NYSE Picks Avalanche as Sole Chain for Its 24/7 Tokenized Stock Venue

The New York Stock Exchange picked Avalanche as the sole settlement chain for its planned 24/7 tokenized stock platform, the WSJ reported Monday. That makes one chain the entire backbone of the biggest U.S. exchange's push into round-the-clock equity trading. Avalanche now accounts for about 5% of tokenized stocks, according to the report. It didn't happen in a vacuum: three U.S. tokenized stock venues spent the past week each choosing a different blockchain.

Five North sold tokenized CNTN shares to DRW Cumberland on TSV, a permissioned venue on the Canton Network. CNTN became the first U.S. equity to trade under the SEC's Innovation Exemption on November 4. Also Monday, Formation notified the SEC that it will run a venue on Solana and is targeting early 2027. Solana, Canton and Avalanche, three venues, zero overlap.

That's deliberate. No U.S. tokenized stock venue is going multichain at launch, since splitting activity across networks would pile on regulatory complexity and make it harder to build deep liquidity. Venues also have to stay under the SEC's cap of 0.25% average daily volume per asset.

The chains already winning tokenized stock volume got there through big exchange partners and their built-in user bases. BNB Chain's surges trace back to Binance's bStocks, Base's rise came from Coinbase, and Solana's volume is largely tied to Kraken's xStocks. The source argument is simple: market share goes to whichever chain lands the biggest platforms and issuers.

Tokenized stocks are tracking stablecoins' early arc almost step for step. At 240 days after crossing $1 billion, stablecoins sat at roughly $4 billion while tokenized stocks hit $3.7 billion. Tokenized Treasuries were at $2.5 billion at the same mark and have since fallen far behind.

The market is also getting wider. The count of tokenized stocks and ETFs worth more than $1 million reached 287 as of November 8, up from three in January 2025, spread across roughly 4,400 tokenized assets and a $3.7 billion market. HTX launched spot trading in bStocks on Monday with 20 names, including NVDA, TSLA, QQQ and CRCL. Strategy and SpaceX are now the most tokenized issuers by asset count. Breadth, not one giant wrapper, is the healthier signal here.