Bitget Opens Tokenised Stock Transfers for 3,000 US Equities
Bitget has opened a route for investors to move shares they already hold at a traditional broker onto its exchange, launching a tokenised stock transfer feature that covers more than 3,000 US-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds. Existing holdings are converted into on-chain tokens, which Bitget calls rTokens, that can then be traded, lent, borrowed against or posted as margin inside the exchange.
For finance professionals, the detail that matters sits beneath the convenience. To make the transfer work, an investor signs their real shares over to a single US broker-dealer, Alpaca, the firm that already sits behind most of the tokenised-equity market.
What has Bitget actually launched?
The feature turns an existing brokerage position into a token in two steps. A user first initiates a Free of Payment transfer, moving the shares from their external broker into a Bitget-designated omnibus account held at Alpaca. Once the shares settle, Bitget's In-Kind Tokenisation Network mints the matching rTokens at a one-to-one ratio and credits them to the user's spot account. Bitget estimates the process takes about 10 business days. Transfers in are free, while moving assets back out carries a fee.
The tokens are not the investor's registered shares. They are instruments backed one-to-one by stock that Bitget's custody arrangement holds through Alpaca, a broker-dealer registered with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority whose balances are covered by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation up to $500,000. Holders receive price exposure and dividend equivalents settled in the stablecoin USDT rather than a direct shareholding with voting rights. Once inside Bitget, eligible rTokens can be used for spot trading, margin, borrowing and lending, and yield products, subject to eligibility.
Who actually holds the shares behind the tokens?
This is the part the announcement understates. Bitget's transfer runs through an omnibus account at Alpaca, the same self-clearing broker that custodies or clears the bulk of the sector. Alpaca says it handles roughly 94% of tokenised US stocks and ETFs and holds more than $1.5 billion of the underlying shares as of July 2026, up from about $480 million in November 2025, and independent trackers broadly corroborate its lead. Ondo Finance and Kraken's xStocks both route through the same firm. Only Robinhood, which keeps custody in-house, sits meaningfully outside it.
That concentration is the structural story of tokenised equities. A market pitched on removing intermediaries has produced one dominant intermediary, and Bitget's feature channels more retail stock into it. For an investor, the practical questions are counterparty ones: what happens to pooled shares in an omnibus account if the custodian, the issuer or the exchange runs into trouble, and how quickly tokens can be redeemed for the real thing.
How big is Bitget's rToken business?
Bitget built the transfer on top of Reality, the real-world asset platform it introduced in mid-2026 to issue rTokens in-house after previously relying on Ondo-issued tokens. The company says rToken assets under management reached about $114 million by 6 July and that cumulative transactions had passed two million. That places Bitget well behind Alpaca's $1.5 billion in custodied shares and Ondo's issuance of several hundred million dollars, though the transfer feature is designed to narrow the gap by importing equity that already exists in brokerage accounts rather than waiting for fresh on-chain buying.
Kraken has pursued the same vertical integration from a different direction, buying Backed Finance, the issuer of the xStocks line, to pull issuance, trading and settlement in-house. The race in tokenised stocks is increasingly about who controls the plumbing, not who lists the most tickers.
What should investors weigh before transferring?
Three points stand out. The roughly 10 business day processing window is long for anyone who wants to stay nimble. The asymmetry between free inbound and chargeable outbound transfers raises the cost of changing course. And the tokens carry the risks of any synthetic equity wrapper, including reliance on the issuer's terms and the custodian's solvency.
The sector's track record under stress is also short. When SpaceX listed on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX in June 2026, exchanges including Bitget, Binance and Bybit had to refund customers who had bought tokenised pre-IPO access after those offerings could not be settled as sold. Bitget is now seeding the new transfer feature with rewards denominated in a tokenised SpaceX stock token, rSPCX, an incentive that steers early inflows toward one high-profile name.
Why This Matters to FinanceX Readers
Tokenised equities have moved from novelty to infrastructure question. The competitive edge no longer lies in offering on-chain stock exposure, which is now widely available, but in owning custody, issuance and settlement. Bitget's transfer feature is a bid to capture equity that investors already hold, convert it into a format the exchange controls, and keep it working across trading, lending and yield. For investors and allocators, the takeaway is to look past the on-chain convenience and price the counterparty concentration beneath it: a fast-growing slice of the public-equity market now depends on a single broker-dealer's custody desk.
