Indian crypto exchanges are betting that the next wave of growth will come from products linked to real-world assets (RWAs), moving beyond pure cryptocurrency trading. Over the past six to seven months, platforms including CoinSwitch, Mudrex and Bybit have rolled out tokenised stocks.

These are primarily shares of US technology giants such as Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta, and Microsoft, among others, allowing retail investors to gain exposure to these companies at a fraction of the cost of buying a full share.

While it is still nascent in India, globally, the tokenised RWA market has crossed $10 billion in total market capitalisation, growing 10X from $1 billion in early 2024. This spans tokenised equities, commodities, and ETFs, marking a structural shift in how traditional assets are being accessed and traded on-chain, according to data from Binance Research.

What’s driving this?

“Instead of requiring investors to buy an entire share, tokenisation enables fractional exposure, lowering entry barriers and opening up opportunities to a much wider set of retail investors,” explained Ashish Singhal, Co-founder, CoinSwitch.

For instance, if an IPO share costs Rs. 10,000, tokenisation could allow an investor to buy just Rs. 1,000 worth of that share instead of the entire share, Singhal told Moneycontrol.

While CoinSwitch was already offering tokenised stocks, it recently participated in the SpaceX IPO tokenisation campaign. Among the tokenised stocks currently available on CoinSwitch, Tesla and Apple are the best-performing ones on the platform.

Edul Patel, founder and CEO of Mudrex believes that in the next couple of years, his platform is going to be a tokenised asset platform and not a crypto trading platform.

He attributes the market excitement to the recent enactment of the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act) in the US, which effectively legalises stablecoins as payment tokens or payment currency.

This was followed by the recent movement in favour of the proposed Clarity Act that further defined the market structure and regulated the digital assets in the US.

“All the experiments that are happening now with US stocks and equities will grow rapidly… The vast majority of US assets that are being traded through crypto platforms have opened access to US capital markets in a format that was never even possible before,” said Patel.

“The tokenised stocks follow the same price and volume metrics as the underlying stock. It’s no different. Mudrex is seeing quite an uptick in broadly the Mag7 stocks,” Patel said.

How does this work?

Retail investors get access to tokenised stocks by transacting through stablecoins.

As compared to traditional equities, tokenised equities address the issues of cost and accessibility that had long excluded large segments of the global population from global equity markets. “Traditional access routes often carry prohibitive barriers, including restricted brokerage availability, high account minimums, and elevated transaction fees,” a Binance Research note said.

From a legal standpoint in India, Meyyappan Nagappan, Partner, Trilegal, explained that typically, tokenised stocks should fall under VDA (virtual digital asset) regulations, recognised as a separate asset compared to stocks.

“Generally, it should be taxed just like VDAs,” he said.

Nagappan added, “There’s a lot of scope for the Indian government for aligning tax policies for such emerging products.”

Since the tokenised stocks lets retail investors buy a fraction of a company’s share, it will be recorded on the blockchain instead of the entire underlying stock getting transferred, Nagappan said.

SpaceX’s tokenised IPO gambit

In India, CoinSwitch and Bybit were the two exchanges that had opened up tokenised pre-IPO access ahead of the much-hyped SpaceX listing.

Globally, the SpaceX IPO campaign became a pivot for all major exchanges such as Binance, Bybit, Bitget and others to start offering tokenised IPOs. The idea was to democratise IPO access to retail investors that is predominantly held by institutional buyers.

“Tokenised IPOs are an interesting evolution of capital markets because they use blockchain technology to make participation in public offerings more accessible,” said CoinSwitch’s Singhal.

At CoinSwitch, in the last 20 days alone, nearly 1 percent of its monthly platform traffic visited the SpaceX (SPCX) asset page. This interest highlighted the strong retail demand for globally recognised companies like SpaceX, driven largely by the familiarity and aspirational appeal of brands and founders such as Elon Musk, Singhal said.

Running up to the day of the IPO, the exchanges had collected over $1 billion in customer orders in aggregate. The tokenised IPO experiment ultimately failed at the time of listing, as the none of the exchanges were able to allocate the stocks and had to refund the customers.

Industry experts said this wasn’t a technology or a blockchain failure but an infrastructure gap that got exposed. All of these exchanges were depending on the same set of intermediaries to get the actual stocks from SpaceX’s underwriters. Being the largest IPO in the history, the stocks were oversubscribed leading to this setback.

Learning the lessons, the global exchanges, however, are now gearing up for the upcoming unicorn-tier issuers that are at various stages of the listing process in the second half of 2026. These include OpenAI (expected proceeds of around $60 billion) and Anthropic (~ $60 billion), alongside a range of secondary targets in AI, SMR, and uranium themes (combined $20–30 billion).

“The H2 pipeline alone could easily exceed $100 billion,” said Binance Research.