Base Creator Jesse Pollak Sees Tokenization Supercycle in Equities and Non-Dollar Stablecoins

$70 million to $100 million. That is the daily trading volume Coinbase's tokenized stocks have generated on Base since launching roughly six weeks ago, and it is the number Jesse Pollak is pointing to as evidence that the next major crypto cycle will be built on real-world assets, not speculative tokens.

Pollak, the creator of Base, Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 network, made the prediction this week, arguing that tokenized equities and non-dollar stablecoins will be the two engines of what he calls a "tokenization supercycle." The framing is bold, but the early volume data gives it more grounding than most cycle predictions tend to have.

Tokenized equities, stocks represented as on-chain assets, can trade around the clock, seven days a week, unlike the traditional market structure that closes at 4 p.m. Eastern and shuts entirely on weekends. They can also be posted as collateral in decentralized lending protocols, unlocking liquidity that traditional brokerages simply cannot offer. A retail investor holding tokenized Apple shares could borrow stablecoins against them at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. That is not possible today in any conventional brokerage account.

The non-dollar stablecoin angle is equally significant. Most stablecoin volume globally runs through USD-pegged assets, which creates currency exposure for users outside the United States. Euro-denominated, yen-denominated, and other local-currency stablecoins would let users in those markets participate in on-chain finance without taking on dollar risk as a baseline. For Base, which has been aggressively expanding its global developer footprint since launching in July 2023, non-dollar stablecoins represent a direct path to user bases that current DeFi infrastructure largely ignores.

Tokenization of real-world assets has been building since 2023, with protocols like Ondo Finance and Centrifuge pioneering tokenized treasuries and bonds. But equities represent a meaningfully harder problem: they carry corporate governance rights, dividend entitlements, and a far more complex regulatory surface area than fixed-income instruments. The $70-100 million in daily Base volume suggests the market is willing to engage with that complexity, though the question of who is actually trading matters. Early volumes in new asset categories tend to concentrate among a handful of institutional desks and sophisticated retail traders, and that concentration can flatter headline numbers before genuine broad adoption arrives.

Regulatory risk is the sharpest counterargument. Tokenized securities sit squarely in the jurisdiction of the SEC and equivalent bodies globally, and the frameworks governing them remain unsettled. Coinbase has navigated its own extended regulatory scrutiny in the United States, and any adverse ruling on whether tokenized stocks constitute unregistered securities offerings could curtail the product's growth quickly. Competing products from traditional financial infrastructure providers, firms with deeper liquidity pools and established compliance frameworks, are also likely to emerge if the market proves durable.

Global equity markets represent roughly $110 trillion in market capitalization. Even fractional penetration of that figure into tokenized form would dwarf the current total value locked across all of DeFi, which sits in the low hundreds of billions. Pollak is not predicting that tokenization captures a majority of that market. He is predicting that it captures enough to define the next cycle's narrative and capital flows, much the way NFTs defined 2021 and liquid staking defined 2022-2023.

Base has grown into one of Ethereum's fastest-scaling Layer 2 networks, and Coinbase's institutional distribution gives it a credible path to onboarding the kind of users who would actually trade tokenized equities rather than simply speculate on them. Whether $70-100 million in daily volume becomes $700 million or stalls out will be the real test of whether the supercycle framing holds. The infrastructure is live. The volume is real. The regulatory ceiling is the variable that no on-chain data can resolve.