Tokenized stock projects: Growing dependence on a single brokerage

The market for tokenized stocks is increasingly entering a fragile situation: the leading projects in this industry are structurally dependent on the same broker. Reports indicate that Alpaca, a California-based broker-dealer, has become the central trading infrastructure for this emerging sector. This concentrated dependency reveals a fundamental problem within the still-young tokenization industry.

Alpaca as the Central Trading Platform

Prominent players such as Ondo Finance, Krakeens xStocks, and Dinari rely on Alpaca’s services to acquire the physical stocks backing their respective token products. NS3.AI has documented this development, highlighting how strongly individual projects have accepted this dependency. For investors, this means that the entire supply chain of stock token ecosystems ultimately operates through a single brokerage.

Causes of Broker Dependency

The reason for this unhealthy concentration is simply the reality that few alternative brokers are willing to collaborate with tokenization companies. While traditional financial institutions still view this technology with skepticism, Alpaca offers one of the few practical solutions available. This scarcity of suitable partners inevitably leads to centralized trading execution, making the business models of individual projects entirely dependent on this single entity.

Risks of Concentrated Infrastructure

Relying on a single brokerage poses significant risks: system outages, regulatory changes, or business decisions by Alpaca could destabilize the entire sector. As long as the market does not develop an alternative to this concentrated structure, the tokenized stock market remains vulnerable to shocks originating from a single institution.