Superstate bets investors will use tokenized stocks in DeFi for lending and liquidity, not just passive holding.
Tokenization-focused startup Superstate has raised $82.5 million in a Series B funding round, the company announced Thursday, underscoring the growing popularity of bringing traditional Wall Street assets on-chain.
The round was led by Bain Capital’s crypto division and Distributed Global. The funds of numerous prominent crypto investors also participated, including Katie Haun’s Haun Ventures and Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital.
Superstate builds infrastructure that moves traditional assets, like stocks and government securities, onto blockchain networks including Ethereum and Solana. In the last year, that trend has exploded from a curiosity on Wall Street to a near-standard practice.
Industry titan BlackRock’s once-experimental BUIDL fund — a tokenized money market fund — debuted on Ethereum in 2024. It has since grown by several billion dollars and expanded to numerous other blockchains.
Traditional finance mainstays have followed suit. Earlier this week, the New York Stock Exchange unveiled an on-chain platform it plans to soon use to facilitate the trading of tokenized stocks and ETFs.
SuperState has been a go-to service for companies seeking to bring their assets on-chain — particularly those with crypto ties. It recently helped two Nasdaq-traded firms, Galaxy Digital and Solana Company, tokenize shares.
Robert Leshner, Superstate’s CEO, recently told Decrypt he anticipates tokenized stocks will become particularly popular with retail investors once they realize they take those otherwise idle assets into crypto’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem, and use them as collateral for all manner of loans.
“You can take that money and buy a car or buy a house and leave the system entirely with it,” Leshner said at the time. “I think there’s going to be a lot of really happy investors.”
Crypto-native companies have also jumped into tokenized stocks in recent months, seeking to compete with traditional finance firms over market share of the growing trend.
Last month, Coinbase debuted a new product, Coinbase Tokenize, which will eventually allow customers to buy and sell on-chain stocks, and also enable institutions to tokenize assets themselves.
A report out Wednesday from BlackRock emphasized that as crypto and traditional finance become increasingly intertwined, the financial opportunities within that intersection are becoming increasingly lucrative — and the race to capture that market, more competitive.
“You have traditional securities and assets that are looking to be tokenized, and frankly, you have [digital] assets that […] are making their way into the more traditional financial systems,” Jay Jacobs, the author of the BlackRock report, told Decrypt. “We believe in that convergence that does seem to be accelerating.”
