to crypto, tokenized securities, prediction markets, stablecoins, and 24/7 trading. Asset managers are expanding from funds to ETFs, tokenized funds, and on-chain distribution. Banks are expanding from deposits and settlement to tokenized deposits, on-chain payments, and institutional clearing networks.
On the surface, they offer different products. In reality, they are all competing for the same thing: the default entry point for the next-generation multi-asset account. Whoever controls this gateway controls distribution; whoever controls distribution can influence liquidity, pricing, custody, and asset issuance.
The future taking shape likely involves users trading BTC, ETH, Apple stock, Nvidia stock, S&P ETFs, on-chain US Treasuries, money market funds, gold, RWA, prediction market contracts, and even tokenized shares of private companies—all within the same interface. Stablecoins may become the cross-market funding layer, on-chain Treasuries may serve as collateral and yield base, ETFs and tokenized funds may become bridges for traditional assets to enter crypto accounts, and the boundaries between brokerage apps and crypto exchange apps will increasingly blur.
This market will likely not be fully decentralized nor fully controlled by Wall Street. A hybrid structure is more probable. Asset issuance will remain regulated, custody will require compliant institutions, securities trading will still have geographic and investor suitability restrictions, but the trading interface, fund flow, settlement speed, and asset composition methods will increasingly resemble the crypto market.
The competition for the next generation of capital markets isn't between crypto exchanges and stock exchanges; it's about who can compress the most assets, deepest liquidity, most trustworthy custody, and smoothest user experience into the same account.
4.2 Conclusion: Wall Street Hasn't Conquered Crypto, and Crypto Hasn't Bypassed Wall Street
The "Wall Street-ization" of crypto financial products should not be interpreted as the crypto market being taken over by traditional finance. More accurately, it is a mutual transformation. Future industry competition may no longer be point-to-point between CEXs and brokerages, but among financial super-gateways. CEXs will continue expanding into stocks, ETFs, bonds, funds, gold, forex, payments, and wealth management. Traditional brokerages will continue expanding into crypto spot, staking, tokenized assets, stablecoin payments, and on-chain settlement. What end-users eventually see might not be a "crypto exchange" or a "stock brokerage," but a unified account containing BTC, ETH, USDT, US stocks, ETFs, gold, on-chain yield products, and more.
Long-term, asset categories will remain important, regulatory boundaries will persist, but the user experience will become far less fragmented than today. Stocks, crypto, RWA, and on-chain Treasuries will no longer belong to separate worlds but will be repriced within the same funding layer, the same account system, and the same trading interface.
Wall Street hasn't simply conquered crypto. Crypto hasn't bypassed Wall Street. They are jointly reshaping capital markets into another form.
Returning to that line in Satoshi's genesis block. Seventeen years ago, Bitcoin aimed to bypass Wall Street and build its own financial order. Seventeen years later, Bitcoin and Wall Street are co-building a new track. The decentralized ideal hasn't faded; it continues operating at the protocol's foundational layer. And at the application layer accessible to ordinary people, a more efficient, more global, and freer unified capital market is quietly taking shape at the intersection of these two converging paths.
Data Sources
• Gate, https://www.gate.com
• CryptoTimes, https://www.cryptotimes.io/insights/how-etfs-are-driving-bitcoin-in-2026-big-players-shaping-the-trend/
• InvestaX, https://investax.io/blog/q1-2026-real-world-asset-tokenization-market-report
• RWA.xyz, https://app.rwa.xyz/
• CoinGape, https://coingape.com/best-crypto-exchanges-to-trade-real-world-assets/
• Eco, https://eco.com/support/en/articles/15083160-robinhood-tokenized-stocks-what-s-live-and-how-it-works
• Eco, https://eco.com/support/en/articles/15254023-tokenized-equities-2026-backed-dinari-robinhood
• CEX.IO, https://blog.cex.io/ecosystem/tokenized-stocks-q2-2026-trends-35636
Gate Research Institute is a comprehensive blockchain and cryptocurrency research platform, providing readers with in-depth content including technical analysis, hot topic insights, market reviews, industry research, trend forecasts, and macroeconomic policy analysis.
Disclaimer
Investing in cryptocurrency markets involves high risks. Users are advised to conduct independent research and fully understand the nature of the assets and products they purchase before making any investment decisions. Gate assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from such investment decisions.
