Can you buy stocks and etf’s with crypto ?

Lately, I felt a bit unhappy about crypto in general. I can't shake the feeling that crypto has become just one more investment vehicle on markets. The problem with that is that if I compare some tokens with stocks, then stocks are backed by real world assets like buildings, patents, customer bases and real income. Whereas most crypto have been created by a bunch of anonymous people that had a great idea once but after a while, it's not really clear what is backing this crypto.

As paradoxically as it sounds, I have the feeling that crypto have become shares that have very in-transparent backing in most cases. My thinking is to slowly transit from crypto into real shares and I was wondering whether it is possible to do so without exiting the crypto ecosystem.

Wrapped Stocks and ETF's

While researching that question, I found several versions of shares that are wrapped on blockchains. There are xStocks and also Ondo shares and ETF's. They are traded mostly on blockchains like arbitrum or solana. However, there is a problem with these shares in my opinion. First of all there is the problem of liquidity, there are quite a few titles that can be purchased but for many of them the supply is ridiculously low.

This is an example of an Ondo ETF but as you can see there are only 14 parts in circulation and they are distributed on several blockchains. This means that the market offers very little liquidity.

It's the same for a lot of xStocks. There are probably only about 20 such wrapped stocks or etfs that have real liquidity and they are mostly the big tech titles like Tesla, Nvidia and consort. Mainly American growth titles.

The big advantage with xStocks and Ondo shares is that you can purchase them on an aggregator like jupiter on Solana and then keep them in your own wallet. However, I strongly suggest that before you do a swap, you check the real address directly from their homepages. This to make sure that you don't end up buying a fake token.

The problem I see with these titles is that it might become tricky to actually sell them without a big slippage. Also there is an additional smart contract risk and of course the risk inherent to the companies that wrapped these tokens.

Real stocks on CEX's

Quite a lot of CEX's propose the trading of xstocks or ondo stocks but recently, I saw also that it's now possible to trade real stocks on platforms like Binance or MEXC

I'm on both of these exchanges because they both allow to trade Hive. Before you can start to trade real stocks on Binance and MEXC, you need to complete KYC and I think that American people are not allowed to trade stocks there. Probably, there are some restrictions for other countries as well. I don't really know and I encourage to research before doing anything.

You now have access to a huge amount of American traded stocks and etf's. There are some transaction fees but they are not higher than on normal financial platforms. Also, you can receive real dividends on your account in the form of USDT or USDC. Keep in mind that on all dividends, the US government will deduct 30% withholding tax before the dividends are paid out.

Even if we are all aware of the risks that are inherent of these platforms (not my keys not my tokens) and also the fact that there is an intermediary between binance and the markets, you can opt among a huge choice of traditional financial products and purchase them with stable coins.

Links:

xStocks
Ondo shares and ETF's
jupiter
Binance
MEXC

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