SEC Declares Tokenized Stocks as Securities – Bullish or Bearish for Crypto?

[HawkTrader]

Real World Assets (RWA) are quickly becoming one of the hottest narratives in crypto. By tokenizing traditionally illiquid assets like bonds, real estate, and even equities, blockchain has enabled a new ecosystem where global investors can gain exposure without the usual barriers.

A good example is Ondo Finance, which recently listed 100+ tokenized stocks across multiple exchanges and DeFi platforms, branding it as “Wall Street without the wall.” That sounded like a bold step forward for mainstream adoption.

Now the SEC has declared tokenized stocks as securities. History shows mixed outcomes with such rulings:

Bitcoin ETFs: SEC approval brought huge inflows and legitimacy (bullish).

ICOs (2017–18): Crackdowns wiped the market (bearish).

Stablecoins & XRP: Regulatory pressure slowed adoption and caused sell-offs.


For DeFi protocols like Maker, Aave, and Ondo that already integrate RWAs, this could go two ways:

Bullish: Clear rules attract institutions, boosting liquidity and legitimacy.

Bearish: Heavy compliance could push projects offshore and restrict retail access.

So, is this going to be bullish or bearish?

[Odusko]

I have seen a real estate token, project but the worst thing is that most of them never ended well, so physical stocks and securities tokenized projects that aimed at anything other than providing liqudities for the project is going to fail in the long run, and the only way for those tokens to do well is when their limit the scope to only being project being a utility token but anything that make them get exposed to the global exchange market, their will hardly survive on that level.

[nelson4lov]

It is bearish for Real World Asset (RWA) projects but not the entire crypto market.

The top majors like Bitcoin, Ethereum or even solana have almost exposure even though some projects building on their chain and ecosystem might be RWA-focused. Now, it is bearish for those projects because tokenized stocks used to be one of their loudest message whenever the topic of RWA was mentioned in crypto.

If anyone wants stocks but don't want to deal with tokenized version, they can just create an onchain stock market protocol. Only problem is that the stock market has its time window for opening and closing whereas crypto is 24/7, 7 days a week, 30 days a month and 12 months a year.

[Hispo]

To me it is pretty clear those who are interested the most on this new market to go bearish are the owners and operators of brokers and stock providers. If these protocols got their way and managed to give access to the stock market to people without having to rely on centralized services, then it would be just matter of time for those brokers to lose a significant percentage of their volume and thus a significant percentage of their profit.

The SEC in this case will undoubtedly side with brokers and try to keep stocks as centralized as possible, the SEC and the people behind it are already feeling uncomfortable with having to allow people to trade Bitcoin freely, they don't want to lose the stock market to people who develop defi protocols.