Binance’s bStocks are tokenized certificates representing an interest in underlying US shares, backed one-to-one at a regulated custodian and issued under an Abu Dhabi Global Market prospectu
Major crypto exchanges have spent 2026 racing to offer their users exposure to traditional stocks, but the specific products they have built to do it differ meaningfully in structure, something easy to overlook when the headlines all describe some version of “crypto exchange adds stock trading.” Binance and KuCoin illustrate two distinct approaches that have emerged within this broader trend.
Binance’s approach, called bStocks, structures each token as a certificate issued by BTech Holdings Limited, a Binance group affiliate, representing an interest in underlying US shares that Binance says are held one-to-one at a regulated custodian. The tokens run as BEP-20 tokens on BNB Smart Chain, Binance’s own blockchain, and trade 24 hours a day with what the company describes as sub-second settlement. Binance structured the product under an Abu Dhabi Global Market prospectus, making bStocks the first tokenized securities admitted to the ADGM Financial Services Regulatory Authority’s official list, and the products are explicitly not offered to US persons.
KuCoin’s stock-index perpetual contracts work completely differently. Rather than backing each token with an actual underlying share held somewhere, KuCoin’s contracts are purely synthetic derivatives that simply track a stock’s price movement, settling entirely in USDT with no underlying asset changing hands at all. KuCoin’s own announcement introducing the first such contracts, tracking Tesla and MicroStrategy, described them explicitly as not conferring ownership or involving any share delivery, a structure that applies the same logic crypto exchanges have long used for cryptocurrency perpetual futures to traditional equities instead.
Both approaches share a common appeal for crypto-native traders: access to well-known public companies without needing to open a separate traditional brokerage account, and the ability to trade that exposure around the clock, including nights, weekends, and holidays when the actual underlying stock markets are closed. That round-the-clock access is arguably the single biggest differentiator these products offer relative to simply buying the real stock through a conventional broker.
The regulatory and structural differences between a backed, certificate-style product like bStocks and a purely synthetic derivative like KuCoin’s perpetuals matter significantly for how each should be understood by anyone using them, since a backed certificate theoretically carries exposure tied to real custodied shares, while a purely synthetic perpetual contract’s value depends entirely on the exchange’s own pricing mechanism and willingness to honor the contract, with no underlying asset standing behind it at all. The explainer, published on Binance’s own learn page, lays out the backed-certificate structure in detail, underscoring just how different that model is from a purely synthetic alternative.
This post first appeared in Inside the Crypto Industry’s Rush to Tokenize Wall Street
