Alpaca, a California-based broker-dealer, has become the dominant custodian of real shares backing tokenized stocks. According to data circulating on social media, Alpaca holds 85.8% of the underlying shares in this market. Token Terminal's analysis put the figure at 83.5% of tokenized stock market capitalization as of October 2026, while Alpaca's own July 2026 report claimed approximately 94% of the tokenized US stocks and ETFs market, backed by more than $1.5 billion in real shares.
Major trading platforms depend on Alpaca's infrastructure. Binance, Robinhood and Coinbase all count among its clients, along with tokenization issuers including Ondo and xStocks. The company services more than 10 issuers and platforms in total, including Binance's bStocks product.
Beyond Storage
Alpaca's role extends past holding shares. The firm handles real-time minting and redemption of tokens, meaning it creates new tokens when buyers arrive and retires them when holders cash out. It also processes corporate actions such as dividends and stock splits that real shareholders receive and token holders expect to mirror.
The Business Model
Alpaca Securities LLC was founded in 2015 and operates as a self-clearing broker-dealer, settling its own trades rather than outsourcing that function. This in-house control over brokerage, custody and settlement positioned the company to offer tokenization as an additional service layer, packaged as its Instant Tokenization Network.
The company raised $135 million in equity financing in July 2026 led by Peak XV, bringing its total capital raised to $435 million.
Implications for the Market
Alpaca's dominant position creates dual considerations for traders and issuers. For traders, the situation offers reassurance that tokens issued by major platforms trace back to real shares held by a regulated broker-dealer rather than an unsecured promise. However, this concentration also presents risk. Any operational disruption, compliance issue or outage at Alpaca could affect multiple major platforms simultaneously, even though traders using different exchanges may believe they are diversifying exposure.
For issuers, the practical calculus favors using an established custodian. Building custody, settlement and corporate-action systems independently is expensive and time-consuming, making an existing provider serving major exchanges an attractive option that reinforces the incumbent's market position.
The discrepancy between Alpaca's self-reported 94% figure and Token Terminal's 83.5% measurement warrants monitoring, as it may reflect different methodologies, dates or emerging competition.
