Binance on Monday opened zero-commission trading in more than 7,000 U.S.-listed stocks and exchange-traded funds to eligible customers outside the United States, and said a tokenization layer called bStocks will follow on its BNB Chain in the coming weeks, according to the company and an exclusive interview co-CEO Richard Teng gave Fortune.
Customers can buy fractional shares starting at $5, pay a $0.35 minimum platform fee per order, and fund positions in USDC, USDT, BNB, USD1, or $U. Certain securities trade 24/5. Orders are routed by Nest Trading Limited — Binance's Abu Dhabi Global Market-regulated introducing broker — to Alpaca Securities, the New York-based clearing broker that executes the trades, custodies the shares, and passes through dividends and corporate actions. Eligible users will be able to lend their shares back to the platform through a Fully Paid Securities Lending program.
The launch puts the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume into direct competition with retail brokerages in emerging markets where Binance built its user base, and into the same tokenized-equities race that Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood entered over the past six months. U.S. equities are "well over half of the global market" but remain "costly and difficult to access for investors in many overseas markets," Teng told Fortune.
What's Different This Time
Binance's last attempt at stock products lasted about three months. Its synthetic Stock Tokens, launched in April 2021 with Tesla and quickly extended to Coinbase, MicroStrategy, Microsoft, and Apple, were pulled on July 16, 2021 after Germany's BaFin warned Binance had sold them without an investor prospectus, the U.K. FCA pressed for answers on the company's broader business, and Italy's CONSOB declared Binance unauthorized the day before. Existing holders had until October 14, 2021 to close out.
The 2026 product is built on different rails. Shares are bought through Nest Trading and held by Alpaca, with dividends and corporate actions passed through — direct securities ownership, not a derivative.
The bStocks tokenization layer is structurally separate: it will be issued by BTECH Holdings Ltd, a Special Purpose Vehicle registered in ADGM, and is "pending regulatory approval." Crucially, bStocks are filed as "certificates representing certain financial instruments" under ADGM's Financial Services and Markets Regulations — they reference the underlying equities but do not confer direct share ownership, the same legal hedge that lets them issue outside U.S. securities law.
Where Kraken's and Robinhood's tokenized-stock offerings pre-mint a fixed issuer-defined set, Binance has designed bStocks so each user can convert the shares they already hold into BNB Chain tokens themselves.
The Super-App Push
Co-founder Yi He framed the rollout in the company's statement as central to reaching "the next 3 billion users" — a thesis that has already moved Binance into derivatives on gold, petrochemicals, and pre-IPO shares.
Coinbase used its December "Everything Exchange" event to commit to tokenized stocks and Kalshi-built prediction markets; the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have said they will fold tokenization into their plumbing; Ondo Finance's tokenized-stock book is the fastest-growing asset class on Ethereum.
The structural pressure for incumbent retail brokers concentrates in the same emerging markets where commission-free U.S. equity access has been hardest to assemble. A Binance customer in Latin America, South Asia, or Sub-Saharan Africa can now fund a U.S. stock purchase with the dollar-stablecoin balance already on the exchange, skipping the FX-and-wire path most non-U.S. retail brokerages still require.
Binance did not detail which jurisdictions, beyond the United States, are excluded from the stock-trading product. The bStocks rollout will depend on ADGM regulatory sign-off, with the on-chain product expected within weeks.