独占94%市场份额，谁是币股竞赛背后的真正赢家？

Original: Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author: Azuma (@azuma_eth)

On June 1, Binance officially unveiled its much-anticipated new product: offering trading in over 8,000 US stocks and ETFs to non-US users, with support for commission-free fractional shares starting at $5. Users can purchase these assets using cryptocurrencies such as USDC, USDT, and BNB. (Recommended reading: "Binance’s Big Move: 5*24H Trading of 8,000 US Stocks & ETFs, Plus Tokenization?")

Odaily Planet Daily noted a key detail: Binance has chosen Alpaca, a US-compliant brokerage, as its partner for asset custody, dividend distribution, and corporate actions. This company called Alpaca holds a market position in the stock tokenization narrative that may far exceed your expectations; Bitget, Gate, Ondo, xStocks, and others are its clients.

The Hidden Giant with a 94% Market Share

While Binance was launching its new product, exchanges like Bitget and Gate were also making significant strides in stock tokens.

On May 28, Bitget officially announced the launch of its stock token platform, Reality, and plans to issue rTokens, derivative tokens pegged 1:1 to stock assets. According to Bitget’s Chinese spokesperson Xie Jiayin, Reality’s underlying brokerage is Alpaca.

On June 1, Gate officially announced the launch of its real stock trading service, allowing users to trade stocks and ETFs in major US markets directly using USDT. Gate representative Godot also confirmed that Gate’s brokerage partner is Alpaca.

Looking at the DeFi side, Ondo, the absolute leader in the stock token market, announced a partnership with Alpaca last September to tokenize US stocks and ETF assets.

Ondo’s direct competitor, Kraken’s stock token protocol xStocks, also announced in December last year that it would partner with Alpaca to accelerate the promotion and global adoption of xStocks outside the US.

More examples are unnecessary. In short, whether in CeFi or DeFi, almost every stock token trading service you come across has Alpaca’s fingerprints on it. According to data released by Alpaca on December 4 last year, the company holds a 94% market share in the tokenized stock and ETF asset market.

Who Exactly is Alpaca?

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in California, Alpaca was started by former Lehman Brothers employee and serial entrepreneur Yoshi Yokokawa (now CEO) and engineer Hitoshi Harada (now CPO). Alpaca operates in a globally distributed remote work model common in the crypto space, with over 250 employees across 25 countries.

Initially, Alpaca was a startup focused on financial databases and machine learning, developing technology to process large market datasets for predictions. Early on, its main product was a trading API for quantitative traders. However, as it expanded, the company evolved from a pure API provider to a comprehensive financial infrastructure provider, now supporting asset classes like stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrencies, along with services like market data, securities lending, high-yield cash accounts, and 24/5 US stock trading.

FundBet data shows that since 2019, Alpaca has raised over $320 million in cumulative funding from investors including Y Combinator, Spark Capital, Portage Ventures, Tribe Capital, and SBI Group.

• 2019: Seed round completed;
• 2020: $10 million Series A completed;
• 2021 and 2022: Two consecutive Series B rounds completed;
• 2025: $52 million Series C completed;
• Early 2026: $150 million Series D, reaching a valuation of approximately $1.1 billion.

According to official data, Alpaca now serves hundreds of financial institutions and fintech companies across over 40 countries and regions, having helped partners open over 7 million brokerage accounts.

A More Accurate Positioning: "Brokerage-as-a-Service"

Unlike traditional brokerages that serve end investors directly, Alpaca’s core clients are developers, fintech companies, and other brokerage firms. Alpaca’s Broker API helps partners quickly build a complete securities trading system, including account opening, KYC, account management, order execution, clearing and settlement, and market data services.

Simply put, if Binance, Bitget, Gate, or Ondo want their users to trade US stocks, they would theoretically need to solve issues like brokerage licenses, compliance reviews, stock custody, clearing and settlement, market data, and order routing. These tasks are both expensive and complex. Alpaca offers a full suite of API solutions, allowing developers to “plug in” these complex backend capabilities by simply calling the interfaces.

In a sense, this is more like "Brokerage-as-a-Service." With Alpaca’s support, platforms like Binance, Bitget, Gate, and Ondo only need to focus on traffic and users, leaving all the backend work of connecting to the real-world securities market to Alpaca.

First-Mover Advantage and Network Effects

At this point, you might wonder why crypto institutions favor Alpaca. Can’t other brokerages do the same?

Admittedly, the US compliant financial market is not short of brokerages. According to FINRA data, the US has thousands of registered brokerages, with traditional financial giants like Charles Schwab, Interactive Brokers, and Fidelity having far greater brand influence and asset scale globally than Alpaca.

However, when the stock tokenization wave began, the dominant players were not these Wall Street veterans but Alpaca, which was founded just over a decade ago. The reason might be that Alpaca was never a traditional brokerage from its inception. For traditional brokerages, the clients are investors; for Alpaca, the clients are developers.

Alpaca’s product design revolves almost entirely around APIs. Developers only need to call the interfaces to quickly gain complete capabilities like account opening, KYC, order execution, clearing and settlement, and market data. This "API First" philosophy highly aligns with the needs of Binance, Bitget, Gate, and Ondo to integrate securities trading functions into their trading platforms or protocols.

Compared to many traditional financial institutions that are cautious about the crypto industry, Alpaca was also one of the earliest US-licensed brokerages to actively embrace digital assets and tokenization narratives. Even before stock tokenization became a market hotspot, Alpaca had already begun building connections with the crypto industry and exploring the integration of securities markets with blockchain technology.

The first-mover advantage, combined with industry fit, is the core reason Alpaca has secured its current market position.

Now, as more CeFi and DeFi players choose Alpaca’s infrastructure, the network effects accumulating around Alpaca are solidifying its moat.

For latecomers, choosing Alpaca means the fastest time-to-market and the most mature compliance path, creating a virtuous cycle: more platforms joining Alpaca—leading to more accounts and trading volume—driving Alpaca to further improve its products and infrastructure—attracting more latecomers to join…

Stock tokenization is undoubtedly a major trend. Within this track alone, it remains unknown exactly how many Binances or Ondos will emerge in the future. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear: As more platforms compete for the stock token market, the one selling “shovels” to all of them might be the biggest beneficiary of this competition.