Alpaca Securities Estimated to Back 91% of Tokenized Stock Market

Shares held at Alpaca Securities backed an estimated $4.17 billion — roughly 91% of the $4.6 billion tokenized-stock market — according to a Nov. 7 estimate by independent researcher stein (@steinRWA), based on holder figures dated Nov. 5. The concentration figure is the first public attempt to map how much of the young market depends on a single self-clearing broker for its underlying equity.

The estimate covered products from Binance's bStocks, Ondo, xStocks, Robinhood, Bitget's Reality, Coinbase and Dinari. Across those brands, roughly 4.7 million holder addresses held tokenized-stock positions. To put the scale in perspective: the entire tokenized-equity market, $4.6 billion, is smaller than a single mid-cap company's float, yet it now routes through one broker's books almost end to end.

How the market splits among issuers

A separate Nov. 8 snapshot of 23 issuers showed the market's distribution:

• Binance bStocks: about $1.4 billion, or 30.7% of the market
• Ondo: about $1.3 billion, or 28.4%
• xStocks: about $1.1 billion, or 23%

Together the three issuers accounted for more than 80% of the market. The remaining share spread across the other 20 issuers tracked in the snapshot.

Alpaca's custody role, precisely drawn

Alpaca is not the custodian for the entire market. It serves as the main custodian for xStocks, but some xStocks shares sit at InCore Bank and Maerki Baumann. Securitize tokens and Backpack exchange products use RQD Clearing. Securitize's SECZ shares and Superstate products are registered directly with issuers — a direct-registration segment that totaled about $250 million, roughly 5% of the market and, per the Nov. 8 snapshot basis, the one material piece outside the Alpaca-linked structure.

For tokens backed through Alpaca, holders receive economic exposure to the stock but are not recorded as direct shareholders. The mechanics matter for practitioners. Alpaca is a self-clearing broker and a participant in DTC, the U.S. central securities depository. The underlying shares are held through Alpaca at DTC, where Cede & Co. — DTC's nominee — appears as the registered holder on company shareholder records.

That chain means products sold under separate brands, from Binance to Robinhood to Coinbase, ultimately share one broker for their backing shares. A retail investor holding an Ondo token and one holding a bStocks token sit on the same underlying custody arrangement, whatever the front-end brand suggests.

What does this change for issuers and investors?

For issuers, the estimate quantifies an operational dependency that was widely assumed but never measured: distribution may be competitive, but custody is effectively single-threaded. Any disruption at Alpaca — operational, regulatory or financial — would propagate across more than nine-tenths of the market's notional value simultaneously, a correlated risk that diversified issuer branding does not mitigate.

For token holders, the structure clarifies their legal position. They hold a claim on economic exposure, not shareholder status, and the registered holder of record is Cede & Co., exactly as in conventional brokerage-held shares. Corporate actions, proxies and any rights attached to direct registration flow to DTC's nominee chain, not to the token holder.

The picture is also moving quickly. In December 2025, Alpaca said its network supported about 94% of tokenized U.S. equities and ETFs and that it held about $480 million in tokenized assets. That earlier figure used a different market-share calculation and is not directly comparable with the Nov. 5 estimate — but the trajectory, from $480 million in holdings to a $4.17 billion backing estimate in under a year, indicates how fast the tokenized-equity market has scaled on top of the same clearing infrastructure.

Whether that concentration persists depends on whether the direct-registration segment — currently about $250 million — grows as issuers seek to reduce single-broker dependency, and on whether new custodians enter as the market expands.