If an investor trades a tokenized share of a U.S. company on a blockchain, which business earns the most from that transaction？ The token issuer may charge a fee. The trading venue may earn a spread or commission. Market makers may capture part of the execution economics. The network receives transaction fees, which could be modest compared with the total trade value.
This is the unanswered economic question beneath the latest tokenization forecasts from Base creator Jesse Pollak.
In an October 9 interview with The Block at TOKEN2049 Singapore, Pollak identified tokenized equities and non-dollar stablecoins as major areas of future growth. He said Coinbase's tokenized-stock offering on Base, launched roughly six weeks earlier, was seeing about $70 million to $100 million in daily trading volume, with approximately 50 stocks available and a target of 250 by the end of October.
Those figures are company-side statements from the interview. They are useful indicators of what the team says it is building, but they are not a substitute for independently reconciled execution, liquidity or customer data.
A bigger catalog does not guarantee a deeper market
The appeal of onchain equities is straightforward: global distribution, transferability and the possibility of trading outside the hours of conventional U.S. stock exchanges. But the economic quality of that market depends on much more than how many familiar tickers appear in an app.
A token tracking the price of an equity can represent different legal arrangements. Investors may own a claim on underlying shares, a contractual obligation from an issuer or another form of economic exposure. Those distinctions affect shareholder rights, dividends, corporate actions, redemption and the failure risk of intermediaries.
Trading volume needs similar unpacking. A daily notional figure does not reveal how much order size the market can absorb, the spread during quiet hours, whether activity is concentrated in a few tickers, how many distinct users are trading or how much volume comes from repeated turnover by the same participants.
The 50-to-250-stock expansion target would broaden the menu. Whether liquidity follows those additional listings is a separate commercial test. The first products with meaningful depth may dominate activity even as the catalog grows.
Local-currency stablecoins have a different economics problem
Pollak also cited Base's support for 32 stablecoins across 21 currencies. He pointed to a rise in the circulating supply of non-dollar stablecoins from roughly $400 million in September 2025 to $3.3 billion in September 2026, or about 8.25 times the initial amount based on those rounded inputs.
The growth claim is material, but the underlying supply classification was not independently reconstructed for this article. More importantly, token count and aggregate supply do not show that a local-currency payment network works well for its intended users.
Someone who earns, spends and pays taxes in a local currency may have little reason to hold digital dollars for every transaction. A reliable local stablecoin could reduce that extra currency conversion. Yet adoption depends on whether people can redeem it, what foreign-exchange spread they face, whether counterparties accept it and whether its issuer can operate within local rules.
This is a harder distribution problem than simply launching another ticker. Demand for a naira-, rupiah- or euro-denominated stablecoin must be established in each relevant market. A collection of thinly traded tokens can look like broad currency coverage while providing little practical payment liquidity.
Base is betting on a financial distribution stack
Pollak described three priorities for Base: trading, payments and financing. Rather than marketing a generic Layer 2, the network wants developers and businesses to use its infrastructure for transactions, machine-initiated payments and onchain credit. The interview also discussed work toward dramatically higher throughput, including a million-transaction-per-second ambition associated with Cloudflare. That ambition should be treated as an engineering target, not a measured current production rate.
The pieces of the strategy reinforce one another in theory. Traders need settlement assets; payment applications need liquid currencies; financing markets need collateral, prices and reliable settlement. A network that attracts activity across all three may become more useful to applications and intermediaries.
But the revenue does not automatically flow to the underlying chain in proportion to transaction volume. Tokenized equities could be a large business for exchanges, custodians and liquidity providers even if base-layer or L2 execution fees remain inexpensive. Conversely, low network fees can be good for user adoption while limiting the direct economic value captured by infrastructure.
The distinction matters whenever investors equate the growth of onchain finance with the value of any one network or associated asset. A strong product-market fit at the application layer and a strong revenue model for a blockchain are related possibilities, not the same result.
Pollak's interview is most interesting as a statement of strategic focus. Base is positioning itself around financial services people may actually use, rather than competing solely on abstract throughput claims. Whether that becomes a durable advantage will be visible in repeat customers, execution quality, redeemable stablecoin balances, sustainable financing activity and the distribution of fees across the ecosystem.
A tokenization market can become much larger without every participant capturing a proportionate share of the value. That is the question worth keeping at the center of Base's next growth story.
