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Sometimes, the leap from impossible to inevitable happens in a single step.
And in that step, skeptics become believers.
Back in 2019, Nasdaq dropped a short video introducing an idea that sounded futuristic at the time—tokenization.
Johan Toll, then Head of Digital Assets, illustrated it with diamonds. Each diamond is one-of-a-kind, he said. Now imagine creating a digital certificate for that diamond, anchoring it on a blockchain, and allowing it to change hands instantly. That was tokenization in its simplest form.
Toll predicted the first use cases would be small and straightforward: smart contracts paying out insurance claims automatically, airline miles treated like cash, grain shipments with digital receipts, shipping documents that couldn’t be forged.
He suggested that the heavyweights of finance—capital markets—would be the last to adopt, weighed down by regulation and complexity.
Tokenization has skipped the sidelines and gone straight for the core of finance—government bonds, treasuries, and now, even stocks.
From Diamonds to the Dow
This week, Nasdaq made its move—urging the SEC to greenlight tokenized stocks: real equities that would exist both on traditional exchanges and on a blockchain.
If approved, the implications are massive: faster settlement, global accessibility, 24/7 trading, and programmable features baked directly into the shares themselves.
This development isn’t a surprise…
But it’s undeniable confirmation of a shift we’ve been highlighting for more than a year.
Wall Street’s biggest players—BlackRock, Fidelity, WisdomTree—are already deep into tokenization projects. Stablecoins have proven the rails work. Bonds and treasuries are migrating on-chain.
The next domino? Equities.
And that domino has already tipped.
The First Stock On-Chain
Galaxy Digital, the crypto investment firm led by Mike Novogratz, has officially taken the leap. With help from tokenization specialists at Superstate, the company placed its own shares (GLXY) on the Solana blockchain.
This isn’t a derivative or a synthetic instrument—it’s the real stock, regulator-approved, mirrored one-for-one on-chain.
Owning the token means owning the share.
Dividends can be paid out instantly, distributed via stablecoins like an airdrop. Shareholder voting could be executed with a click. Settlement happens in seconds, not days.
And in the future, these tokenized equities could trade seamlessly on decentralized markets, side by side with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the rest of DeFi’s assets.
How You Should Position Yourself
The real opportunity isn’t in trading GLXY tokens at midnight—it’s in the infrastructure.
If equities, treasuries, and funds migrate onto blockchains, then the networks that secure and settle them—Solana for speed, Ethereum for trust and institutional adoption—become the financial highways of the future.
Stablecoins already flow across these rails. Tokenized treasuries are following.
Stocks are next.
For investors looking to ride this transition, the clearest bet is on the ecosystems surrounding Solana and Ethereum. They are fast becoming the backbone of tokenized finance.
And this story is only just beginning.
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