Binance Research: Tokenized Stocks Hit 11% of DEX Trading, BNB Chain Leading

Meme Coins Cede Ground on DEX

Tokenized stocks averaged 11% of decentralized exchange (DEX) trading volume in September, a level that would have been unthinkable a year earlier, according to the latest Binance Research analysis. Meme coins, the segment those equities are absorbing volume from, held a 17% average share over the same month, leaving a gap of six percentage points between the two categories. The wider crypto market stayed range-bound through the period, with the Bitcoin (BTC) price sitting near $85,400 as of publication.

The report's records show tokenized equities, meaning traditional shares issued as blockchain tokens, held close to a 0% share of DEX activity through 2025 and for most of the first half of 2026. The inflection arrived late in that window: in late July, tokenized stocks briefly passed meme coins on the share metric for the first time, and by September their portion of turnover had settled at a double-digit average.

Meme coin trading tells the other side of the story. The category's DEX share swung violently between 6% and 53% during 2025, a band that mirrored the boom-and-bust rhythm of that market cycle. That intensity has faded. September's 17% average sits far below last year's peaks and points to a portion of on-chain turnover rotating toward assets with exposure to real-world equity prices. “The on-chain economy is evolving from its roots in crypto-native assets towards a broader financial network, where crypto and traditional assets trade side by side on shared, always-on rails,” the analysis states. Our reading at COINOTAG is that the shift is compositional rather than cyclical: each point of DEX share the equities add comes largely out of a meme coin segment that no longer commands the speculative flow it carried in 2025.

Tokenized Stock Market Crosses $3 Billion

The DEX gains track a broader expansion of the tokenized equity market itself. The category's market capitalization crossed $3 billion during the fourth week of September, based on RWA.xyz figures cited in the report, making tokenized stocks the fastest-growing real-world asset (RWA) category of 2026. Distribution is concentrated: as of mid-September, BNB Chain hosted roughly $1 billion of that market, or about 34% of the total, per the report's own tally.

On-chain settlement activity has scaled faster than market cap. Total transfers of tokenized stocks, a figure that includes trades, climbed from $6 billion in the first quarter to more than $100 billion in the third, a seventeenfold increase in six months. That velocity suggests the tokens circulate actively rather than sit passively in custody wallets.

Decentralized finance has absorbed part of the new supply as well. The report records rising tokenized stock deposits across DeFi protocols over the past year, giving holders yield venues for assets that until recently existed mainly as brokerage-style exposure. The underlying document behind both the DEX-share and market-cap figures is Binance Research's Rewriting the On-Chain Economy, which combines venue-level trading records with RWA.xyz supply data; readers weighing an allocation into the newest issuances should apply standard DYOR screening on collateral and redemption terms.

October Data to Settle the Shift

COINOTAG's view is that the September figures describe an infrastructure story more than a trading story. When equity tokens move from near-zero to 11% of DEX volume within a single year while the market passes $3 billion in capitalization, liquidity, custody and settlement are converging on one always-on rail, and BNB Chain's 34% hosting share indicates which venues capture that flow first. Whether meme coins recover their lost share or tokenized equities close the six-point gap is the concrete data point to watch in October's DEX records.