Nasdaq and tokenized stocks, digital asset treasuries, and Justin Sun had Web3 talking this past week.
Nasdaq’s bet on tokenized stocks
“If the SEC allows tokenized equities to be traded on the Nasdaq, it would mark a watershed moment for the crypto industry – digital assets finally integrated into the world’s most significant financial market.
“That’s cause for celebration, but also a reminder that builders in blockchain have little time left to prepare. This week alone, Nasdaq’s daily trading volume topped $450 billion – around ten times the seven-day average across major crypto exchanges. Even if just 1% of that flow moves into tokenized equities, it would push Web3 infrastructure to its limits.
“The only way to be ready is to keep testing, scaling, and pushing these limits every single day.”
– Mangirdas Ptašinskas, head of marketing and community at Galxe
“Nasdaq stepping in feels way bigger than what Galaxy, Backed, or Dinari have been doing. Those guys are crypto-first, pushing tokenized stocks more as experiments or niche products.
“With Nasdaq, you’re suddenly talking about mainstream legitimacy, actual investor protections, and the SEC breathing down their necks. Ownership rights differ, too, in that most tokenized plays today are synthetic exposures, not true equity claims.
“Settlement on-chain is instant in theory, but Nasdaq still has to tie back to legacy clearing. Retail can’t easily touch xStocks or Dinari without hoops, while Nasdaq could open the door. The real snag, though, is cultural; traditional finance isn’t comfy with blockchains yet, and regulators are painfully slow.”
– Hedy Wang, co-founder and CEO of Block Street
“Nasdaq entering tokenized stocks is not another incremental experiment; it is the most established piece of market infrastructure beginning to re-platform itself in software.
“The difference between Nasdaq and the crypto-native experiments is fundamental. Nasdaq is not offering a derivative or a wrapper. It is taking the actual equity, with shareholder rights, dividends, and DTC settlement, and adding an on-chain interface. That matters because it turns tokenization from a proxy market into the real market.
“Galaxy’s move to tokenize its own stock is the closest parallel, because it preserves full ownership rights. By contrast, initiatives like Backed’s xStocks or Dinari’s broker-dealer structures create synthetic or price-linked exposure that can trade, but they do not deliver the same legal finality of true equity ownership.
“When you break it down, everything comes down to four categories. Ownership: Nasdaq and Galaxy preserve it, while most other platforms provide synthetic exposure. Settlement: Nasdaq keeps the gold-standard DTC clearing process, but layers token settlement as an option, while crypto-native platforms settle entirely on public chains or proprietary ledgers.
“Access: a Nasdaq listing means universal brokerage access, while today’s tokenized equities are gated, KYC’d, or offshore only. Compliance: Nasdaq brings the surveillance, reporting, and investor-protection apparatus of the largest regulated market, while most on-chain equity projects rely on exemptions or lighter frameworks.
“Nasdaq still faces real challenges. It has to reconcile corporate actions seamlessly across both systems, keep registries and wallets in sync, map addresses to compliant identities at scale, and guarantee that token settlement does not fragment liquidity or create hidden risk. These are non-trivial engineering and governance problems.
“But if Nasdaq pulls it off, it sets a new standard. Instead of tokenized equities being niche, synthetic side products, they become the exact same stocks investors already own, upgraded with 24/7 programmable settlement.
“That is the true prize. This is not gold paint on old rails. This is the legacy system beginning to converge with the Internet of value. And that is what makes this moment more significant than every tokenized stock experiment that came before.”
– Sid Sridhar, founder and CEO of BIMA Labs
Digital asset treasuries: Compounded risks or investor-first models?
“At first glance, DATs sound like they’re built with investors in mind, in the sense that they are transparent, programmable, and supposedly safer than the usual opaque vehicles. But when one public DAT starts putting capital into another DAT, the exposures stack up fast. You don’t always see it on the surface, but underneath it’s this compounding of risks that feels a lot like hidden leverage.
“Some commentators will call that innovation, others will just call it dangerous. Personally, I think the bigger picture is choice. If you’ve got permissionless margin trading and lending available for any token alongside these DAT structures, investors can decide how much risk to take rather than being forced into one-size-fits-all strategies.”
– Sky, founder of LIKWID
“In 2025, DATs represent an emerging class of programmable financial vehicles that promise greater transparency, governance, and investor alignment. However, when a DAT invests directly into another public DAT, the result is a layering of exposures that can compound risk across participants, creating hidden interdependencies.
“For institutions evaluating adoption, this underscores the importance of rigorous compliance, standardized disclosure, and operational safeguards. At the same time, the rise of RWA-native blockchain infrastructure offers a framework to balance innovation with regulatory expectations. By embedding compliance and scalability at the protocol level, DATs can evolve into a structure that meets institutional standards while still enabling broader market participation and sustainable growth.”
– Blake Jeong, co-CEO of IOST
Bitcoin treasury company shares are falling
“Bitcoin treasury companies have enjoyed a period where simply buying and holding was enough to generate market enthusiasm and justify lofty valuations. That moment has passed. As we’ve seen with recent share price declines, investors are now asking tougher questions about sustainability and capital efficiency.
“The next phase will require greater creativity in structuring exposure. We’re likely to see balance sheets evolve beyond straightforward bitcoin holdings into hybrids that may include bonds, preferred instruments, and other yield-generating structures. Active management will increasingly become the differentiator, not just passive accumulation.
“At the same time, a new frontier is emerging in Ethereum treasury strategies, where the design space for staking, yield, and tokenized instruments is arguably even broader. Treasury companies that can combine disciplined risk management with innovative structuring will be the ones that survive this transition and continue to attract investor multiples.”
– Karl Naïm, chief commercial officer of XBTO
“The decline in valuations for bitcoin treasury companies reflects the fact that simply holding bitcoin is no longer enough to justify premium multiples. Investors now expect capital efficiency and want to see treasuries actively managed, not passively stored.
“The next generation of treasury managers are deploying strategies like structured products, lending facilities, restaking, and credit origination to turn dormant bitcoin into productive assets. This does not mean abandoning BTC exposure, but rather layering financial engineering and infrastructure on top of it to unlock liquidity, generate yield, and reduce risk.
“Ultimately a billion-dollar bitcoin treasury that earns steady yield and demonstrates prudent risk management is more attractive than a static balance sheet, and valuations will favor firms that bridge traditional capital markets with bitcoin treasuries instead of those that sit on coins and hope for appreciation.”
– Sridhar
“The appropriate investment horizon for blue-chip crypto assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum is five to 10 years. That principle holds whether you’re an individual investor or a company structuring a treasury strategy.
“We’ve seen this play out already: when Bitcoin was down, Michael Saylor’s strategy was derided; now that Bitcoin has hit new all-time highs, the same strategy is being hailed as visionary. The real question is whether you trust a company’s treasury conviction more than your own.
“Companies starting now—or in the last nine months—are effectively buying near cycle tops. Even if their long-term strategy is solid, they will always be a leg down from firms that accumulated earlier. True gains in this market come from holding high conviction when others call it crazy, not chasing the trend once it’s obvious.”
– Dylan Dewdney, founder, Kuvi.ai
Justin Sun’s travails
“Justin Sun said his assets are frozen. We can confirm this on-chain. His labeled wallet 0x5ab2…da74 holds about 544.7M WLFI. On Sept. 4, the WLFI contract’s guardian address (0x407f…c178) called the function “guardianSetBlacklistStatus”, setting that wallet to blacklisted = true. From that moment, transfers from the wallet are programmatically blocked. So: ~545M WLFI were frozen.
“The 50M WLFI transfer screenshots show that before the blacklist, Sun’s wallet transferred 50M WLFI to another address. This was done before his main WLFI wallet was frozen. The 50 tokens were earlier sent to HTX. Perhaps as a retaliation of the main wallet having its WLFI tokens frozen. (In case World Liberty Fi decided to also freeze that wallet).
“We can tell from on-chain data alone that his address is blacklisted. The WLFI contract exposes an “isBlacklisted(address)” function, and the Sept. 4 transaction log shows it was explicitly toggled to “true” for his wallet.”
– Nicolai Søndergaard, research analyst at Nansen