What are the form factor upgrades we need to see for tokenized stocks to make sense? The promise of stocks on-chain has hovered above the crypto space for the past five years or so especially. But we’ve never seen this come to fruition at the retail level. Companies like @BackedFi have made a valiant push (and Backed continues to do so now with xStocks coming), but all of Backed’s issued assets have a total liquidity of just over $7.2m. So why haven’t tokenized equities made sense so far? At the macro level, it’s a question of unique offering: the largest traders of US equities already have venues to trade these assets that function well, often with no fees and low to no trade settlement times if executed during trade hours. Now this discounts the potential for market expansion, particularly around US equities, but it emphasizes the idea that trading crypto-native assets was a net new unlock; trading equities so far has not been. Then at the micro level, leaving the obvious piece of unregistered security issuance aside, I would say there are three other key issues with tokenized equities: >Liquidity: As shown by the total liquidity of Backed assets above, tokenized stocks have not been able to see any significant traction on the trading front because liquidity has been sparse at best >Real-world settlement: With these tokenized stocks, settlement has continually been a question. Who owns the underlying and how can I access this? Is KYC required to do so? (Most likely). In which case, if I know I want access to the underlying equity at some point and I have to KYC, why bother holding on-chain? What is the unique benefit? >Fragmentation: Trading venues on-chain continue to fragment liquidity, not offering a centralized hub of settlement which benefits traders at Fidelity/Vanguard size If the three aspects above can be addressed, equity trading on-chain could make sense sooner as more of the financial system moves on chain, but these transitions don’t appear to be shifting as quickly as I would originally have hoped