Kraken acquires BackedFi (xStocks) and took another look at the tokenized stocks market: Daily trading volume for some popular stocks is around $10M-$30M, like TSLAx, NVDAx, CRCLx, with total on-chain trading volume reaching $400M. CEXs have even more activity, and recently Binance Wallet integrated this as well, so there should be some growth in volume. For now, simple trade and hold strategies seem less appealing, especially with Perps entering the scene. It’s time to look for new opportunities. The focus should shift back to DeFi combinations. In the past few months, the market had very high expectations for this sector, but the current state clearly hasn’t met those expectations. Plus, Hyperliquid HIP3 has already started offering perpetual contracts for U.S. stocks. With this kind of competition, the appeal of simply holding and trading tokenized stocks is diminishing. More project teams should prioritize building around DeFi in the future. Currently, xStocks can already be used as collateral for lending on Kamino, achieving initial DeFi composability. Although the scale is still small, I think this is a good start and experiment. The xStocks solution is backed 1:1 by real stocks, fully collateralized, verified by Chainlink PoR for underlying assets, permissionless, and freely transferable. This provides the essential foundation for integration into DeFi applications. In many other solutions, users can’t transfer tokens to public chains outside the platform, which locks them into the single trade and hold domain. These solutions face significant limitations. xStocks’ openness gives it a certain advantage in this regard, and this could be a breakthrough point for tokenized stocks in the future.