According to data from Token Terminal, tokenized stocks deposited into decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols have reached $262.4 million, up from $14.66 million at the start of the year. That is a year-to-date increase of approximately 1,690%, or close to 18x, with the pace of growth accelerating over the past month.

Tokenized stocks are blockchain representations of publicly listed equities, built to be transferred, traded and pledged onchain like any other digital asset. The metric counts only tokenized equities that have moved from wallets into protocols and been put to work — whether supplying liquidity, borrowing against them, or pursuing yield. A tokenized Nvidia share sitting idle in a wallet therefore does not register in the total, making the figure a gauge of active usage rather than of tokens issued.

DEX Liquidity Pools Hold the Largest Share

Broken down by venue, decentralized exchanges hold the biggest slice. Roughly 58% of the $262.4 million sits in DEX pools, where tokenized equities trade around the clock rather than within traditional market sessions. Uniswap V4 leads with $59.5 million, or 22.7% of the total, while Uniswap V3 adds another $26.7 million. Raydium, PancakeSwap, Aerodrome and Meteora account for most of the rest.

Lending protocols rank second, with approximately 26% of total value locked (TVL) posted as collateral. Kamino Lend leads this category at $54.1 million, Fluid Jupiter Lend adds $14.2 million, and Pendle yield strategies hold $33.7 million, close to 13%.

The lending share carries significance beyond its size. An asset only becomes useful as collateral when there is confidence and trust in its pricing, liquidation and redemption systems. In January, the entire category stood at less than $15 million; today, more than $68 million of tokenized stock is backing loans.

Solana Leads Chains, but Robinhood Chain Is Close Behind

Solana remains the largest chain for tokenized stocks in DeFi at $95.9 million, a 36.6% share. Robinhood Chain sits right behind at $79.9 million, or 30.5%, and almost all of it appeared in September — essentially a one-month arrival at the number-two spot that makes the top of the chain leaderboard one of the fastest-moving storylines on the chart. BNB Chain ($35.3 million) and Ethereum ($34.7 million) hold roughly 13% each, while Base trails at $16 million.

Uniswap V4 followed a similar trajectory. For most of the year, Kamino and Solana DEXs carried the market, with V4 appearing as a thin sliver at the top of the chart. Its share jumped through September, and total TVL roughly doubled over the month.

Crypto Treasury Stocks Lead the Asset List

The single largest asset is STRCx, a tokenized version of Strategy's STRC preferred stock, with $34.3 million deployed. FWDI, the stock of Solana treasury firm Forward Industries, follows $25.4 million, and MSTRx — tokenized Strategy common stock — adds $9.6 million. Crypto treasury stocks together account for about a quarter of all tokenized equity TVL.

That concentration is logical: investors holding Strategy exposure onchain typically already use DeFi, so borrowing against a preferred share on Kamino is a small step for them.

Mainstream equities are catching up. S&P 500 trackers SPYx and SPY hold a combined $30.1 million, Nvidia tokens across two issuers hold $15.6 million, and Tesla's TSLAx sits at $6.2 million. How much further that catch-up runs is one of the clearer signals to follow in the dataset.

The long tail runs deep. Token Terminal tracks 1,495 separate tokenized stock assets in DeFi, and everything outside the top 10 still makes up 48.9% of the total. Most of that float has been put to work within the last few weeks, underlining how broad — and how recent — the deployment wave across the category has been.