Alpaca Secures $135 Million for Tokenized Stock Infrastructure
Crypto brokerage infrastructure firm Alpaca has secured $135 million to expand the rails used by exchanges and tokenization platforms to offer U.S. stocks on-chain, marking a significant milestone in the convergence of traditional finance and digital assets.
Traditional Giants Betting On On-Chain Infrastructure
Peak XV led the equity round, with participation from Elefund, BNP Paribas’ Opera Tech Ventures and Unbound. This raise follows a $150 million Series D in January that valued the company at $1.15 billion. Debt financing, primarily from Kraken parent Payward and BMO, brought the total package to $435 million.
The Regulatory Backbone of Tokenized Assets
Alpaca clears or custodies roughly 94% of tokenized U.S. equities, including products connected to market leaders Binance, Ondo and Dinari. The company holds more than $1.5 billion of underlying stocks backing tokenized equities through its infrastructure. The funding underscores a central constraint facing tokenized equities, where putting a stock on-chain does not remove the need for a regulated firm to hold the underlying shares, process corporate actions and connect blockchain transactions to traditional markets.
This funding round highlights a fundamental constraint in the tokenization ecosystem: putting a stock on-chain does not eliminate the need for a regulated entity to hold the underlying shares and bridge blockchain transactions to traditional markets. Alpaca is effectively building the necessary compliance and custody layer that institutional investors demand under scrutiny from regulators like the SEC and MiCA, ensuring that the promise of 24/7 settlement does not come at the cost of legal integrity.