🥛 Coinbase put Nvidia onchain ⛓️

GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that just extended its Milk Road PRO price increase window by 24hrs.

Prices go from $25/m to $39/m at midnight tonight (ET)! Last chance to lock in lower prices for life!

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ Coinbase put Nvidia onchain.
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitwise Just Launched the Next Generation of Onchain Investing.
🍪 "I believe Ethereum will outperform Bitcoin this year.”

Ledn gives you an indirect way to get professional, institutional-grade custody. See how Ledn stores your BTC.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.

COINBASE PUT NVIDIA ONCHAIN ⛓️

Coinbase spent Monday putting four American tech stocks onchain.

Nvidia, Apple, Meta and Alphabet went live as tokens on Base, where anyone eligible outside the U.S. can hold them in a self-custody wallet with no brokerage account involved.

They trade 24/7, which is already more than the actual stock market manages.

The plumbing works like this:

A market maker buys the real shares → Alpaca (an SEC-registered broker-dealer) holds them in a segregated account → and you get a token that's a claim on that share (with dividends and stock splits passing through to the token).

Which sounds neat…

But, why bother when stocks are already easily tradable elsewhere?

Because a token can plug into other software, while a brokerage account can't.

Roughly 50 Base apps supported these on day one. Aave and Morpho for lending, Aerodrome for spot trading, Wasabi for options.

I.e. you could post your tokenized Nvidia as collateral and borrow against it at 3am on a Sunday, which your broker will absolutely not let you do.

As for actual demand on day one, it was modest:

Tokens minted: ~$4.55M.
Onchain liquidity: ~$3.06M.
First 24 hours of trading: $10.8M.
Holders of NVDAc, the biggest of the four: 1,745.

That's arriving into a tokenized stock market worth $2.48B - one that's nearly doubled since March.

Source: RWA & DEX Screener

Coinbase turned up last, and smallest, to a party that's been going on for a while.

Good news is, this market’s so dang big that I doubt ‘first’ is going to be the deciding factor…

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Coldcard users lost over $130M in Bitcoin last month.

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COINBASE PUT NVIDIA ONCHAIN (P2) ⛓️

Right now, Americans can't buy any of these onchain stocks.

These tokens are sold under Regulation S, the rule covering securities offered only to non-U.S. buyers. Coinbase asked the SEC for domestic permission back in June 2025 and is still waiting.

Which sounds like a handicap, until you look at what sits on the other side of that border.

Global stock markets are worth $157.8T, and the U.S. accounts for $68.9T of that.

So the slice Coinbase can already sell into is roughly $89T of equities, against $2.48B of tokenized stocks across every issuer combined, with Citi wagering that tokenized securities reach $5.5T by 2030.

I.e. There’s plenty of room to grow:

Source: SIFMA & RWA

Kyle (our Head of Research) has been waiting for someone to build this properly, and I’m going to borrow his take on why the earlier attempts fell short…

24/7 trading is a nice feature, but composability with DeFi is the part that legitimately matters.

Tokenized stocks only pull people out of brokerages once they carry the same rights as a brokerage share and let you do more with them than a brokerage allows.

Coinbase has both now. Dividends and splits pass through, and Aave, Morpho and Euler will lend against them.

Giving a retail investor the ability to borrow, lend and earn against stocks they already own is the thing that will move them onchain. Nothing before this managed to do that without piling on extra risk.

The still-yet-to-be-answered question is whether non-crypto people will bother making the move.

Kyle's guess is that it takes real incentives, plus a simple way to shift existing holdings across (the way you'd transfer an account between brokers today). Get that part right and it becomes a no-brainer.

Which brings us to COIN itself:

Kyle's been holding since $35, bought near the last bear market lows, and it's one of his biggest positions.

His argument is that Coinbase hands you crypto upside with a floor underneath it:

Up 30% this week, against BTC's 22% and ETH's 27%.
Beat ETH by 3x and BTC by 2x through the last bull market.
Revenue from stablecoins, stock trading and prediction markets that don’t swing with crypto prices.
Exposure to Bitcoin and Ethereum through its balance sheet and Base, plus Solana, Circle, OpenUSD, Hyperliquid's USDC treasury, and a venture arm across the whole industry.

The catch being you can't self-custody a share of COIN, and you're trusting Brian Armstrong's team to keep executing.

(Kyle's cool with both.)

What we’re watching for from here:

More TradFi tickers landing onchain within the next few weeks.
Whether Coinbase builds that transfer path.
The CLARITY Act vote in September.

Keep your eyes peeled!

Oh, and btw - Kyle publishes every entry and exit with the reasoning attached, before the position moves rather than after.

That happens inside Milk Road PRO, which goes from $25/m to $39/m at midnight tonight!

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Still interested? Good: Lyn Alden's biggest long-term fear for Bitcoin isn't quantum or regulatory risk, "It's more about the risk of disinterest."

Jordi Visser: "I believe Ethereum will outperform Bitcoin this year. Bitcoin is the S&P 500. It's amorphous. It is the thing that survives over time." ETH is a different beast.

CZ: There is no "crypto finance vs traditional finance.” There's not two parallel financial industries. There should just be one.

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