Ivan Kan, global investor and entrepreneur at the intersection of capital markets, tokenization and emerging tech. Investor in HackIndia.
In August 2026, Coinbase brought tokenized shares of Apple, Nvidia, Meta and Alphabet onto its Base network, letting eligible users outside the U.S. hold and trade those equities around the clock. More tickers followed within days, and dozens of DeFi protocols lined up to support them before the launch even settled.
It’s tempting, in an industry built on differentiation, to greet a launch like this with caveats. I want to do the opposite. Coinbase just did something this industry has needed for years: It made tokenization mainstream.
This is the market education nobody else could buy.
Tokenization has spent most of its life as an insider’s topic, debated at conferences and written about in trade publications that never reach the people who decide where capital goes. A household brand, trading under a ticker millions of retail investors already recognize, just told the market that owning a share of Nvidia onchain is real and usable today.
That reaches audiences no RWA-focused startup could reach alone. Every credible entrant adds legitimacy to the category: Regulators pay closer attention, institutional allocators ask their own teams why they haven’t looked at this yet and retail investors who’d never search “real world asset tokenization” now ask their exchange app what “tokenized stock” means.
Wrappers are the on-ramp, not the destination.
Most tokenized equity products today, including Coinbase’s, work the same way: A regulated custodian holds the underlying shares, a special purpose entity issues a token representing a claim on them and the token trades onchain while legal title sits upstream in a trust structure. It’s a wrapper, a well-built one, but a wrapper nonetheless, representing ownership rather than serving as the instrument of it.
That’s not a criticism. It’s a description of where this industry sits in its own development, and it’s exactly the right place to start. Stablecoins followed the same arc, as wrapped claims on bank deposits, before the market matured enough to demand more sophisticated structures underneath.
The more people who interact with a wrapped tokenized stock, the more who will eventually ask why ownership still routes through a trust deed and a custodian’s balance sheet instead of existing natively onchain from the moment it’s authorized. That question only gets asked at scale once people have experienced the wrapper first. Coinbase isn’t competing with that future. It’s building the audience for it.
Bank charters are another door into the same building.
Coinbase isn’t the only major player redrawing this map. On August 14, 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) granted conditional approval for World Liberty Trust Company, National Association, the banking arm of Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial, to operate as a national trust bank that would issue its USD1 stablecoin, manage the reserves backing it and provide digital-asset custody services under federal supervision.
That structure matters more than the headline suggests. Money transmission is regulated state by state, and most crypto platforms spend years assembling money transmitter licenses one jurisdiction at a time. A national bank charter changes that math. Federally chartered banks can benefit from National Bank Act preemption, which can displace state licensing requirements when those requirements prevent or significantly interfere with the exercise of federally authorized banking powers.
In June 2026, OCC Interpretive Letter 1192 specifically confirmed that national trust banks are not required to obtain state money-transmitter licenses for federally authorized activities, including certain payments-related activities. The interpretation was discussed by law firms including Gibson Dunn and Norton Rose Fulbright.
World Liberty is joining, not originating, this pattern. In December 2025, the OCC conditionally approved national trust bank applications from Ripple and approved applications from BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos to convert their existing state trust companies into national trust banks.
One federal charter beats 50 state licensing regimes. That’s five major entrants choosing banking infrastructure as their on-ramp into regulated onchain finance, alongside Coinbase choosing exchange infrastructure as its own.
Different door, same building: Exchanges prove the demand side, while bank charters prove the rails side, that money movement can run through one federally supervised structure instead of a 50-state patchwork. Neither gets the industry to native issuance alone, but both are necessary groundwork for it.
Every champion builds the runway for what comes next.
I coined the term RWA+ to describe the next phase of this industry: infrastructure where the token is the security from the moment it’s created, not a receipt layered on top of one, moving through rails federally supervised by design rather than assembled state by state after the fact.
That vision only becomes reality if enough capital, attention and regulatory comfort flow into tokenization first, on both the demand side and the rails side. Coinbase, World Liberty and the other major players moving equities, stablecoins and custody onchain in 2026 are all doing that work simultaneously, from different starting points.
The tokenization industry doesn’t need fewer champions right now. It needs more of them, moving more asset classes onchain, building more of the underlying rails, faster than anyone expected a couple of years ago. Every wrapped stock that trades successfully today, and every charter proving regulated money movement can run through a single federal structure, makes the case for native issuance easier to make tomorrow.
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