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🏩 Tokenized Stocks and the Institutional Stablecoin Counterattack

Your Bi-Weekly RWA Breakdown

May 26, 2025

Welcome to the Monday edition of What’s Drippin’, brining you what was previously known as Security Token Prime Insights directly to your inbox to kick off every Monday morning in addition to Wednesday’s mid-week security token digest!

Enjoy a summary of the top headlines, market movements from the data team, special announcements, and Herwig’s thoughts on what’s going on in this fast-evolving space.

Without further ado, it's time to


Get Liquid 💧

Summary and Key Takeaways

1. xStocks by Kraken and Backed Pile On to US Public Equities Trading

If you’re still sleeping on tokenizing US equities even after Crypto.com, Ondo, Robinhood, Dinari, Swarm, and others are already doing it (or planning on it), maybe you shouldn’t be after Kraken’s rollout with Backed - once again reserved for international investors only of course. Powered on Solana, we will soon see the early days of tokenized stocks (which saw millions in daily trade volume on crypto exchanges like FTX, Binance and Bittrex) return in possibly a bigger, more grandeur way than ever before. This time the promise of DeFi could help create additional utility for US equities that doesn’t exist anywhere today. One thing is certain, this trend is here to stay and the SEC seems to have no qualms about this time around! 

2. Top US Banking Giants Consider Joint Stablecoin

The moment of fear is arriving for stablecoin issuers
 the banks want their business model back! No longer are the likes of BofA, JPM, Citi, and Wells Fargo willing to stomach letting Circle, Tether, PayPal, and others take their lunch. As a previous lack of regulatory clarity allowed these tech companies to move into the bank’s turf, a new US administration is helping these old-school incumbents enter the arena with legislation and a supportive task force designed to do just that. 

Many have feared that when this time comes we will see a plethora of stablecoins with each bank looking to dominate the sector in their own way or simply to use for their own customer base. Turns out, those thoughts may be squashed as we see a possible killer stablecoin come to the market from the world’s biggest US banks. No one was able to avoid the native-banking payments solution Zelle like they could Venmo or CashApp, let’s see how that plays out with this stablecoin! 

3. Apex Group Acquires Majority Control of Tokeny 

Apex Group has been one of the leading fund administrators for tokenized funds, among other financial services the firm provides. They made an early bet on Tokeny back in 2022 after slowly increasing their strategic position in the firm over time. Now we will see the company release control to the global financial conglomerate and could lead to further acceleration of adoption of tokenization within Apex’s own client base. That or Apex sees itself becoming a key infrastructure player for the entire tokenized markets industry. 

4. 21X Opens Primary Market in Europe with $USMO SBI Money Market Fund

Launching with much fanfare last week at Digital Assets Weeks, 21X is now officially the first none-CSD based capital markets solution for Europe. Having been granted the first non-custodial, blockchain based centralized securities depository license allows 21X to claim the first mover status in the continent. With the secondary market set to open shortly after, 21X’s primary market is now live featuring a tokenized Money Market Fund by SBI Digital in partnership with Black Manta Capital. 

5. R3 Taps Solana to Expand Support for First Public Blockchain 

Institutions have been building in private/ permissioned environments for the sake of security, early testing, regulatory compliance, and other reasons while others have gone straight to public blockchains. This has sparked debates around which to be building on and this week we’re seeing a convergence of both with R3 and Solana teaming up to bring institutions to a public blockchain for its scalability and reach while maintaining the security of R3’s Corda platform. Bringing over $10B worth of quality assets to Solana isn’t just an interoperability play, it’s a more direct integration with transactions being confirmed directly on the public blockchain. Ultimately this will allow institutions to interact with DeFi applications, participate in their benefits, build enterprise-grade infrastructure all while compliantly bringing their high-quality assets to Solana’s growing userbase. If you’re wondering how the public vs. permissioned blockchain conversation has evolved, check out this session from TokenizeThis 2025 featuring R3, Digital Asset/ Canton Network, SonarX, and Kadena, moderated by EY.

This is not financial advice.

Notable Market Headlines

Institutional Activity

RWA Foundation & WALLY DAO

The WALLY DAO website is officially live!

Monday’s Onchain: Weekly X Spaces

 Join us on Monday’s Onchain to talk about
📰 Tokenization News
🚀 New RWAs
⭐ Featured Guests and more!

Set your reminder and see you there!

STM.co Data

This week’s gainers and losers features a change from last week’s with Backed Niu Technologies rising from 3rd place (7.89% gain last week) to 1st place in Top Gains. The rest are new but what’s interesting is two different assets that correlate to publicly-traded Strategy. They were served with a class action lawsuit this past week which resulted in a 3-day price decline and the tokenized stocks reflect that as well. 

Is this an arbitrage opportunity? Learn about STOKR’s CMSTR and Swarm’s MSTR.s on STM.co and let us know if this is something you can execute on!

This is not financial advice.

Think Like Herwig

Hello readers,

Another exciting week that further validated my thesis that the first wave of consolidation in RWAs has already begun now with Apex and Tokeny coming together. Makes you wonder how many other early investments like Apex are sitting on a cap table considering an acquisition for control as well. Meanwhile at Solana Accelerate I witnessed more than 60% of content on stage relating to RWAs and their favorite phrase internet capital markets. We saw this in the form of Kraken’s launch of xStocks, in Apollo’s $ACRED landing on Kamino, R3 tapping Solana, and many more launches and spotlights of RWA activity throughout the conference. One thing is clear, Solana has done a tremendous job evolving from just a memecoin chain to being taken seriously by Wall Street in a short order of time. DeFi projects like Orca and Kamino are leading the charge into DeFi and may help Solana find itself top choice as a result, even attracting Wall Street institutions despite most other chains actively developing walled gardens instead - which one would have thought was the only way to bring them to the table. 

We’ve got our website live for WALLY DAO by the RWA Foundation (which might suggest something VERY soon). If you want to support this initiative, there is still a window of time left to join as a founding member. Please reach out ASAP!

Happy tokenizing, 
Herwig “Happy” Konings
CEO, Security Token Group 

💩 What Else is Drippin’

Companies of the Week

Company of the Week - Kyle: Kraken

Find out why and more every Friday live around 12pm EST on LinkedIn or X/ Twitter. Past episodes available on Youtube or your favorite podcast platform! 

Reports

RWA Tokenization: Key Trends and 2025 Market Outlook

Keep an eye out tomorrow for a new report we contributed to: RWA Tokenization: Key Trends and 2025 Market Outlook. Led by Brickken, this report brings multiple parties together in diving into tokenization, with STM.co supporting with both data and some of the written sections.

What’s Inside?

✅ A Breakdown of Tokenization and Related Benefits
✅ Key advantages for issuers, investors, and institutions
✅ How the market is evolving and trends shaping adoption in 2025
✅ What’s next? Expert insights on regulation, DeFi integration, institutional involvement, and market growth

STM’s RWA Market Prediction for 2030

Security Token Market (STM.Co) is proud to release a thorough report on our prediction on the tokenized real world asset market growth. This report explores the variety of opportunities within each asset class to capture value on-chain.

Tokenization can be applied to just about any object and asset type. Art, carbon credits, life insurance, and other sub $5 trillion asset classes weren’t even considered in estimates.

In order for STM to derive its 2030 market predictions, the following asset classes were evaluated: currency, M2/M3, real estate, commodities, public equities, private companies and funds, bonds, credit and lending markets.

This is not financial or investment advice.

We hope you enjoyed this week's What’s Drippin’ email - if you have any feedback on either what you liked or what you’d like to see, please reply to this email with it.

Everything in this newsletter is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing in this report should be taken as financial advice or as an inducement to purchase or sell any security. Nothing in this newsletter should be used as legal advice. Always do your own research before making any decisions regarding financial transactions of securities.