Crypto neobanks add tokenised stocks and metals to their collateral menus
Onchain consumer apps are converging on a familiar product set: a yield account, a card, and now borrowing against tokenised equities and gold.
NEW YORK —
A cluster of consumer crypto applications has spent the summer adding tokenised equities, gold and short-dated treasury exposure to products that a year ago offered little more than a stablecoin balance and a debit card.
The mechanics lean on existing onchain lending markets. A user buys a tokenised representation of a stock or a metal, deposits it as collateral, and borrows dollars against it at a loan-to-value ratio set by governance. From the app's perspective, none of the credit machinery has to be built in-house.
The design gives these products a familiar shape — margin lending, essentially, with a mobile interface — and the familiar risk that comes with it. Tokenised equity markets trade thinly outside exchange hours, and a liquidation triggered at three in the morning meets a book that cannot absorb it.
Consumer-protection advocates have raised a second concern about disclosure. A tokenised share is a claim on an issuer that holds the underlying, not the share itself, and the strength of that claim in an insolvency has not been tested at scale.
Providers argue the transparency runs the other way: collateral, loans and liquidation thresholds are all visible onchain, which is more than most margin lenders publish.