The US stock market is breaking records, with the S&P 500 index exceeding 7,534 points. It has risen 75% over the past five years, but only a small part of the world is benefiting from this growth. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong believes the traditional financial system has become a closed club, and tokenization is the only solution.
“Imagine sitting on the sidelines watching this growth happen,” Armstrong wrote. He says billions of people don’t even have to imagine it because severe geographic barriers, complex compliance requirements and brokerage bureaucracy mean there’s no practical way to directly buy shares in major U.S. technology companies.
Imagine sitting on the sidelines watching this growth happen.
Billions of people don’t need to imagine. They can’t invest in American companies. While the S&P 500 has risen 75% over the past five years, the majority of the world has been forced to sit on the sidelines.
Tokenized stocks are… pic.twitter.com/DKqeOEcwhq
— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) July 16, 2026
Experts estimate that more than half of the adult population in developing countries is now completely cut off from global capital markets.
“Everything Exchange”: Bringing Wall Street to your smartphone
Cryptocurrency exchanges have decided to take advantage of this gap by launching “Everything Exchange”. A month ago, Coinbase launched stock trading in tokens backed 1:1 by real stocks for users outside the US through an offshore entity.
The idea is simple. It cuts out the Wall Street intermediaries and allows anyone in the world to buy fractional shares of Apple or Nvidia using an ordinary smartphone with internet access while receiving real dividends.
The most interesting thing is that Wall Street itself is no longer working against this trend, but is trying to lead it. Clearing giant DTCC, which processes hundreds of billions of dollars worth of transactions, completed a test this week in collaboration with JPMorgan and BlackRock that included transferring equity ETFs to blockchain infrastructure.
As the total market for tokenized real-world assets (RWA) exceeds $33 billion and the U.S. Senate moves toward a final vote on the Transparency Act, equity tokenization is giving retail investors a new edge in the battle, with traditional brokers at risk of losing their century-old monopoly for good, according to rwa.xyz.
