xStocks Secures Majority Control Over Tokenized Equity Deposits in DeFi

If you've ever wanted to generate yield on equity exposure without actually selling the position, that kind of concentration in a young category deserves a slow look before you commit capital.

What's actually underneath the headline

xStocks, built on Solana by Backed Finance, issues SPL tokens that mirror underlying US equities and ETFs held at regulated custodians on a one-to-one basis. The catalog has expanded past 700 assets since the late-June 2025 launch, and cumulative transaction volume across centralized and decentralized exchanges had crossed $35 billion by mid-2026. Onchain holdings tied to the platform reportedly reached around $225 million earlier in the year.

The figure I keep returning to, though, is on the lending side. xStocks controls 86.5% of tokenized-stock lending TVL, a pool that currently totals roughly $23.1 million — modest in absolute terms, but unusually concentrated. Kamino's lending markets alone absorb about 82.6% of that TVL, which means a meaningful share of "yield on tokenized stocks" is really one issuer's tokens sitting inside one protocol's book. Seven of the top ten tokenized stocks by trading volume belong to xStocks as of February 2026, which reinforces the same picture from a slightly different angle.

The workflow, and where it plugs in

Practically speaking, the loop looks like this: you mint or buy an xStocks token — say, Apple or an S&P 500 wrapper — and instead of letting it sit, deposit it into Kamino as collateral to borrow stablecoins against it. If borrowing isn't your style, you can pair it into a Raydium liquidity pool to earn trading fees. Either path turns a passive equity position into working capital.

The integrations are spreading beyond that core pair. Ether.fi's recent summer release added tokenized asset trading to its self-custodial app, leaning on Aave (deployed on Optimism) for portfolio-backed lending while explicitly naming xStocks among its supported assets. Portfolio-level borrowing starts at a 4% rate, with loan proceeds spendable through an integrated cash card — useful if you're trying to keep equity exposure intact while still funding everyday expenses.

Navigating the trade-offs

Here's where the patience pays off. xStocks offers depth and a familiar workflow, but you're leaning on a single issuer, a single chain (Solana), and a narrow set of dominant venues on the lending side. That's efficient capital deployment today, and it's also a concentrated bet.

I'd watch three things before sizing up: actual utilization rates inside the tokenized-stock collateral markets, since a low-utilization, high-borrow pool signals that supply has outrun borrowers; how the issuer handles redemptions, corporate actions, and custody across 700 names; and whether rival tokenized-equity issuers begin moving meaningful TVL off xStocks. Right now, xStocks isn't just leading the lane — it is the lane. For passive-income strategies built on tokenized equities, that consolidation is both the opportunity and the thing to underwrite carefully.